The first tranche of company scores awarded under a new approach designed to more holistically assess corporate climate efforts have been released by businesses piloting the system.

The results provide an in-depth look into what companies are doing — or not doing — to address climate issues. At the top, France-based energy technology company Schneider Electric earned a 79 percent score for cutting emissions, scaling low-carbon products and other activities. At the other end of the rankings, Weyerhaeuser, a U.S. timber business, scored 40 percent, in part due to slow progress on emissions and limited supplier engagement. 

The Climate Contribution Framework was launched last November by Sweep, a sustainability data platform, and the Mirova Research Center, which studies sustainable finance. In addition to assessing the integrity of emissions targets and reductions, the assessment recognizes efforts to help suppliers decarbonize, investments in climate solutions, sales of products that help avoid emissions and other factors. Weightings for the different metrics vary between business sectors to reflect the potential for different companies to tackle climate change.

Three pillars

Schneider’s success in reducing emissions — it cut the intensity of its Scope 3 emissions, by far its largest source, by an average of 9 percent annually between 2021 and 2025 — helped earn an 84 percent score for footprint minimization, one of the frameworks three “pillars.” Sales of energy-saving electrical devices contributed to a 71 percent score on the climate solutions pillar, while the company’s philanthropic efforts in climate pushed its finance pillar result to 68 percent. As an energy-sector company, the first pillar dominates Schneider’s score, leading to its 79 percent overall total.

The focus on the second two pillars was one reason why the company trialled the framework, said Chief Sustainability Officer Esther Finidori: “There are many things you can do as a company through financing, philanthropy and other tools that contribute to your impact and that are rarely factored into sustainability evaluations.”

Diverse results

Schenider’s score is one of 10 released last month, following an earlier pilot by the French utility EDF. The results reveal a diversity of corporate approaches to climate:

• Telecommunications company Orange scored 52 percent. The company earned high marks for cutting emissions, but was dinged for doing little to increase revenues from climate solutions, a relatively important pillar for its sector.
• Bel, a French cheese company, scored 75 percent on footprint minimization, helping it to an overall result of 69 percent. Its investments in peatland regeneration and other climate solutions beyond its value chain scored 96 percent for climate finance, the highest result in this pillar across the 10 businesses.
• Weyerhaeuser’s 40 percent score stemmed from its emissions trajectory — Scope 3 emissions, which account for around 90 percent of the company’s total, are falling by just over 1 percent annually — and the D+ score awarded by InfluenceMap, a nonprofit that monitor corporate lobbying on climate.

Schneider received its results a few months ago and the scorecard has since prompted internal conversations about where to focus sustainability efforts, said Finidori. By scoring companies for investments beyond customers and suppliers, for example, the framework provides her with a reason to lobby for such work. “It’s way for me to push forward those projects and get their sponsorship,” she said.

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Microsoft’s emissions jumped 25 percent in its 2025 fiscal year, reflecting the company’s scramble to build new data centers and secure electricity to run its expanding artificial intelligence and cloud services portfolio.

Google and Amazon likewise reported double-digit emissions increases in their 2025 environmental sustainability updates released in late June and early July, respectively. Google disclosed an 18 percent year-over-year bump, while Amazon posted a 16 percent rise in its footprint, which also includes its massive e-commerce network  

Microsoft pledged to honor its long-time climate commitments anyway, arguing that its emissions would have been much higher without the work it has done so far. 

“We do not see these dynamics as a reason to step back,” said Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith and Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa in the foreword to the company’s 2026 environmental sustainability report, published July 9. “We see them as a mandate to lead differently.”

The speed of the AI buildout requires “greater operational rigor, stronger integration across our sustainability priorities and a sharper focus on durable outcomes for the local communities where we work and the global value chains that make our work possible,” they said.

At the center of that shift is the company’s Community-First AI Infrastructure approach, its strategy for proactively countering backlash against proposed data center projects and taking a more responsible approach to development. 

Microsoft is also becoming more transparent about metrics such as site-level water withdrawals and electricity use, which it disclosed for the first time in the data tables accompanying the report.

“This report is a candid take about where progress is advancing, where it’s difficult and where new approaches are needed,” Nakagawa told Trellis. 

Portfolio approach to electricity

One striking data point in Microsoft’s report was the big leap in electricity-related emissions, which accounted for 13 percent of the company’s total footprint in 2025, up from 2 percent in 2024. That increase was, in part, due to the company’s decision to stop using non-additional unbundled renewable electricity certificates in Scope 2 accounting.   

Still, Microsoft consumed 37 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity in 2025, up 24 percent from 2024 and enough energy to run 3.4 million U.S. homes for a year. North America accounted for 56 percent of the total. 

The company’s total water withdrawals were 13 million cubic liters; Microsoft “replenished” 14 million liters as part of a deeper focus to manage water amid heightened community scrutiny.

Microsoft for the first time disclosed power consumption and water withdrawal by location in the data tables accompanying the 2025 environmental sustainability report. Its Boydton, Virginia, data center was the biggest power consumer at more than 3 million MWh. 

