At this year’s Climate Week in New York City, one theme stood out amid the 1,000-plus events and 100,000 attendees: leadership. Not just any leadership, but the kind that comes from the very top.

On our Two Steps Forward podcast, recorded live at Solutions House, my co-host Solitaire Townsend and I sat down with Jesper Brodin, CEO of IKEA and chair of The B Team, to explore the role of corporate leaders in accelerating the sustainability transition. What emerged was a candid conversation about agency, accountability and belief.

Fighting doom, building agency

For decades, sustainability professionals have debated whether CEO buy-in is indispensable. I argued yes: leaders like Walmart’s Lee Scott, Unilever’s Paul Polman and GM’s Mary Barra set bold courses that changed both their companies and their industries.

Townsend countered that while CEO support is transformative, it’s not the only path. “If your CEO isn’t on board,” she said, “go and engage your peers in middle management. You might find there’s a lot more power sitting there than you think.”

Brodin, who has spent three decades at IKEA, took the long view. “The solution on how to resolve climate change is an economic and technical transformation,” he said. “We need all leaders to collaborate because we’re in a hurry.” But he acknowledged that belief remains the hardest nut to crack — convincing skeptics that “climate smart is resource smart is cost smart.”

Proof in practice

IKEA has tried to make that case in tangible ways. Since the Paris Agreement, the company has grown revenues by 24 percent while cutting absolute emissions — Scopes 1, 2 and 3 — by more than 30 percent. Renewable energy investments alone have saved €97 million. Spare-parts programs and secondhand platforms extend product life cycles, turning circularity from concept into business model.

It’s a reminder that climate action isn’t charity or compliance — it’s competitiveness. Yet Brodin noted that half of CEOs still hesitate to speak publicly, wary of being accused of greenwashing. The result is a strange paradox: commitment is strong, but confidence is shaky.

Leadership imperative

So, do CEOs still matter? Brodin believes they do, profoundly. “We have long passed where sustainability belongs to the CSO,” he said. “Today, all leaders need digital competence and sustainability competence. It’s no longer an expertise field.”

That shift — from niche to norm — may be the legacy Brodin leaves as he steps down from IKEA after 30 years. The company’s trajectory suggests there’s “no way back,” as he put it. The challenge for other CEOs is whether they’ll find the courage to not only act, but to say out loud why they’re acting.

The Two Steps Forward podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and other platforms — and, of course, via Trellis. Episodes publish every other Tuesday.

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The corporate climate “actionists” who converged in New York last week for the 16th annual Climate Week NYC are resigned to the reality that federal policy won’t favor their agendas for at least another three-plus years. 

Even so, the majority of corporations with net-zero aspirations are not retreating from their top-level commitments. They’re just not talking about them as loudly.

At least three research analyses published to coincide with Climate Week NYC suggest that companies committed to reducing emissions and conserving nature and biodiversity are actually doubling down on that agenda:

• The number of U.S. companies with net-zero commitments rose 9 percent in the past 12 months, according to the Net Zero Tracker’s 2025 stocktake, which did note that most of those pledges aren’t very robust.
• A focused study that included 75 top companies by market capitalization found that while roughly 13 percent retreated from programs between April 2024 and May 2025, nearly one-third increased their investments.  
• Close to 90 percent of CEOs think the case for sustainability is stronger now than five years ago, according to research by Accenture and the United Nations Global Compact, which represents more than 20,000 member companies. Almost all of 2,000 surveyed executives expect to include these metrics in their core strategies and compensation structures by 2050. 

“That makes sense, because being a business leader is not about opinions from one day to another, it’s about building, it’s about investing, it’s about transformation,” said Ingka Group CEO Jesper Brodin, referencing the Global Compact data during a panel discussion at the Nest Climate Campus. Ingka, IKEA’s largest retailer with $47 billion in revenue in 2024, is on pace to meet its 2030 target to halve emissions. A cross-functional committee of business leaders that meets at least eight times annually manages this strategy.

Only half of the CEOs responding to the UN Global Company survey, however, felt comfortable communicating this agenda — a refrain discernible in the other analyses.

