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Allbirds Director of Sustainability Aileen Lerch has left the San Francisco-based footwear company to become net-zero program manager at Meta.

Lerch exited Allbirds in June, according to a short LinkedIn update she posted recently announcing her new position. Meta declined to comment, citing a policy not to discuss personnel moves.   

Allbirds has not hired a new sustainability head yet. It is evaluating leadership needs for this function, the company said through a spokeswoman.

“Sustainability is not a standalone function, but an integral part of every role at Allbirds — from product designers, to material experts, to marketing,” she said.

Lerch, who reported to Allbirds CEO Joe Vernachio, was responsible for strategy, reporting and developing partnerships to advance its decarbonization agenda. She was hired in January 2020 to develop the company’s rigorous life-cycle assessment methodology, which Allbirds publishes for others to borrow. 

Allbirds uses a software management tool called Carbonfact to closely measure the potential impact of materials substitutions and other decisions. “Why do we even measure these carbon footprints?” Lerch said during the May 2024 episode of the Climate Pioneers interview series. “The key reason is so that we can understand hotspot areas and actions that we can take to make change.” 

The company is pushing to reduce the average footprint for its shoes to 5.5 kilograms per pair by the end of 2025. The industry average is 14 kilograms. In February, it shipped a limited production run of Moonshot, which Allbirds describes as the first “net-zero carbon shoe.”

Allbirds prioritizes the use of natural materials, such as wool from sheep raised on farms that use regenerative agricultural practices, or bioplastics made from captured methane. These factors aren’t generally selling points for the company’s footwear, but they are part of its mission despite a struggle to grow revenue since going public in November 2021. Sales slipped 25.4 percent in 2024 to $189.9 million.

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Scope 3 emissions are a headache in food and agriculture. Large supermarkets stock tens of thousands of products containing multiple ingredients. And food companies have supply networks that span large farming cooperatives and smallholders in developing nations. 

Obtaining primary emissions data from every node in this network is impossible, forcing companies to rely on “spend-based” accounting — use of crude emissions factors to convert dollars spent on an item into an estimate of the emissions generated in its production. This obscures emissions hotspots and makes it difficult for companies to collaborate with suppliers on emissions-reduction projects.

Thankfully, change is afoot. A growing number of initiatives are now focused on making detailed, supplier-specific data available for more and more ingredients and products. Here are three recent developments worth keeping an eye on.

UK retailers are using digital twin technology to track supply chains

Several major U.K. retailers, including Tesco and M&S, track supply chain emissions using technology developed by Mondra, a London-based startup. Retailers link product management systems with Mondra, which creates a digital twin of the company’s supply chain, analyzes the ingredients and draws on a database of emissions factors to calculate carbon footprints for specific products. Mondra defaults to generic emissions factors, but suppliers can log on to the system to add primary data. 

Two years after launch, 90 percent of all grocery market sales in the U.K. involve a product that’s covered by Mondra, said Ian Piddock, the company’s head of product marketing.

Once retailers have visibility across their supply chains, they can then identify potential emissions cuts. Piddock said that Tesco, an early partner on development of the technology, has used Mondra to reformulate its private-label lasagna ready meal to reduce the emissions associated with the product by 18 percent.

By the end of 2026, Piddock expects retailers to begin reporting reductions in total Scope 3 emissions that they have achieved using the system.

Granular data is being integrated into carbon accounting platforms

HowGood is a food systems intelligence company that maintains a database of 90,000 agricultural emissions factors. It’s won customers such as Nestlé and Chipotle by researching specific regions and suppliers to produce increasingly granular data on ingredients. 

“We have over 250 sweeteners in the database that you can pull from,” said Michael Streitberger, HowGood’s head of partnerships. “When you select sugar, you’ve got 40 plus locations of where you could source that sugar, all with different emissions factors and metrics.”

Companies use HowGood’s data to assess the emissions associated with potential new projects. Thanks to a partnership announced earlier this year, customers of Watershed, a leading provider of carbon accounting software, are also using it to compile Scope 3 inventories and identify emissions hotspots that can be the focus of reduction efforts. 

