Apple, Mars, Unilever and more: Big leadership transitions in 2025 

Not since the COVID-19 era have major U.S. corporations slashed so many employees, and sustainability teams did not emerge unscathed.

Companies cut their payrolls by more than 1.1 million positions through November, with the technology and retail sectors particularly hard hit, according to research by recruiters Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

Sustainability teams at Boeing, BlackRock, Kohler, Wells Fargo and Zendesk were among those affected by broad workforce reductions. Meanwhile, there were targeted cuts at companies including S&P Global and Southwest, based on shifts in their ESG priorities. 

There was also plenty of turnover at the top, as companies reassessed their commitments to emissions reductions.

For example, Tylenol maker Kenvue’s chief sustainability officer, Pamela Gill-Alabaster, departed in June after the company folded that role into the research and operations and product development division.

Long-time leaders move on

Kenvue is far from the only corporation to embrace a new organizational structure for its top sustainability executive or to distance itself from offering a C-suite office to that role.

When Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president for environment, policy and social initiatives, retires in late January after 13 years on the job, her responsibilities will be split between two senior-level executives: one to handle her policy work, and one to handle her environmental and social mandates. 

Unilever used the departure of Rebecca Marmot, chief sustainability officer since 2019, to drop the global CSO position. Her successor is Michael Stewart, a former communications strategist for companies including PwC, Edelman and McKinsey. His title: chief corporate affairs and communications officer. Sustainability is part of Stewart’s job, but it doesn’t factor in his title.   

CEO refresh for notable nonprofits

The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) tapped former EY consulting executive, David Kennedy, to reset the nonprofit’s executive direction amid the overhaul of its Corporate Net Zero Standard. Under his leadership, SBTi is evolving its position on the role of high-integrity carbon removals in becoming net zero.

The Bezos Earth Fund, a major climate philanthropy, named a former Amazon senior vice president, Tom Taylor, as CEO after the departure of long-time environmental nonprofit executive, Andrew Steer, who previously led the World Resource Institute.

Get ready for another new notable nonprofit CEO next year: B Lab Global, the company behind the B Corporation certification, is recruiting for a new chief executive after releasing a stricter version of its standard in April.

Big promotions from within

Some companies with long-time commitments to environmental sustainability — notably Inter IKEA Group and Mars — tapped internal candidates to fill vacancies at the top in 2025. 

Lena Julle, a 30-year IKEA veteran, was named chief sustainability officer for the retailer in May after several months in an interim role. Meanwhile, Alastair Child was tapped as CSO of Mars after his predecessor, Barry Parkin, retired. Child has been with the company for close to 25 years.

Notable sector flip-flops 

Other corporations sought a fresh perspective when they chose new sustainability leaders.

Apollo Global Management walked over to the footwear sector when its first CSO, Dave Stangis, decided to retire. Its choice, Jaycee Pribulsky, left Nike to join the financial services firm in October. She was at Nike for almost nine years, her last 19 months as CSO.

General Motors poached from technology company Dell Technologies when it hired Cassandra Garber as its new CSO in April. She was at Dell for four years before officially filling the role vacated by Kristen Siemen, who retired in late 2024 after 30 years with the automaker.

Change is a constant in the sustainability profession. Send ideas for career development and news about leadership roles, promotions and departures to [email protected].

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Corporate climate leadership has moved on. The critics haven’t

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

Climate leadership has changed a lot in recent years. In the U.S., there are fewer flashy announcements. Instead, many companies are evolving their programs to meet increased demands for precision, detail and pragmatism. They’re updating targets to address the reality of changing baselines in sectors where “business as usual” means something different every month (hello, AI). And importantly, they’re bolstering internal credibility so that potential high-impact investments will receive executive approval when the time is right. 

All of this work happens quietly. No big announcements. No fanfare. But without it, high-impact climate work in the next few decades will slow considerably. 

