Thought Piece · Reflections from Sustainability Live: Net Zero Summit
Sustainability Leadership Has Entered Its Hardest Phase
Author: Shaun Walden
At this year’s Sustainability Live: Net Zero Summit, one theme surfaced repeatedly across conversations and sessions. The era of aspiration in sustainability is over and the era of execution has begun.
For the past half a decade, organisations focused on commitments, targets, and frameworks. Big pledges were announced, reporting systems built and sustainability strategies defined. These steps were necessary, but they were also the easier part of the journey (although maybe it didn’t feel like it at the time).
What sustainability leaders now face is something far more complex: delivering transformation at scale inside organisations that were never designed for it.
The Changing Role of the Sustainability Leader
The role of the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) has fundamentally shifted. What began in many organisations (but not all) as a reputational response to banks and investors asking questions and regulators producing +200-page reporting frameworks, has evolved into something far more strategic. From the conversations I listened to, the CSOs in the room were not running departments, they were running change programmes and change programmes live or die on human dynamics, not technical ones. For example, several leaders were candid about early mistakes such as adding sustainability KPIs to scorecards and then expecting culture to follow, culture change does not work that way.
The most effective approach highlighted by multiple leaders, was to begin by building a coalition of the willing. Not a mandate handed down from the executive suite, but a deliberate effort to find the people across the business who already care, who have influence in their functions, and who can become internal advocates before the broader organisation is ready to follow. From there, the work becomes one of repeatability and culture: playbooks that make best practice replicable, lighthouse examples that show others what good looks like, and recognition systems that make sustainability feel like a source of pride rather than an obligation.
The CSOs gaining real traction are also those who have developed commercial acumen, storytelling ability, and the political intelligence to influence without authority. One speaker described it as: coalition-building leadership, anchored in the understanding that lasting change comes from transforming systems, not ticking compliance boxes.
What good looks like for a CSO remains harder to define than it is for a say a CFO, but that ambiguity, several speakers suggested, is not a weakness of the role. It is the role.
Finance and the Question of Leadership
A recurring question was whether finance functions should lead sustainability efforts or simply reflect changes happening elsewhere in the organisation. There was no single answer.
There is continued growing interest in mechanisms such as financing linked to sustainability and environmental performance incentives. Linking executive compensation or lending terms to sustainability metrics can create real momentum, but as discussed above, is not the be all and end all. One investment leader offered a candid observation, sustainability teams exist in many firms because customers and clients want them to but ultimately the commercial case must still stand on its own if they are to last.
This reflects a deeper challenge. Markets continue to struggle to value long term sustainability risks and opportunities. Until incentives across regulation, capital markets, and corporate governance align more fully (which I believe they will not do so anytime soon), sustainability leaders will continue to operate between two time horizons. One measured in quarters. The other measured in decades.
Artificial Intelligence and the Sustainability Trade Off
Artificial intelligence was another major theme, and the conversation was notably balanced.
The opportunities are significant. AI can streamline sustainability reporting, optimise logistics networks, and accelerate research across climate and health. One organisation shared that an agentic AI system helped secure $88m in contract renewals in a single year.
Yet the technology also raises difficult questions. I will not go into detail here (please refer to by previous piece titled Sustainability and AI), but the energy and water demands of large scale AI infrastructure are rising rapidly, and responsibility for these impacts across complex value chains remains unclear.
There are also social considerations. Women represent roughly 1/4 of the global AI workforce, and research suggests many AI systems continue to replicate gender bias.
If AI is to support solutions to global challenges, the people building these technologies must reflect the diversity of the societies they aim to serve. Otherwise the tools designed to address systemic problems risk reproducing them.
The Skills Sustainability Leaders Now Need
Perhaps the most important takeaway was how the sustainability leadership role itself is evolving.
Technical expertise and systems thinking remain essential, but the capabilities most frequently discussed were different. Commercial judgement, storytelling, coalition building, and the ability to operate across organisational boundaries are becoming just as important; the capacity to generate value by holding tensions productively rather than trying to eliminate them, profit and purpose, competition and collaboration, short term performance and long term resilience.
Unlike more established executive roles, the success metrics for sustainability leadership are still evolving. There is no universal dashboard equivalent to revenue or earnings. Yet this may not be a weakness, it reflects the complexity of the challenge itself.
The Question That Still Has No Easy Answer
One of the sessions closed with a deliberately uncomfortable scenario.
Would you achieve your 2030 carbon target if it meant losing two percent of market share, or would you miss the target if doing so made you the market leader?
As you would expect, no one offered a definitive answer. One leader suggested that targets should be viewed as direction rather than fixed endpoints. Another noted that sustainability strategies must ultimately support the commercial viability of the organisation if they are to endure. That tension between ambition and viability will define the next phase of the sustainability transition.
The leaders working in this space understand the balance well. The question is whether the organisations around them are adapting quickly enough.