The Watershed link-up is one of around a dozen such partnerships that HowGood has with carbon accounting systems from Persefoni, Salesforce and others.

Retailers unite to simplify data requests

Many retailers want better emissions data from suppliers, but exactly what they want differs from company to company. If retailers could coalesce around an agreed-upon set of questions, suppliers could avoid duplicate efforts and prepare a single set of answers for all to use.

That was the goal of a project by the Consumer Goods Forum, a global trade group for the industry. Working with the consultancy BCG, the forum’s Climate Transition Coalition, which includes Ahold Delhaize, Tesco and other retailers, began by looking for commonalities between the data requests that the companies were making to suppliers. 

“These went from one retailer asking ‘Are you SBTi validated?’ to another asking 160 questions in an Excel file,” said Sharon Bligh, the forum’s director of health and sustainability.

The diversity meant that a single unified data request was deemed impractical. But the coalition was able to agree on the Common Data Framework, which launched in June. The framework defines three levels of sustainability maturity — dubbed Foundational, Expanded and Granular — and specifies a single set of questions for suppliers for each level.

The Foundational and Expanded questionnaires allow data to be aggregated by supplier or commodity, for example, whereas Granular retailers require suppliers to report data from specific plots of land. When verifying the information, Foundational requesters accept self-reported data, while third-party certification is required at the Expanded level and satellite imagery or other more specific data for Granular reporting.

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The solar and wind industries have never looked more vulnerable.

Just weeks ago, Congress passed a policy and budget package billed as fiscal reform that, in reality, takes direct aim at clean energy. Critical tax credits are set to sunset in 2027. Foreign content rules that will sharply increase the cost of new projects arrive just as we need to bring huge amounts of new capacity online. Experts warn of 830,000 jobs lost, skyrocketing energy bills and investor confusion.

Clean energy entrepreneurs are resilient. We have all ridden the “solar coaster” over the past two decades. But like hope, resilience isn’t a strategy. We are no longer operating under the radar. Powerful interests have put our industry in the crosshairs. It’s time we take full responsibility for our political license to operate.

This isn’t a policy accident. It’s a calculated attack by our political opponents, threatening not only the economic and social upside of the clean energy transition but also the ability of U.S. companies to secure reliable, advanced energy technologies that future-proof their operations.

And the hardest truth? It passed because we were unprepared.

Despite clear wins in cost, innovation and job creation, renewables remain politically underpowered. Our trade associations play a vital role. But we now spend less on influence and education than we did a decade ago, while our opposition spends more than ever. Real political power demands more: smarter communications, grassroots organizing, clean energy champions in elected office at every level — and above all, money.

It’s time for a wartime footing

The new budget bill wasn’t a victory for the fossil fuel industry. Rather, MAGA politics beat us, by out-organizing, out-communicating and outlasting us in the places where power is actually decided.

We must adopt a wartime footing. Survival requires unity, speed and resourcefulness. Political power can no longer be optional. It must be treated as essential infrastructure.

Wartime footing doesn’t mean panic. It means clarity of purpose and firm resolve. It means that every employee, CEO, subcontractor and policymaker understands they are part of something bigger.

We’ve seen this before. When Saudi Arabia flooded the oil market in 2014 to crush U.S. fracking, American drillers responded like it was a hurricane. They cut costs, consolidated and coordinated — from city halls to Congress. They didn’t just survive. They adapted and came back stronger.

Now it’s renewable energy’s turn. The real fight isn’t in Washington anymore. It’s in statehouses, utility commissions, local permitting battles and public opinion. Congress dropped a bomb, but we can decide where the next battle is fought.

States are the new battleground

This war isn’t over. The balance of power has shifted to the states. From California’s interconnection queue to Texas’ battles over distributed generation, the policies shaping our future are local. State commissions, permitting boards and zoning councils are often dominated by NIMBY voices or fossil-backed interests. We can’t let that stand. That’s where the public is, where the friction lives and where our momentum is strongest — if we show up.