While Microsoft has been a long-time corporate supporter of solar and wind projects — it has contracts for up to 40 gigawatts of renewables, 19 of which are operational — the company has turned to new natural gas generators for several proposed projects.

“Meeting future demand responsibly is going to require and continues to require making long-term investments in energy systems that are going to support those future capacity needs,” Nakagawa said, when asked about that tension.

For example, Microsoft is simulating how it could potentially automate the distribution of AI workloads between modular data centers that run directly on renewable energy. It is redirecting power loads in existing data centers to improve efficiency, and its backing emerging technologies, such as superconducting cables from startup Veir that can deliver more power to more compact data centers.  

Microsoft has also refined its strategy for matching Scope 2 emissions with so-called “carbon-free” sources; it will seek more opportunities to use nuclear power, including next-generation fusion energy, as well as geothermal energy from startups including Eavor Technologies, another company backed by Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund.

Microsoft is also scaling up investments in smaller clean energy projects near existing or proposed data center locations, with new contracts for 1.5 gigawatts in 100 communities across 20 states. 

Carbon removal work continues

Microsoft, by far the largest corporate buyer of carbon removal credits, signed contracts for 29 long-term projects in 2025, enough to contribute more than 45 million metric tons of emissions reductions to its carbon goal over the next 30 years.

Nakagawa downplayed recent reports that the company is pausing investments, and said there has been “no change” to its interest in technologies and opportunities that can deliver emissions reductions over multiple decades.

Aside from the many headline-making deals the company has inked in the past three years, Microsoft is backing pilot projects for early-stage approaches including enhanced rock weathering, direct air capture and ocean alkalinity enhancement.

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The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis or its editors.

“What’s our space strategy?” is a question most organizations can comfortably ignore. After all, space remains a niche concern for all but a handful of companies, and most executives have more immediate priorities than orbital infrastructure, satellite manufacturing or the commercialization of low-Earth orbit.

Yet the question reveals a broader shift already reshaping corporate decision-making.

Organizations are increasingly being forced to determine what’s going to matter before markets can determine what does matter. AI, carbon removal and quantum computing all became strategically relevant long before their commercial or technological pathways were demonstrated. The challenge was not predicting the future. It was recognizing relevance before the proof arrived.

Across our recent conversations with sustainability leaders, investors, founders and corporate executives, this dynamic appeared consistently. Regardless of industry or technology, many described feeling pressure to engage with emerging opportunities before traditional indicators provided confidence.

Space may simply be the next example.

The real question is not whether your organization needs a space strategy; it’s how leaders can determine what’s coming before they can show that it’s arrived.

Relevance before validation

Historically, organizations could afford to wait and see. Technologies emerged, markets matured and business models proved themselves before executives were forced to take action. Validation came first. Strategy followed.

That sequence has reversed, and the pace has increased dramatically.

Technologies now become strategically relevant before commercial pathways are established. Instead of waiting for markets to develop, organizations must decide whether to invest, partner, pilot, advocate, adopt or change course —  fateful choices that will shape their access to customers, capital, talent, policy influence and future market opportunities.

The result is a fundamental shift in how organizations make strategic decisions. Rather than responding to existing markets, they are increasingly reacting to emerging possibilities. The question is no longer simply whether a technology will succeed, but whether waiting for proof creates more risk than acting before it arrives.

Markets do not wait for certainty. While organizations seek proof, partnerships are formed, standards emerge, capital is deployed and adoption pathways begin to take shape. By the time a business case becomes obvious, many decisions shaping that opportunity will have been made. The organizations that engage early are not simply responding to emerging markets; they are helping shape them. 

Before markets take shape

This dynamic is not new for sustainability practitioners.

For decades, they have engaged with emerging solutions before markets could provide clear signals. Renewable energy, electric vehicles, sustainable aviation fuel and carbon removal all attracted corporate participation well before their pathways to scale were clear. Many sustainability leaders did not simply wait for these markets to mature. Through their collective actions, they helped shape the conditions that made scale possible. In reality, organizations often shape emerging markets even as they try to understand them.

In this rapidly shifting environment, validation has become a lagging indicator of strategic relevance. That lesson is becoming more important as the gap between technological emergence and strategic relevance continues to shrink, and markets increasingly deliver validation only after consequential positioning decisions have been made.

For sustainability practitioners, this changes the role validation plays in decision-making. The challenge has evolved from identifying proven solutions and scaling them to recognizing the strategic relevance of those solutions before definitive market validation arrives. 

Position before proof

That means that organizations need a different way to engage with emerging opportunities.

Positioning before proof does not require organizations to commit blindly to uncertain outcomes. It requires them to participate early enough to learn, build capabilities and preserve influence while markets are still taking shape. For sustainability practitioners, that means becoming involved early enough to understand nascent solutions, explore their potential and determine whether they deserve deeper engagement.

Organizations that engage early gain more than information. They influence the conditions that ultimately determine how markets develop. In a world where relevance increasingly arrives before validation, positioning before proof is becoming one of the most important ways organizations prepare for the future while helping shape it.