“I think the corporate sector has gotten pretty quiet on these issues, whether or not they are moving forward,” said Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert during a panel discussion at the Nest Climate Campus. “I think there’s a real lack of leadership right now from the business sector, a real lack of leadership response to what we’re navigating.”

Here are three themes of note from the weeklong industry gathering:

Real work continues

Some 100,000 people came to New York to attend more than 1,000 summits, panels, receptions, climate tech pitch sessions and countless face-to-face meetings.

“This week for me, is about finding new people that I have not known before, hearing about new climate initiatives,” said Kate Heiny, vice president of sustainability for Booking Holdings, the company behind travel sites including Booking.com, Kayak and Open Table. “I often look to other industries and not the one that I’m in. I think that learning from other places has always been something that I would look to for growth. So it’s people, it’s ideas.”

That need for connection, validation and fresh perspective was echoed in many of my interviews throughout the week. “I think it has just been great to see that the majority of companies are just plowing on like we are,” said another chief sustainability officer, speaking on background.

“I see very serious people doing really extraordinary things, continuing at full force and momentum,” said Andrew Mayock, who headed the federal government’s sustainability strategy under President Joe Biden. 

Mayock was appointed the inaugural vice chancellor at the University of Colorado Boulder in March. He’s already shaping new master’s programs for integrating sustainability into business, engineering and policy. Mayock is also coordinating development of a new classification from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement that will recognize colleges and universities that include climate action as part of their mission.

“I’m really buoyed by being here,” he said.

AI debate gets more nuanced

Plenty of companies in attendance were willing to talk about how artificial intelligence stands to accelerate both their company’s environmental agenda and revenue growth. 

Packaging company Ranpak, which counts Amazon and Walmart among its many big-name customers, is already deploying AI for applications such as rightsizing packages or detecting how much cushioning is needed to protect items in them. “What excites me, frankly, is the stuff that we haven’t figured out yet … the problems that haven’t even been identified yet that can be solved with all of this data,” said David Murgio, chief sustainability officer at the company.  

NVIDIA’s head of sustainability, Josh Parker, downplayed ominous predictions about AI load growth that could strain the U.S. grid, suggesting that the electrification of vehicles and industrial loads is a bigger load factor over time and AI plays an important role in easing bottlenecks.  

“AI is helping us modernize the grid, helping us integrate renewables and batteries,” he said during one panel.

NVIDIA’s influence on the AI ecosystem cannot be understated. Its chips are at the center of data center buildouts by Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft, and the company on Sept. 22 announced a deal to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI’s infrastructure ramp-up. 

Natural gas isn’t going away

The biggest tech companies are spending billions of dollars on the AI data center buildout. To tame the associated emissions they’re investing in creative contracts to keep nuclear power on the grid, support new nuclear technologies and add emerging generation options, such as geothermal.

Here’s the thing few of them are talking about: 40 percent of the electricity powering U.S. data centers comes from natural gas, and it will be the biggest contributor of additional capacity between 2025 and 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

Meta’s big $10 billion project in Louisiana, as one example, will require three new gas turbines. Elsewhere, natural gas plants that weren’t running at full capacity are being commissioned for more load, said Julio Friedmann, chief scientist for carbon removal advisory firm Carbon Direct. “The thing that people don’t talk about, the hidden aspect of what’s actually happening, is that the easiest thing to do is just ramp up existing natural gas capacity,” he said. 

While the tech firms are investing in as much renewable energy as possible to counter this rise, the Trump administration is making those deals tougher to complete. It plans to stop the retirement of aged coal power plants, for example, and U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright last week said data center operators should be prepared to shoulder the burden of their loads by co-locating near specific sources. That’s what Amazon plans to do, for example, near a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

Natural gas is a better alternative than coal, although much of the capacity being added is “uncontrolled,” meaning the methane emissions are vented into the atmosphere, Friedmann said. Adding carbon capture and storage to natural gas facilities presents one potential solution, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to kill the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program could make it harder — if not impossible — for companies to tap into the 45Q tax incentives for those projects.

“The other thing is that all of this action on natural gas means the prices are going up, which is making all of this more expensive,” Friedmann said. 

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

For years, one hurdle to diverting food waste from landfills has been limited collection of this material across the U.S. But new research shows that access to composting in cities across the country has increased by 8.9 percentage points, up from 27 percent in 2020 to nearly 36 percent today.