California shows both the risk and the opportunity. With federal support retreating, Sacramento now bears national leadership responsibility. SB 541, led by Senators Josh Becker and Henry Stern, offers a blueprint: lowering costs by enabling smart batteries, EV chargers and thermostats — the same technologies that the Trump administration has penalized. California is doubling down on flexibility, affordability and grid resilience while others retreat.

But the stakes are rising. Grids everywhere are straining from heat waves, AI-driven demand and aging infrastructure. One in six U.S. families is behind on its utility bills. Clean, distributed power must now move from backup to backbone and prove it works at scale.

Meanwhile, Texas offers a case study in post-partisan progress. In the last legislative session, three Senate-passed anti-renewable bills died in committee after a coalition of clean energy employers, rural co-ops and oil and gas groups mobilized. They warned lawmakers that blocking renewables would stall economic growth and raise energy costs.

ERCOT’s numbers back them up: blackout risk fell from 12 percent to 0.3 percent over the last year as solar and battery capacity surged. Prices stayed 24 percent below the national average.

This wasn’t luck. It was organizing. Texas shows that when renewables are treated as infrastructure, not ideology, practical policy follows. That’s the model to replicate.

A worrying shift in public support

Policy isn’t the only thing under pressure. Public support is slipping. A recent AP-NORC poll shows declining enthusiasm for solar tax credits and offshore wind, even among Democrats. Pew reports that Republican support for solar farms has dropped 20 points since 2020. Over 15 percent of U.S. counties have banned or blocked utility-scale clean energy projects.

This isn’t a blip. It’s a warning. Clean energy has the economics. But our narrative is losing ground. And that has political consequences.

When support weakens, it becomes easier for opponents to repeal incentives or spread disinformation. Without voter pressure, lawmakers face no cost for siding with fossil fuel interests. If we lose the cultural narrative, we lose the political mandate.

Four moves to win the political war

1. Shape public opinion with a coordinated media strategy
Too many Americans still believe wind and solar are more expensive than coal, or that batteries aren’t safe. That’s not just a messaging problem; it threatens deployment. The industry needs a unified, well-funded communications strategy to shift public perception and tell powerful stories: EVs keep our air clean, rooftop solar cuts monthly bills and batteries provide resilience in blackouts. Public sentiment isn’t a side issue. It’s core political infrastructure.

2. Mobilize at the grassroots
Showing up means having a steady, local presence. Solar installers at rate hearings. Co-op members writing op-eds. Students organizing school campaigns. When neighbors speak up about energy choices, elected officials listen. We need real people with real stakes, backed by training and support, making their voices heard.

3. Align with workers and consumers — always
Every clean energy message should start with American workers and American families. Clean energy must prioritize good jobs and lower costs. These aren’t competing goals — they’re reinforcing. We can grow union careers and cut monthly bills. Projects from Intersect Power, Form Energy and the DOE Loan Programs Office prove it’s already happening. Every message and policy should reflect that reality.

4. Elect supporters
We need more elected officials who’ve built clean energy firsthand. Leaders like Illinois Rep. Sean Casten, California Rep. Mike Levin and New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich bring practical expertise to public service. Developers, entrepreneurs and installers should be encouraged to run in both parties. No one speaks for this work better than those who’ve done it.

Most importantly: fund the fight

None of this matters without resources. The opposition funds advocacy like it funds pipelines. We treat it like a line item to minimize. That must change. We need to invest in organizing, education, regulatory strategy and legal defense exponentially to what we now spend.

Let’s be clear: the Big Beautiful Bill didn’t pass on merit. It passed because we didn’t have the power to stop it.

We’ve already won the battlefield of economics. But politics is not won by Moore’s Law; it’s won by muscle. If we don’t adopt a wartime footing and build the political infrastructure to match, we risk losing everything we’ve created.

But we won’t. Because we’ve learned. This industry is filled with builders—of projects, companies, careers and futures. Now we must build political power too. That means starting small, scaling fast and staying with it for the long haul. We know how to deploy capital, manage timelines and build coalitions. Let’s bring those skills to organizing and show what happens when clean energy fights back.

