It’s getting harder to build or maintain trust with diverse groups these days, so it’s no wonder people are turning to innovative methods to try to boost engagement.

But recent research conducted by GlobeScan and the Corporate Affairs Academy at the University of Oxford, finds that stakeholder engagement ranks among the top five priorities for corporate affairs professionals. At the same time, other GlobeScan research shows that many sustainability experts don’t see stakeholder management as a highly effective lever for advancing sustainability. This disconnect highlights a critical challenge: how can engagement be redefined to deliver trust and meaningful sustainability outcomes?

Corporate affairs practitioners surveyed say the most innovative ways to build trust with diverse groups is to return to the fundamentals, especially with stakeholders who are skeptical and critical: direct, in-person engagement and open dialogue, followed by clear communication and transparency. While digital tools and AI are part of the mix, they’re viewed as less powerful than authentic, human-centered approaches.

What this means

In a world of eroding trust and rising stakeholder expectations, organizations must focus on the quality of stakeholder engagement. By combining the relationship-building expertise of corporate affairs with the leadership of sustainability teams, companies can elevate engagement to drive credibility and impact. This means investing time in face-to-face dialogue to co-create solutions with stakeholders directly and, when possible, in person to ensure engagement not only builds and maintains trust but also contributes to tangible sustainability progress.

Based on a survey of 245 corporate affairs practitioners, February-March 2025.

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JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange in June, marking a comeback for a company that in 2020 had paid billions in fines to Brazilian and U.S. authorities to settle sweeping bribery and corruption cases. 

The rebrand included setting ambitious climate goals to appeal to ESG-focused investors: zero deforestation in its cattle supply from the Amazon by 2025 and net-zero emissions in its global operations — which span from Brazil to the U.S. and Australia — by 2040.

Four years later, though, the company’s plans still lack transparency and credibility, according to sustainability experts. Jason Weller, its global chief sustainability officer, told Reuters in January that JBS’s net-zero pledge “was never a promise,” but an “aspiration.” The Brazilian company hasn’t disclosed how much of its greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to land-use changes like deforestation, likely a significant source of its emissions, given that beef production accounts for more than three-quarters of the Amazon’s destruction.  

The meatpacker, which supplies McDonald’s, Walmart and other big retailers, reported small cuts to emissions between 2019 and 2023 and is investing in new tools to monitor its network of cattle farmers in Brazil. But those actions aren’t enough to meet its climate goals, according to environmental watchdogs, sustainable investment analysts and groups that evaluate corporate climate plans. They noted that JBS’s public listing in the U.S. means it can raise more cash from investors to help fund expansion into countries like Vietnam and Nigeria. Since June, JBS’s share price has risen to $15.60, an increase from its debut at nearly $14.

JBS didn’t respond to requests for comment. Chief Financial Officer Guilherme Cavalcanti told The Financial Times in June that it’s in the company’s interest to end deforestation “because we depend on the climate to have pasture for animals.”

Track record

In 2021, JBS was the first global meatpacker to announce a net-zero emissions goal. However, JBS’s net-zero plan now lags behind that of its peers, including Danone, Mars, Nestlé, and PepsiCo, according to an analysis by the NewClimate Institute in June. The think tank rated JBS’s strategy as “very poor,” citing little evidence that the company is embarking on deep emissions cuts. That would require shifting to more plant-based products, reducing fertilizer use and food waste, and eliminating deforestation. JBS hasn’t disclosed whether it will rely on carbon offsets to achieve its 2040 goal.

“Without major innovations to drastically reduce the emissions footprint of meat production or diversifying away from this highly GHG emissions-intensive industry, it is not credible for livestock agribusinesses to claim that they are on a path to deep decarbonization,” the NewClimate Institute said. 

JBS’s targets cover only Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which, even if achieved by 2030, would lead to a 1.1 percent overall reduction compared to 2019. That’s because 97 percent of JBS’s emissions are Scope 3 — the result of tens of thousands of individual farming operations and millions of consumers cooking, refrigerating and disposing of its products.

Biggest challenge: deforestation

JBS slaughters some 76,000 head of cattle a day from farms across the globe. In Brazil, it’s particularly difficult for agribusinesses to link cattle to deforested lands because the animals pass through many different farms before reaching the slaughterhouse, said Pablo Majer, conservation specialist at WWF-Brazil.

“The problem is those indirect suppliers, and meatpackers don’t have information on them,” Majer said. 