Foundational standards for greenhouse gas measurement and accompanying claims are undergoing significant revisions. At the same time, expectations for accuracy and precision are higher than ever before. The intensifying scrutiny and legal exposure from attorneys general is a double-edged sword. Increased accountability? Excellent. Criticizing companies when their flashy announcements of yesteryear are replaced by less shiny — but much more rigorous — impact statements? Unhelpful, unrealistic and fundamentally missing the point of corporate climate action in 2025. 

An evolution of commitments and communication

Ten years ago, companies were celebrated for bold, ambitious climate commitments. But public pledges often preceded detailed implementation plans. Headlines came first and details came later — or sometimes never at all. For practitioners, big commitments would often drive internal pressure to secure the resources necessary to actually achieve those lofty goals. 

Today, audacious commitments without accompanying plans to achieve them simply don’t fly. That’s a good thing. Holding companies accountable for actually doing meaningful climate work is important. Do corporate commitments seem less exciting today? Sometimes, yes. But this isn’t a surprise. The rules of the game are changing in real time, making it especially tricky to make grand statements in this era of intense scrutiny. When a company makes fewer big announcements, that doesn’t necessarily mean their ambition has stalled. 

For companies that are established sustainability leaders, this era necessitates an especially complex dance. Will strategies and commitments set five years ago remain relevant? Will they still reflect the most accurate and effective way to frame the companies’ work? 

Almost certainly not. And yet, all too often critics seem thrilled to point a finger at companies that are increasing the candor and detail of their disclosures. In this moment of increased accountability and honesty, candor should be rewarded. 

Where to channel criticism

At the same time, some corporate voices are conspicuously absent. This is an especially complex time to execute sustainability work, but that certainly doesn’t mean that companies should get a free pass for doing nothing. In this time of rapid change, critics should focus their attention on the companies with no climate programs — or those actively backpedaling. Companies that have no public climate disclosures and no commitments. Companies that make claims without transparency or substantiation. Companies that are downsizing their teams and backing out of partnerships. Increase the pressure to get these laggards into — or back into — the boat while climate leaders navigate the choppy waters and conflicting currents of this murky and jagged GHG accounting maelstrom.

Many corporate sustainability leaders are quietly considering more impactful investments than ever before. But the guidance that will allow them to credibly account for the impact of these investments — and to make claims against them — is still in the process of being written. Without a clear way to reputably take credit for such investments, companies are understandably hesitant to fully commit. When these companies get dragged through the mud for perceived incrementalism in the meantime, their sustainability teams’ ability to make the case for game-changing investments, or even for continuing the work they’re doing today, is significantly undermined.

Moving through this messy moment

So how do we move through this messy moment? How do we speed toward the kind of clarity that will unleash large-scale corporate investment and the accompanying absolute decarbonization that’s so desperately needed? Accounting and claims guidance that incentivizes the highest impact investments — both inside companies’ value chains and beyond — must be finalized as quickly as possible. That’s because today’s ambiguity is diminishing tomorrow’s climate impacts.

But there’s another reason that’s even more important: There has been a continued focus on inside value chain decarbonization, to the exclusion of beyond value chain investment. Without adding the power of markets into the mix, we won’t achieve global decarbonization at the necessary speed and scale.

Companies must continue decarbonizing their value chains with a focus on maximizing absolute reductions. Programs focused on direct and supply chain decarbonization are table stakes at this point. But some of the highest impact investments that companies can make will never be traceable back to their supply chains. For example, a company might have an opportunity to invest in a project in a sector not related to their value chain that results in a total reduction of GHG emissions that’s higher than any intervention they can execute in their own supply chain. The impact of such an investment should not be reflected in their inventory, of course, but it certainly makes sense for the company to be able to reputably quantify and communicate its impact separately.

