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October 15, 2026 · By Brandon Toews and Stephanie Bertels
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The context around corporate sustainability is shifting, as are sustainability-related ambitions.
Following several years of progress that brought more ambitious sustainability goal setting, increasingly transparent sustainability disclosures, and a focus on more accountable governance, headwinds are causing many companies to rethink their short- and long-term sustainability commitments. Competing pressures – often at cross-purposes – are motivating and influencing these changes. In response, some companies are holding firm or even expanding and accelerating their ambitions, while others are walking them back or abandoning them completely.
In this blog, we explore key trends in sustainability ambition, the shifting context companies are operating within, changes in framing and approaches to transparency, and more.
We are seeing notable – and growing – gaps between sustainability leaders and laggards.
These include gaps between the credibility and ambition of commitments that companies are announcing; gaps in the systems and infrastructure that companies are building to deliver on their commitments; gaps in measurable progress; and gaps between what companies are saying and what they can substantiate.
Notably, among the leaders, the quality of commitments has held steady or improved. For example, leading companies typically have interim 2030 milestones; transparent governance and executive accountability; investment and transition plans; implementation pathways; and disclosure of assumptions.
The laggards are backsliding on ambition. Some companies are abandoning targets, either by acknowledging they have missed the targets they set for themselves or quietly scrubbing them from their websites and disclosures. Some have shifted the goal posts, such as by extending deadlines or subtly adjusting baselines (such as the year by which emissions reductions are measured). Others are using different metrics that make it easier to claim progress, such as shifting from absolute emissions to emissions intensity.
Corporate sustainability appears to be entering a new phase – one defined less by setting ambitious goals than by demonstrating that you are delivering on them.
Until recently, the emphasis was on new pledges and setting long-term goals. At the peak, companies were shifting from net-zero emissions by 2050 to more aggressive, nearer-term aspirations, such as net-zero by 2035 or 2040. There was also a late-blooming trend of companies issuing comprehensive climate/net-zero roadmaps with interim 5-10 year targets and milestones.
More recently, and especially since late 2024, corporate sustainability ambitions have shifted from aspirational positioning towards execution and a focus on “disciplined” and “credible” action.
The latest version of SBTi’s Corporate Net-Zero Standard explicitly reflects this shift – they describe the move as one from "ambition to real-world implementation." SBTi also explicitly notes that v2.0 of their net-zero standard represents an evolution of the SBTi model from validating target ambition to recognition of measurable, company-reported progress.
As a result of this shift, sustainability-related commitments are also changing.
There has been a notable backslide in timelines, with many prominent examples of companies pushing back net-zero targets that were once more aggressive than the average, such as from 2040 back to 2050. Further, many companies are reverting to softer or more distant commitments, if not scrubbing their commitments entirely. Fortunately, these companies still represent – at present – a minority. It’s also worth noting that some sustainability commitments are far more exposed to backsliding ambition than others, such as social commitments, as well as those enforced by voluntary standards.
Our own observations from reading hundreds of reports each year is that companies are starting to shift away from the typical 5-year sustainability goal setting cycle and moving to align more closely with the financial reporting rhythm of sharing progress from the past year. Shifting towards a year-on-year reporting style raises concerns about how key stakeholders and rightsholders will be able to put this information in context to assess whether a company’s actions align with respecting ecological limits or meeting regional social needs.
Assurance is also up, even if most of it can’t be verified. 72% of S&P 500 firms now report some form of third-party assurance in 2025, which is up nearly 20% points since 2021, although nearly a quarter of companies claiming assurance name no provider, standard, or scope. As it stands, unnamed and unspecified assurance providers collectively outnumber all identified providers combined.
Communications around sustainability ambitions have become more cautious, and many companies are heading in one of two directions: greater clarity and nuance, or greater opacity.
One such change is the notable decline in bold-sounding – if at times vague and/or specious – claims, such as companies making statements to the effect of “We are leading the race to [net zero, or nature positivity].” Instead, we are seeing companies use more operations-focused language, issuing statements such as “We are implementing our climate transition plan” or “We are placing a greater emphasis on regenerative sourcing and managing our nature-related risks and impacts.”
Companies are also demonstrating greater nuance and interconnection within and between issues. For example, we increasingly see companies identifying the links between nature, climate change, water, and human rights. As knowledge matures, terminology expands. For example, “biodiversity loss” has increasingly been replaced or supplemented by more precise and illustrative language, such as companies clarifying their ambitions around protecting and restoring nature, invoking the mitigation hierarchy, referencing ‘nature positive’ aspirations, and addressing topics such as deforestation, land conversion, and soil health.
Ambitions once framed more nebulously or in abstract terms are now being replaced by tangible and operational language that is common outside of the sustainability sphere, such as that used by professionals in risk management, capital and/or resource allocation, supply chain resilience and/or transformation, and transition planning. For example, we are seeing – and research supports – a reduced emphasis on terms such as net zero, carbon neutral, carbon reduction, leadership, DEI, and purpose, and greater emphasis on terms such as value creation, risk, operational resilience, adaptation, cost discipline, transition plans, infrastructure, return on investment, and implementation.
CSO’s report that they increasingly speak in terms of impact, materiality, and disclosure and use language that is more accessible and relevant to CFOs and CEOs, like risk and return and cash flow. This, in part, is also the result of sustainability responsibilities increasingly being decentralised, moving out of strategy and into operational areas such as procurement, manufacturing, and logistics, where topics like energy use and worker rights are most prominent, or into legal, risk, compliance, or finance functions.