Brazil’s federal databases of land records and livestock movements aren’t interlinked and have quality issues, reported Angela Flaemrich, director of stewardship services for Morningstar Sustainalytics, who traveled to Brazil in October 2024 to engage with companies, including JBS, on behalf of institutional investors.

Satellites can show where trees are cleared, but not when cattle move or who owns the land. 

“I think JBS has put in a tremendous amount of work into this,” Flaemrich said, noting that the company traces direct suppliers — i.e., farms that are one step away from the slaughterhouse.

JBS created a Transparent Livestock Platform, which enables direct suppliers to submit information about the sources from which they purchased cattle. 

That doesn’t solve the problem of tracing cattle from birth, however, which would require a nationwide animal identification system using tags affixed to calves’ ears at birth, said Flaemrich. 

JBS has pilots underway, including with the government of Pará. The Brazilian state, which has some of the highest rates of deforestation in the Amazon, aims to tag all the cattle in the state by 2026. JBS said it will invest $43 million over three years to help farmers offset their costs.

Morningstar Sustainalytics gave JBS a “severe risk” rating on ESG issues. Sydney Krisanda, a research analyst, said the company has some strong initiatives to manage carbon within its own operations but continues to receive fines for sourcing cattle from deforested lands in Brazil.  

Political and economic realities

There likely won’t be deforestation-free cattle from Brazil until its largest customers demand it — namely, China, the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries like Egypt.

China buys about 40% of Brazil’s beef exports, Majer said, but the country is more interested in food security than ending deforestation. The U.S., the second-largest buyer, has rolled back its climate agenda under President Donald Trump. While the European Union is requiring traders to prove that cattle, soy, coffee and other imports don’t come from deforested land, the bloc is a relatively small customer for Brazil’s beef companies.

Between 2022 and 2024, the environmental watchdog groups Mighty Earth and AidEnvironment alerted JBS to more than 100 cases of deforestation in its cattle supply chain in the Amazon and Cerrado regions. JBS said the majority weren’t their suppliers, but provided no evidence to support those claims, Mighty Earth said.

Meanwhile, Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is focused on boosting the country’s economy, Majer said. Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef and soybeans, and agribusiness accounts for about 25 percent of the country’s annual GDP.

“It’s very tricky to balance these two agendas, economic and the environment,” Majer said.

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Climate activist, academic and journalist Bill McKibben’s nonprofit 350.org convinced investors representing $40 trillion to divest from oil and gas companies over the past decade.

Now he’s using his voice and organizing platforms — 350.org and Third Act — to raise awareness about the “explosive spike” in renewable energy adoption around the world, especially electricity from the sun. 

McKibben’s latest book published in August — “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization” — offers a hopeful account of how solar power is lifting up communities in Africa, Pakistan and China and the rural U.S.

“We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun,” McKibben told me in the latest episode of Climate Pioneers. “That changes the dynamics in many, many ways and should be changing the decision-making for corporations. It certainly is around the world.”

New renewable generation added 585 gigawatts of power worldwide in 2024, up 15.1 percent from 2023. In the U.S., 90 percent of the additions came from renewables, including 39.6 gigawatts of solar power. There’s now enough solar capacity in the U.S. — about 220 gigawatts — to satisfy 7 percent of U.S. electricity demand.

That growth continues in the face of President Donald Trump’s intensifying assault on U.S. solar and wind development through executive orders, tax rule changes and permit revocations, said the 64-year-old author of more than 20 books about climate change.

Here are four highlights from our conversation:

Solar power, the ‘Costco of energy’

The Trump administration’s policies ignore the reality that developers and utilities can add solar and wind power to the U.S. electric grid more quickly than natural gas or nuclear plants — in months compared with five years or a decade, respectively. 

Corporations with climate commitments may sign clean power contracts to make emissions claims, but it’s also cheaper, McKibben said. For example, the levelized cost of solar energy was $61 per megawatt-hour in 2024, compared with $76 per megawatt-hour for natural gas.

“I have no idea why any business would want to pay more for a primary input like energy, especially when their competitors in other parts of the world are going to be paying less and less and less,” McKibben said. “This is a strategy, at the moment, for choking the American economy. We need some businesses willing to stand up and move against it wherever they can.” 

The fossil fuel industry has broadcast the idea that alternative electricity is more expensive, when the reality is no longer true. “We think of it as the Whole Foods of energy, nice but pricey,” he said. “It’s actually the Costco of energy now: it’s cheap, it’s available in bulk, it’s on the shelf, ready to go.”

