Reasons to be cheerful: Will sustainability change for the better in 2025?

Looking for reasons to be cheerful has always been challenging for those working in sustainability, but 2025 is set to be particularly tough.

The new year follows one in which global CO2 emissions hits record levels, and warming crossed the 1.5°C threshold for the first time since records began.

At the same time, the political will to change course seems to be weakening, with the return of president Trump in the US and growing backlash against the EU’s green regulatory agenda.

While there are mounting concerns that these headwinds will cause a slowdown in momentum on sustainability, Eelco van der Enden hopes they will also yield some positive results – especially if the European Commission gets its review of disclosure rules right.

The CEO of industry body Accountancy Europe says that, rather than spelling disaster, the planned rethink of the Corporate

Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is “quite healthy” and could drive a more balanced outcome for companies.

“If you look at Europe and reporting, things have not been thought through too well from an implementation and user point of view,” says Van der Enden, who stepped down as head of the Global Reporting Initiative last year.

“That’s the wake-up call that’s now been issued, and will bring things into a more realistic timeframe, and perhaps also simplify some of the issues that we see,” he predicts.

A more realistic era for commitments?

Companies have also been rethinking their expectations when it comes to sustainability.

Big names like Unilever, Microsoft and Shell have already rolled back some of their environmental and social pledges, with more firms anticipated to follow suit in 2025.

But even if the retreat does continue, Ken Pucker, a professor at The Fletcher School at Tufts University in the US, says the world is so far off target the impact won’t be as material as the pessimists fear.

“Say the current work of the sustainability community is advancing progress at 1/10th of what’s needed,” he says. “If that effort goes down by 10%, it doesn’t represent a consequential change.”

For Alison Taylor, a clinical associate professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, the retreat isn’t just immaterial, it’s welcome.

She tells REP the period between 2015-2020 was “the worst of all worlds” when it came to sustainability, with corporates overpromising, underdelivering and, in the process, fuelling political backlash in the US.

“I think we’re past that now,” she says, describing the current, more bearish conversation about what’s achievable as “long overdue”.

“I’d rather see a company dial back on [unachievable] goals, because at least then we know where we are and can have a more realistic conversation about what needs to be done – about what needs government action and what we can expect the private sector to do under its own steam.”

“Whether we’re going somewhere better or worse is debatable, but I can certainly make the case that we’re going into a more realistic era.”