This, however, can muddy the waters and make intentions and rationalisations less clear. Last year a report from The Conference Board found that more than half of the 125 responding sustainability executives said their companies were reframing their sustainability communications, including moving away from “ESG” content and language and increasingly framing around ROI and shareholder value. This year, analysis of 250 sustainability reports from S&P 500 found that the term “ESG” was present in only 4% of report titles, down from a peak of 35% in 2022, and that the term had decreased by 50% within reports compared to last year.
It is also worth noting that sustainability-related investments have continued to increase in recent years, and that ‘revenue generation’ was the most frequently reported business benefit of sustainability actions. At the moment, the narrative around purpose and good corporate citizenship and responsibility towards society appears to be taking a backseat in some sectors, and especially in sectors with the greatest ESG impacts and the greatest exposure to political backlash.
Recent polling of corporate sustainability executives indicates that the leading pressure cited on climate targets was financial, with respondents specifically referencing capital allocation, cost, and return-on-investment as the factors most likely to prompt adjustment or delay. Related, surveys show that climate-related sustainability is being embedded more deeply into energy systems, digital infrastructure, supply chains, and industrial operations. It is no surprise, then, that terms such as carbon reduction are increasingly being replaced by energy savings, energy security, and asset protection – both to accommodate political sensitivity and to reflect businesses seeking to align decarbonisation with financial performance.
In respect to climate action, data supports the shift from ambition to disciplined execution. Although new decarbonisation targets grew by just 7% in 2025 (following decarbonisation targets growing by 29% in 2024 and by 45% in 2023), quality is outweighing quantity, with commitments being increasingly science-based. Execution and progress on targets also appears to be improving, with more companies on track against their Scope 1 and 2 targets than in prior years. The number of companies with validated climate and emission targets, including net-zero commitments, also grew by 40% in 2025, and companies with validated net-zero targets grew by 61% during the same period. Research also indicates that climate pledges are increasingly emphasising implementation plans, Scope 3 coverage, offset reliance, and policy alignment as key indicators of credibility rather than headline ambitions alone.
However, many companies are still taking action on (and reporting on) what’s easy to measure and manage, not what matters most. Headline Scope 3 reporting rates, for example, significantly overstate the quality and completeness of what is actually being disclosed, and although the number of S&P 500 firms with net-zero targets has more than doubled since 2021, from 118 to 248 companies, 91% of these companies did not disclose a transition plan in their 2024 reports.
Further, there has been a noteworthy phenomenon of companies weakening, delaying, or abandoning climate commitments in recent years. Some have pushed deadlines back, removed interim targets, or stepped away from explicit 1.5°C alignment. We are also seeing a creeping return of language related to limiting warming to “less than 2 degrees” rather than limiting it to 1.5oC. This is particularly concerning considering the United Nations Environment Programme’s recent acknowledgement that exceeding 1.5oC is now unavoidable (though not irreversible) and that Earth has lost the chance to prevent some of the worst impacts of climate change.
Some companies have also refrained from abandoning net-zero goals outright, yet nevertheless have increased fossil fuel investments, withdrawn from voluntary climate alliances, or adopted transition plans that are inconsistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C – assuming they have created a transition plan at all.
Among nature-related commitments, there is growing reference to the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and terms such as “nature-related risk” in general.
Nature-related commitments have broadened, with “nature positive” language nearly doubling between 2024 and 2025, and we are seeing companies increasingly connect nature to resilience and business strategy. The TNFD also reports that the number of organisations publishing disclosures has doubled since last year.
However, progress remains uneven, and many commitments lack clarity and lack implementation (or lack the evidence of implementation). New research indicates that only 13% of reported nature commitments have sufficient detail and transparency to allow others to assess whether targets have been met.
Although there has been vocal pushback against social commitments in some regions, as well as a very real decline in the visibility of DEI commitments and terms, companies are not abandoning social sustainability. Instead, we are seeing social ambitions reframed to reduce public exposure (and ire) and DEI initiatives moving into broader human-capital management.
However, while most top companies have, thus far, maintained their social commitments, and Board-level DEI oversight is increasing, new polling reveals that 71% of sustainability leaders expect their company to reduce or abandon at least one commitment, with DEI-related commitments and public advocacy on sustainability policy facing – by far – the greatest risk for revision or removal.
The World Economic Forum recently noted that 63% of chief sustainability officers expect global sustainability progress to hold steady or accelerate over the next year, despite geopolitical and economic disruption and uncertainty. Further, 69% expect companies’ transition-related investment to remain stable or increase, noting that businesses are increasingly anchoring climate and sustainability strategies in resilience, growth, costs, and competitiveness.
In spite of this, the backlash against sustainability is nevertheless contributing to a decline in disclosure.
UCLA reports that there has been 6.8% decline in sustainability reporting between 2024 and 2025, marking the first decline in the report’s history. Nearly two-thirds of companies have reported scaling back or reframing how they communicate sustainability externally, with some companies continuing sustainability work internally while reducing their public profile (a phenomenon known as “greenhushing”).
Despite evidence of backsliding, it is worth noting that publicly declared ambitions – as a whole – have not become noticeably weaker. For example, the number of companies adopting science-based targets continued to increase strongly through 2025. SBTi reported ~10,000 companies with validated science-based targets by early 2026, with validated net-zero targets growing even faster than overall target adoption. Further, new reporting from PwC also indicates that (82%) of companies in 2025 held steady or accelerated the timeline they needed for achieving their climate ambitions, and that more companies are increasing ambitions than decreasing.
Despite headwinds, investor expectations and regulatory scrutiny continue to be a significant motivating force for sustainability ambitions, and although geopolitical factors in certain jurisdictions have led to a steep reduction in ESG regulations and oversight, concerns related to greenwashing, increasing litigation risk, and physical climate impacts remain significant motivating factors for continued sustainability action.