A nationwide rally to highlight that narrative, Sun Day, is scheduled for the Sept. 21 autumnal equinox. 

Texas, the biggest installer

One place the message is getting through is Texas. Despite Republican lawmakers’ attempts to slow down renewables adoption in the state, Texas installed more solar electricity in 2023 and 2024 than any other state, including California. 

Texas is also installing energy storage technology at the quickest pace in the U.S., motivated to prevent catastrophic blackouts — such as a 2021 winter storm outage that left 4.5 million customers without power, some for days. The storage capacity tripled to 8.6 gigawatts in 2024, and is projected to reach almost 18 gigawatts this year.

“There was important lobbying done, often by corporate players,” McKibben said. “People do have to begin standing up to the fossil fuel industry in one state house after another, and figuring out how to make it easier for this transition to happen.”

Utah, the unlikely disruptor 

Permitting reform is one of the biggest places where corporate support can make an important difference, McKibben said, pointing to Utah as an example of what’s possible.

In early July, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, signed a new law that allows individuals to quickly install small solar arrays — less than 1,200 watts — without having to go through the trouble of getting an interconnection agreement. The legislation, modeled after a policy in Germany that gave apartment dwellers the right to hang solar panels off their balconies, had unanimous bipartisan support. 

China, the first ‘electrostate’

For other inspiring solar adoption stories, look to developing countries such as Pakistan, where citizens built almost half the capacity of the nation’s electric grid on their own in the span of a year — with very little help from the government or utilities. 

But the country poised to benefit the most from solar adoption is China, which McKibben calls the world’s first “electrostate.”

In May, the last month for which data is available, China installed three gigawatts of solar power on a daily basis — roughly three coal-fired power plants. It’s still approving coal plants, too, but solar and wind installations now outpace the growth of fossil fuels.

China has a good use for that low-cost electricity: keeping electric vehicles (EVs) on the road. Close to half the cars sold in China in July came with a plug, threatening the dominance of the U.S. automotive industry.

Both solar and EVs got their start in the U.S., but Trump’s policies put the U.S. at a significant disadvantage during a crucial moment in the low-carbon economy transition. 

“What we’re doing at this moment in this country is serving up our lunch to China. I’m afraid that unless we act very quickly we’re going to be also-rans,” McKibben said.

Watch the whole Bill McKibben conversation. Be the first to read about upcoming Climate Pioneers episodes with senior sustainability professionals from PepsiCo, Yum! Brands and Patagonia by signing up for the Trellis Briefing newsletter.

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Nobody feels the effects of rising global temperatures than workers exposed to severe heat. 

For construction workers, farm laborers, delivery people and millions of others who get paid to work outdoors, extreme heat has become a normal part of the day that presents increasing risks of heat-related illness or even death. Indoor workers, too, can face similar dangers in buildings that haven’t been designed or upgraded for long periods of extreme heat.

Research from the Workers Compensation Research Institute found a seven-fold increase in heat-related illness on days with temperatures between 90 and 95 degrees compared to days between 75 and 80 degrees. On days over 100 degrees, they’re 18 times more likely. Notably, these injuries are most common with younger and less-experienced workers, suggesting that workers with less experience in navigating extreme heat would benefit from clearer guidance on how to manage it.

A federal policy void

The federal government took steps last year to start addressing these challenges when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a draft heat rule for workers that would require training, on-site shade and water, regular breaks and other measures depending on the temperature. Originally proposed under the prior administration, the regulatory process is still ongoing — despite the Trump administration’s general disinterest in climate policy. 

While it’s uncertain whether or how the current administration will move forward with the policy, its main purpose remains critical: to reduce the risk of heat-related injury and illness for workers. At the same time, it gives businesses a valuable test case for climate adaptation and an opportunity to support smart risk management that contains heat-related costs while also protecting workforces and productivity.

In the absence of a federal standard, several states have implemented workplace heat safety rules, such as California, Colorado and Maryland, and some leading companies have taken measures of their own. Best practices that companies can take include:

• Training on heat hazards, including how to identify the symptoms of heat stroke and other health issues
• Scheduling regular breaks or allowing workers to take them as needed, in designated shaded or cool areas close to water and bathrooms, to prevent and monitor for heat-illness symptoms
• Adjusting dress codes to allow for cooler attire
• Employer-provided cool water and electrolyte drinks
• Employer-provided shaded areas at worksites
• Scheduling work for the coolest times of the day

A costly risk for companies

Beyond looking at policies, unmitigated risk is costly for businesses. The rate of heat-related worker compensation claims in the U.S. Southwest more than doubled on average between 2009 and 2019, according to risk management consultancy Marsh, from 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of all claims – although that is almost certainly an undercount due to inconsistent reporting and data collection methods. 