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It’s a tough time to be a sustainability expert in government or part of a social movement.

A survey by Trellis data partner GlobeScan, together with the ERM Institute and Volans, shows experts are increasingly critical of how key actors are performing in advancing sustainable development. Ratings have dropped most sharply for:

• Social movements (down 21 percentage points)
• NGOs (down 16 points)
• Multi-sector partnerships (down 15 points)

National governments receive the lowest score overall, with only 5 percent of experts rating their contributions as excellent. The private sector also saw its lowest performance rating since tracking began in 2012, with just 14 percent of experts viewing its efforts positively. In contrast, academic and research institutions are gaining recognition, with half of experts rating their contributions positively.

What this means

These findings reflect a broader crisis of confidence in the institutions traditionally seen as drivers of sustainable development. As experts grow more critical of governments, NGOs, social movements and corporate actors, a clear message emerges: current approaches aren’t delivering the scale or speed of change needed to meet today’s environmental and social challenges.

The rise in credibility for academic and research institutions suggests a shift in expectations toward actors that are seen as less politicized, more evidence-driven and better equipped to develop innovative, systems-level solutions. 

Based on a survey of 844 sustainability practitioners across 72 countries globally conducted April-May 2025.

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GSK has committed to reducing more emissions faster than any other large pharmaceutical company. 

Now it has five years left to deliver.

Special Series

Chasing Net Zero

Intro: A case-by-case look at corporate progress on 2030 climate goals

Profile 1: Nestlé is on track to halve emissions by 2030. Here’s how (holes and all)

Methodology: How we assess a company’s progress on net zero

By 2030, the London-based pharmaceutical company has promised to slash direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent, relative to a 2020 baseline. It did so even though it has the industry’s highest emissions intensity, as measured by metric tons of emissions per dollar of revenue

So far, it is not on track to meet its goals. By 2023, the last year for which it published full data, GSK’s emissions had fallen 12 percent — half the pace it needs to reach its 2030 target. 

But the numbers do not tell the whole story. This profile in the Chasing Net Zero series — our company-by-company look at progress toward 2030 climate goals that kicked off with Nestlé and IKEA’s biggest retailer — reveals that GSK’s decarbonization plan includes two initiatives that, if successful, would lead to dramatic emissions cuts. 

One is common to almost all large companies: GSK is working with industry groups to convince pharma suppliers to reduce the emissions of their products. The news here is mixed: Ingredient manufacturers, many of which are in China and India, have started to engage, but actual emissions reductions have been slow to appear.

The other initiative is a sector-specific project that promises tantalizing results. If GSK can obtain regulatory approval and widespread adoption of a new version of its flagship Ventolin asthma inhaler, it would at a stroke eliminate close to half of its emissions.

GSK declined to make any executives available for this article, but in a recent podcast, Giulia Usai, GSK’s senior director for procurement sustainability, acknowledged the challenge of the 2030 deadline.

“We have less than 60 months to our target; that’s nothing,” she said. “It gives us all anxiety, but at the same time, it helps us prioritize the actions that will give us quicker results.”

The commitment: A big promise from a company in transition

Since taking over as chief executive in 2017, Emma Walmsley has faced relentless criticism from investors complaining that GSK lacks the lucrative pipeline needed to replace products losing patent protection. During Walmsley’s term, the company has fallen from seventh in the industry by revenue to 12th, in part because she spun out consumer businesses in 2022 to focus on lines with higher potential, including vaccines and treatments for respiratory diseases, HIV and cancer.

Despite these struggles, Walmsley has made unusually aggressive climate and nature commitments: 

• Reducing GSK’s Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions — which totaled 11 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020 — by 80 percent by 2030. (The company excluded Scope 3 categories representing 2 percent of its 2020 emissions from its goals.)
• Becoming carbon neutral by 2030 by using carbon credits to offset the remaining 20 percent of its emissions. 
• Reducing its emissions by 90 percent from 2020 levels by 2045, a net-zero commitment validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). 