Composting is a critical tool in the climate change toolbox. It diverts food and other organic waste from landfills, where food waste accounts for 58 percent of landfill methane emissions, the greenhouse gas equivalent of 50 million passenger vehicles. Plus, the finished compost is incredibly effective at enriching soil and promoting carbon sequestration. Since as much as a third of what we send to landfills is food, sending this material to another home is a key sustainability strategy.  

First, though, we need better data. Knowing where people have access to composting programs — and what they’re allowed to put in the bin — is essential for driving food waste diversion efforts and understanding whether compostable packaging can be a viable option across the country. 

The different types of composting access 

Knowing where residents can compost is important, but we also need to know how the program is structured. Residential access to composting collection can be through:

• Municipally run curbside programs, administered by a resident’s city or county. These are generally considered to be easier to use, as residents typically already access other waste services through their municipalities.
• Privately run curbside programs, managed by private composting companies that pick up material from residents and take it to a nearby composter or their own composting sites. These programs are often structured as a monthly subscription service (typically in the range of $30/month), and see use from motivated residents.
• Drop-off programs, which can be managed by the municipality or private companies, often offer multiple drop-off locations, and are typically free but in some cases may include a fee. 

An evolution over the past five years

Five years ago, the environmental nonprofit GreenBlue developed interactive maps and charts of municipally run and privately run composting programs, available on Tableau Public. The study looked at data on program availability and material acceptance in the 1,000 most populous U.S. cities, whose combined population represented approximately 40 percent of the total U.S. population. Cities are key to the composting puzzle. They’re densely populated, they typically offer curbside waste and recycling programs, and some have goals around zero waste or packaging circularity. 

Fast forward to this year and we have an updated dataset to understand the state of composting access today. Expanding the dataset to the 6,233 largest U.S. cities, representing more than 60 percent of the nation’s population, we learned that:

• Today, 17.8 percent of the measured U.S. population has access to curbside or drop-off programs that accept food waste only (no compostable packaging accepted), up from 16 percent in 2020.
• 18.1 percent of the measured U.S. population has access to curbside or drop-off programs that accept some form of compostable packaging in addition to food waste, up from 11 percent in 2020.
• In total, nearly 36 percent of the U.S. population has access to some kind of curbside or drop-off composting program that accepts either food waste only, or food waste and some forms of compostable packaging. This was 27 percent in 2020, resulting in an 8.9 percentage point increase. 

What this means for food waste and compostable packaging 

Clearly, there’s more work to be done. Access to composting programs is not widespread, and if we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by diverting food and other organic waste from landfills, more cities and private haulers will need to start offering these services. Cities will also need to see support, advocacy and demand from companies — organizations can advocate for expanded infrastructure through the US Composting Council and Biodegradable Products Institute, and make sure that their own corporate operations and headquarters are signed up for food waste collection. 

At the same time, we can take a moment to celebrate. Composting access is growing, and it’s a more-than-legitimate, not-so-hippie waste management strategy that’s quietly building local soils and economies. As companies lean into composting advocacy, we’ll see big payoffs for the climate, for waste reduction and for local landscapes. 

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

Much attention is paid — justifiably — to the outcomes of companies’ various sustainability efforts: energy consumption, fair labor practices, governance frameworks and water and waste reduction, to name a few. Those outcomes, however, are driven by processes, and those processes by people. So for CSOs, a critical part of the job comes more from the field of communications than environmental science: employee engagement.

It’s no surprise that public discussions of sustainability often cover processes, workflows, product specifications, supply chains and metrics. Those are all incredibly important and they’re clear, measurable ways to hold organizations accountable. Yet at the most basic level, impact isn’t driven just by strategy or technology — it’s driven by people.

I’ve found that behind closed doors at events such as Climate Week NYC, business leaders focus on the people in the organization. Using one’s people right is a big opportunity for every company, and an enormous one for global enterprises, where 200,000-plus human beings can be viewed as simply colleagues — or compatriots. This is true now as AI and other technological advances require ongoing reviews of how tap people for where their unique skills are needed most.