Other research has found that heat-related occupational injuries across the U.S. have increased by about a third between 2000 and 2020. Marsh also found that heat exhaustion can affect mental and physical abilities that result in other accidents, noting: “The absence of dedicated regulations leaves workers vulnerable to heat-related health risks.”

The Swiss Re Institute, the research arm of the Swiss risk management giant, has found that between workers compensation, higher medical costs and the risk of litigation, “extreme heat poses a growing threat to the insurance industry.” 

Without clear public policies, businesses can expect an accelerated rise in insurance costs and even the possibility of un-insurability in regions of the country that face dangerously high temperatures. The consequences of extreme heat are already driving the loss of insurance in other parts of the economy, such as utilities unable to secure affordable insurance for transmission lines and other infrastructure in wildfire-prone areas.

Addressing the effects of heat on workers will require a policy foundation that ensures both workers and companies remain protected and productive: workers through safer workplaces and their employers through consistent risk management practices at worksites that facilitate a stable insurance market despite rising temperatures and extreme heat.

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The literary canon dedicated to decoding corporate climate strategy has swelled since legendary author John Elkington coined the term “triple bottom line” in his 1997 book, “Cannibals With Forks.”

His argument that businesses should be judged on three foundational elements — social justice, economic prosperity and environmental quality — reshaped management practices.

Few other corporate sustainability titles have had the same disruptive impact, but here are six bonafide best-sellers that should also be on every sustainability professional’s bookshelf.

“Thinking in Systems”

By Donella Meadows

“Thinking in Systems” was published posthumously in 2008, more than 15 years after the late scientist and farmer first circulated a draft. It argues that the world’s biggest problems, including environmental degradation, can’t be fixed in isolation “because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the efforts of too-narrow thinking,” as one description explains. If you’re in a binge-reading mood, revisit Meadows’ earlier book, “Limits to Growth,” her 1972 warning about the dangers of unchecked consumption.

“All We Can Save”

Edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson

Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and climate drawdown strategist Katharine Wilkinson co-edited this anthology featuring inspirational and passionate essays by 40 women ranging from Indigenous activists to entrepreneurs. It is meant to inspire, as Johnson told me in September 2020, when the book was originally released: “For people who haven’t yet found their role in climate work, we hope that this book will help them see where they fit in. And for people who are already doing the work, we hope that this will help them feel less alone and bolstered for the next years and rounds and decades of the work that needs doing.”

“Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things”

By William McDonough and Michael Braungart

First published in 2002, “Cradle to Cradle” was co-authored by architect Bill McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart, both already well-regarded for prioritizing environmental concerns in their work. It was one of the first books to espouse a circular economy in which waste from one process becomes a resource for another. Today, with more than 1 million copies in circulation, it’s the centerpiece of countless university courses in industrial design and the inspiration for a widely used product certification framework of the same name. 

“Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming”

Edited by Paul Hawken

This New York Times best-seller from 2017 outlines 100 practical applications for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, ranging from technologies for clean energy generation to simple but profound ideas, such as educating women and girls in low-income countries about regenerative agriculture and land management practices. Don’t expect lists of specific solutions. This is a guide meant to inform potential entrepreneurs and investors, but the research is continually refreshed as part of Project Drawdown. 

“How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need”

By Bill Gates

The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist’s Breakthrough Energy venture firm has funneled more than $2 billion in 160-plus climate tech startups since 2015. Gates has also personally invested more than $1 billion in nuclear company Terrapower. This 2021 book provides a glimpse into Gates’ investment thesis — he’s looking for ways to decrease the “green premium,” or the cost differential between using clean technologies versus ones that will contribute more greenhouse gases. 

“Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take”

By Paul Polman and Andrew Winston

Former Unilever CEO Paul Polman teamed up with consultant and author Andrew Winston to argue that it’s possible for companies to give more to the world than they take. “Net Positive” offers many examples of businesses that have made a practice of considering social and environmental impacts as equal partners to revenue generation — ranging from oft-cited exemplars like apparel maker Patagonia and IKEA to companies that get fewer headlines but also deserve credit, such as Kenyan telecommunications firm Safaricom and home improvement retailer Kingfisher. 

What book would you recommend to other sustainability pros? Share your suggestions at [email protected].

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