“They really understand the interconnections between health, climate and nature,” said Amy Booth, a University of Oxford researcher studying sustainability in the pharmaceutical industry. She praised GSK’s early commitment to transparency and to address its impact on biodiversity. (The company was the first to publish disclosures in line with Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures standards.)

“They are one of the better companies at reporting data,” she said. “They report extensively across Scopes 1, 2 and 3, and provide pages of methodology backing up their data.”

The context: Pharma companies are engaged 

GSK is not alone in its industry in setting ambitious climate goals. 

Eighteen of the top 20 publicly traded pharma companies have had near-term commitments validated by the SBTi. Several say they will eliminate nearly all of their Scope 1 and 2 emissions — those from company facilities and from purchased electricity, respectively — before 2030, largely by shifting to renewable electricity sources.

Eight of the top 20 also have long-term SBTi commitments. Seven are based in Europe, where drugmakers face pressure to reduce their climate impact from national health systems and European Union regulations that apply to all large companies.

More than 90 percent of most pharma companies’ emissions lie in value chains, with the largest component of these Scope 3 emissions coming from the raw ingredients in their products. Transportation can also be a significant source of emissions because many drugs require refrigeration, sometimes at very low temperatures.

Here GSK stands out: Its 80-percent Scope 3 commitment is the largest in the industry. The industry’s next highest Scope 3 goal is AstraZeneca’s, GSK’s larger British rival, which has promised a 50-percent reduction by 2030.

Scopes 1 and 2: Rapid shift to renewable energy

While Scopes 1 and 2 represent a small fraction of GSK’s overall carbon footprint, the company has made the largest reductions so far in this area, mainly by investing in renewable energy. It is increasingly purchasing electricity from renewable sources. And it’s replacing some of its on-site generators that burn fossil fuels with wind and solar generation systems. 

Last year, for example, GSK activated two wind turbines and a 56-acre solar farm at its plant in Irvine, Scotland. The plant produces a majority of the world’s supply of the antibiotic Augmentin, which is made using an energy-intensive fermentation process. With the new capacity, more than half of the facility’s energy will come from its on-site wind and solar generation.

In addition, the company has made progress in improving the efficiency of its manufacturing processes, especially by reducing the gas leakage during inhaler manufacturing.

Scope 3: Reengineering a problematic product

GSK is the world’s leading maker of drugs to treat asthma and other respiratory diseases, propelled by the success of Ventolin, which it introduced in 1968. Even though GSK’s patents have expired and generics are available, 35 million patients worldwide used the company’s version in 2024, accounting for sales of almost $890 million, 2 percent of GSK’s revenue.

A puff from Ventolin’s ubiquitous L-shaped inhaler offers immediate relief from asthma symptoms. Unfortunately, each puff is also powered by R-134a, a gas that traps 1,400 times more heat than CO₂. GSK plans to switch to a chemical known as HFA 152a, made by Orbia, the large Mexican company. The new propellant cuts carbon emissions by 90 percent. 

It’s not as simple as substituting one gas for another, however. The drug formula and the inhaler mechanism need to be adjusted to work with the new propellant. The revised product is now in phase III clinical trials, and GSK hopes to submit the results for regulatory approval next year. HFA 152a is also highly flammable and has to be manufactured with elaborate safety precautions. GSK has started building new production lines for low-carbon Ventolin at its factory in Evreux, France.

“In the medicines sector, changing a product is costly, challenging and not guaranteed,” said Claire Lund, GSK’s vice president of environmental sustainability, on a recent podcast. “We have to work with multiple regulators in multiple countries, and we have to set up a global supply chain.”

Will GSK be able to accomplish the biggest item on its decarbonization checklist? While the results from the clinical trials are not yet available, there is evidence that the new class of propellants can be effective. Last month, British regulators approved a low-carbon version of AstraZenica’s Trixeo inhaler that used a similar propellant. 