The conditions you’re waiting for

As organizations engage with emerging technologies earlier, their decisions increasingly become part of the environment that shapes new solutions. The optimal conditions for commercial deployment and market scale are not simply discovered. They emerge through the collective actions of the organizations participating in their development.

This does not mean every organization should move first or place outsized bets. It does suggest that waiting for validation may no longer be a neutral position. In a world where relevance increasingly arrives before proof, organizations are not simply deciding which future to prepare for. They’re also helping determine which futures become possible.

Perhaps the more important question is whether the conditions you’re waiting for are conditions you’re already helping create.

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Sustainability strategists for Amazon and Coach use different internal messaging to sell the potential of reuse, recycling and other circular economy principles to business leaders. 

At Coach, roughly 80 percent of the sustainability team’s focus is on promoting circular design principles, such as constructing accessories so they can be taken apart easily for reuse or turning scrap leather and other materials into revenue-generating products that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

The message that resonates most loudly with Coach employees is that circular economy principles offer parent company Tapestry, which also owns Kate Spade, an opportunity to decouple revenue growth from environmental impacts.  

“That’s how I explain it within the organization,” said Kim Matsoukas, director of sustainability at Coach, during a session at Trellis Impact 26.  

The Coach (Re)Loved business, which sells repaired, restored, “upcrafted” and vintage styles, has provided a small, new source of revenue by appealing to Gen Z shoppers who prefer thrifting to buying new. The business has stayed steady in the face of uncertain U.S. import tariffs: Coach sold more than 13,800 units through the program in 2025. 

“We don’t have tariffs in resale so there’s some resilience there, and there is starting to be some recognition around that,” Matsoukas said.

Coachtopia, the company’s circular research lab, in fiscal 2025 launched the Alter/Ego Collection, which includes products made from production scraps from two of Coach’s most iconic bags. Alter/Ego items have a 59 percent lower carbon footprint than similar products.

While Coach doesn’t report on revenue generated through Coachtopia or (Re)Loved, it tracks this metric internally along with the percentage of recycled or scrap material used in its mainstream brands, she said.

Another new metric maps the effort it takes Coach employees to take apart a bag so that the materials can be reused (versus the value that can be recovered after that process); this will influence future design. 

“You want it to be greater than zero, because if it costs more to disassemble something than the output if valued at, you will never do it right,” Matsoukas said. “It will just be trash.”   

Waste = defect at Amazon

Amazon’s approach to reuse and recovery is driven by its view that waste is an operational defect, said Priscilla Okyere, global head of circular solutions and waste reduction at Amazon, during the Trellis Impact session. 

“We want to eliminate defects, we want to reduce them, so we position waste as a defect and track different types of defects that they feel controllable,” she said.

Different KPIs are used across the company. One example: Amazon uses AI in its warehouses to detect damage in products before they are sent to customers, which reduces returns. In 2025, that effort cut the percentage of damaged items by 21 percent. 

Amazon routinely conducts waste stream audits to identify ways to eliminate single-use materials, Okyere said. 

One success story is a program suggested by the logistics team to replace disposable wooden pallets used to transport items internally with ones made from reusable plastic. The original material was more difficult to repair, and the reusable pallet design has reduced the need for protective, single-use plastic shrinkwrap.

The initiative helped Amazon avoid sourcing 85 million wood pallets during 2024 and another 35 million in 2025, as the system was converted to the reusable ones. It will also save money in the long term, which was the benefit Amazon’s circular solutions team highlighted. 

“It’s good for circularity, but because there’s also a cost benefit, we could start there,” Okyere said.

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3M Chief Sustainability Officer Gayle Schueller stepped down in early July after a 34-year career with the company. One of her team members, Amanda Yates, was promoted as her replacement.

Schueller, who was a senior vice president with 3M, announced her “graduation” in a LinkedIn post shortly before the U.S. holiday weekend. 

Schueller, with degrees are in physics and materials science, held numerous positions in research and development, design and commercial strategy before being named CSO in 2018.

“Two lessons stand out,” Schueller wrote in her farewell post: “At the end of the day it’s all about people. The greatest impact is when innovation, operational excellence, business performance and purpose come together.”

Under Schueller, 3M adopted a “sustainability value commitment” for every product released after 2019. For example, a product might contain materials substitutions or be manufactured differently to reduce a customer’s greenhouse gas emissions footprint.

“This was an intentional choice that shift investment in favor of greater sustainability, allowing us to transform our business by transforming our products,” she wrote.

Examples from 3M’s 2026 global impact report, published June 1, include new film technology that reduces the temperature of steel roofs in direct sunlight, saving on energy for cooling; and new optical models that cut the amount of energy needed by laptop computer displays.  

Schueller’s successor, Amanda Yates, joined 3M in April 2013 as a corporate brand strategist and was named senior director of global sustainability in August 2021. 

Her undergraduate degree was in environmental science, and her first job was as a specialist for SeaWorld Orlando. “I’m deeply grateful for the chance to continue this work in a role that feels both meaningful and humbling, at a company that believes in the power of science, innovation and long-term impact,” Yates said in a LinkedIn post about her promotion.

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