Turning employees into CSO partners involves embedding sustainable thinking not just into corporate processes, but in daily decision-making. This is valuable for several reasons: it can help justify investment, drive timelier decisions, cement a stronger value proposition to clients and cultivate coordinated action across the business.

There are myriad ways to approach this, but I’ve found it helpful to break down engaging with employees into three pieces.

1. Find and leverage natural allies

Thanks to the inherent goodness that drives so many people, most organizations are fortunate to have a core group that already cares deeply about sustainability — even if it has nothing to do with their role. That might be a software engineer passionate about the environment, an HR administrator who volunteers on human rights or project manager concerned about extreme weather. This group may add up to only 10 percent of employees, but it remains a phenomenal, “free” foundation.

The task is to identify those people throughout your organization and consider how to organize them in a meaningful way. At IBM, we did this in my first year by holding a “Global Sustainability Forum” that targeted about 60 employees, ranging from design consultants to infrastructure developers, representing every part of our business that touched on sustainability — regardless whether they viewed it that way. That year we established a network of ambassadors and articulated how sustainability was key to their work. This year we invited broader participation and are expecting almost seven times more participants.

Many companies have a form of sustainability “ambassadors.” Often these focus on volunteering and intermittent projects, items more “apart” from core business than ideal — but these programs do help bring together natural allies. IKEA, for example, has taken this a step further by seeking candidates in their hiring that are enthusiastic about their environmental goals.

2. Don’t invite the rest over — go to where they are

It’d be natural to think the next step involves “bringing over” the remaining 90 percent to your foundation, but creating affinity is difficult and time-consuming, when possible at all. People are busy, understandably, working toward their own KPIs. Instead, an effective strategy should include a narrative that inserts your work into what the others already care about.

For example, CSOs and their teams can aid the KPIs of other teams by assisting with business development, using sustainability angles to promote products or services through channels and platforms and people not already being used. They can also roll up their sleeves, establish regular touchpoints and simply ask their colleagues how they can help. What do sales and product managers need to address client requirements? What language should we be using (we all know sustainability can suffer from jargon)?

Mastercard does this well, with an “Impact Steering Committee” that spans all its business units (including their respective leaders) and BU-specific guides that outline specific actions employees in different roles can undertake to help the company achieve its environmental and social impact goals.

At IBM, one way we did this was developing an AI-powered “Ask Sustainability” chatbot that can help fulfill bespoke data requests we get from clients. However, we didn’t stop there; we integrated the tool directly into an existing “Ask Sales” chatbot, so that this data was easily accessible to sellers through a channel they already use. In this way, my team wasn’t “asking” for anything; we were providing much-appreciated support to our colleagues.

This helped other teams start to see the value prop behind IBM’s sustainability initiatives, and by capturing data on the backend, we also began putting numbers to the “book of business” for which sustainability is a salient issue.

3. Build a beachhead of mindshare

Achieving complete sustainability mindfulness throughout an organization is a never-ending effort, but several tactics can help lock-in incremental progress. Well-crafted self-service tools (such as internal websites) are a great start, letting employees pursue their interest without any roadblocks. It’s imperative that such a site is written to offer help and support, not simply to inform or cajole.

Of course, other proactive tactics such as newsletters and annual activities can help, too. Sometimes external communications — a news story or op-ed — are more effective than traditional internal communications, particularly when those are shared among colleagues.

One of the most impressive examples of proactive tactics might be Patagonia’s Environmental Internship Program, which offers employees from any part of the company two months paid to spend with an environmental group of their choice and “bring back stories, inspiration, and a new commitment” to their mission.

At IBM, we’ve established a new Sustainable Innovation Prize, which awards teams whose work uncovers creative ways to drive and measure long-term value with an added benefit of the chance to ring the New York Stock Exchange closing bell. While the prize may or may not trigger new work, it absolutely incentivizes everyone in the company to consider how their work — in new innovations, product design, AI model development and more — also has a sustainability angle. That’s already an important win, and one I’m excited to reinforce annually.

As Climate Week conversations wrap up in New York, it’s worth reiterating that engaging employees is a key part of driving real change. By identifying and empowering internal allies, collaborating with the others in ways they appreciate and creating regular company-wide touchpoints, CSOs can turn employees into powerful partners in accelerating progress.

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