Scope 3: Coaxing suppliers

The prospects are harder to assess for GSK’s other major Scope 3 challenge: reducing the emissions embedded in the products it buys, especially the raw ingredients for drugs. These made up 30 percent of the company’s emissions in 2020. With just a 9-percent cut since 2020, progress is well short of the pace needed for an 80-percent reduction by 2030.

In 2021, GSK and six other drug companies formed Energize, an effort to help suppliers reduce their energy consumption. “It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears” to negotiate the legal agreements between rival companies, Usai said. Still, she concluded that “it’s going to be much more impactful to approach our suppliers as a group, as opposed to doing it on our own.”

Last September, for example, Energize negotiated a deal for five industry suppliers and three pharmaceutical companies to buy 560 GWh of renewable energy a year from seven new solar projects in Spain. 

“Energize has gone above and beyond just telling suppliers to do stuff,” observes Booth, the Oxford researcher. “They are actually supporting them to get access to renewable energy.”

Another component of the goods and services challenge — getting suppliers to rethink how they manufacture products — has proven tougher than expected.

“However big and complicated you think the challenge is, it is probably even bigger and even more complicated,” the company wrote in a 2022 report on its climate efforts. 

For example, GSK discovered the most significant emission sources for some suppliers were solvents, which are energy-intensive to produce and release volatile organic compounds that break down into greenhouse gases. GSK must now reach out to the makers of these solvents to encourage new, lower-emission production techniques.

“Green chemistry has a long time horizon,” observed David Linich, a sustainability partner at PwC. “Many pharmaceutical companies have started exploring green alternatives that have a lower environmental impact than traditional methods, but if you are starting the R&D now, you may not see the benefit for decades.”

It’s also not clear that all suppliers are eager to rework operations so that pharmaceutical companies can report lower Scope 3 emissions. After all, many of them are in countries such as China and India, where they are under less government pressure to cut emissions than they are in Europe. Growing international trade tensions may further discourage cooperation.

“You would think that Big Pharma has a lot of power to tell suppliers what to do, but it’s actually almost the opposite,” Booth said. “There may only be a niche supplier of an active pharmaceutical ingredient, and they can say we don’t need to sell to you because we have other customers.”  

Big pharma companies also have massive, complex supply chains around the world, she said. “Their suppliers are often in countries that don’t have strict environmental regulations. And even if they want to take action, there may not be ready sources of renewable energy.”

Toward 2030: Getting numbers on the board

All this diligent effort doesn’t erase a cold fact: GSK promised to eliminate 8.5 million metric tons of emissions over the 10 years ending in 2030 and, during the first three years of that period, it shaved its emissions by just 1.2 million tons. (The company reported an additional cut of 0.5 million tons in 2024 from Scopes 1 and 2, plus some Scope 3 categories, but won’t release its full 2024 numbers until next year.)

If GSK can replace all of its Ventolin inhalers with its newer model, the company would wipe out another 4.1 million tons, leaving around 2.7 million remaining. To meet its target, GSK would need to reduce its supplier emissions and the other smaller Scope 3 categories by 50 percent. 

There’s little in the results GSK has published so far or in the moves of its competitors to suggest that emissions reductions of this magnitude are possible over the next five years. A “Pathway to Net Zero” graph that GSK published earlier this year shows a slow reduction in emissions through 2026, followed by a drop so steep it would make a hardened roller coaster fan scream. The company declined to answer repeated requests to explain its thinking.

If GSK misses its target, it’s worth remembering the company set itself a bigger challenge than many of its peers. Companies that bet big on sustainability often get criticized for falling short. In this case, that may simply mean falling in line.

GSK, however, is not pleading for more time, at least not yet. In podcast interviews, GSK officials have suggested they initially put more emphasis on laying the groundwork for their reductions than finding savings that would appear in their published disclosures. As the deadline nears, they have a renewed focus on accomplishments they can boast about.

“We know that the projects like Energize are producing real savings,” Usai said. “Now is the time for us to show the benefits of what we’ve been doing to the world.”

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