Normalizing the necessity of high-credibility, third-party assurable beyond value chain investments — and their associated claims — is critical. Both GHGP and SBTi are conducting consultations that could reshape how companies frame these investments. And newer guidance from The Task Force for Corporate Action Transparency (TCAT) and the Center for Green Market Activation’s AIM Platform provides detailed ways to leverage the power of markets while also maintaining the necessary foundation of direct decarbonization.

To address the climate crisis, we need everything, everywhere all at once. More companies need to be taking action and companies that already have climate programs must be incentivized to take more impactful action. Criticizing and undermining the work happening now, in this fractious moment, is a dangerous game. Let’s hold companies accountable to the kind of leadership that tomorrow will need, not to the expectations of the past.

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Europe’s anti-deforestation law is delayed again. Here’s what to expect in 2026

The European Union’s landmark anti-deforestation law, originally passed in 2023 and designed to ensure that key goods sold in Europe are free from forest destruction, has once again been pushed back, against the wishes of dozens of major companies.

Under a new deal struck between EU institutions in early December, the regulation will take effect Dec. 30, 2026 with smaller companies granted an extra six months’ grace period.

The agreement, according to the EU Council, aims to “simplify the implementation” and “reduce administrative burdens” while preserving the law’s environmental ambition.

But for companies that have spent years preparing for the regulation, the news has prompted frustration. For many, it marks yet another weakening of what was once hailed as the most ambitious anti-deforestation law ever.

“Companies should act now to comprehensively map their supply chains, engage directly with and support their producers, invest in traceability systems and go beyond legal minimums,” said Vanessa Richardson, senior forest campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency. “Businesses that delay or wait for political uncertainty to clear risk falling behind — both ethically and commercially.”

How we got here

Uncertainty remains over what form the final law will take, but here’s what you need to know ahead of 2026. 

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) seeks to ensure that commodities such as cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy and timber — along with goods derived from them — can only be sold in the EU if they are proven to be deforestation-free and compliant with local laws.

Originally set to apply to large and medium-sized operators starting in December 2024, the law was delayed to December 2025 to give businesses time to adapt. Now, under the new deal, the main provisions will not apply until December 2026, with micro and small enterprises (those with fewer than 250 employees or an annual turnover under $58 million) following in June 2027.

The revision reflects mounting concerns about the readiness of companies and national authorities — and about whether the EU’s new computer system, which will underpin the law’s traceability requirements, can handle the data load anticipated when companies began submitting reports.

Simplification or dilution?

Under the new compromise, the obligation to submit due-diligence statements will fall solely on operators placing products on the market for the first time. Downstream traders will only have to retain reference numbers of those statements — not file their own.

Micro and small operators that grow, harvest or produce commodities covered by the law from low-risk countries will be allowed to file a one-time simplified declaration instead of a full accounting. The EU has already drawn up its country classification list, with the U.S. and Canada in the low-risk category. 

Brussels argues these measures will make compliance simpler for businesses without undermining ambition. Others disagree.

“Many companies are frustrated and increasingly vocal about the constant changes,” Richardson said. “They’ve invested millions in systems to trace their supply chains and ensure compliance — and now face uncertainty just as they were ready to move ahead.” 

Prior to the decision, a coalition of 30 companies and NGOs, including Nestlé, Danone, Mars Wrigley and the Rainforest Alliance, called for no further delays and warned that constant revisions penalize those who acted early. A clearly defined grace period would have allowed firms to begin implementation while giving authorities time to finalize the computer system, the group argued. 

A Nestlé spokesperson told Trellis it had prepared “intensively” for EUDR compliance by the end of 2025, with 93.5 percent of its key ingredients already assessed as deforestation-free.

What to expect 

“Frontrunners’ investments should be secured by ensuring that the implementation starts under a well-defined grace period serving as a learning phase,” the spokesperson said. “The Council position is a step in that direction but needs to be further streamlined to avoid confusion and continued uncertainty.” 

Retailers also express unease. “Important obligations such as the recording, verification and transmission of reference numbers remain unclear,” said Christian Schneider, senior manager of strategic communications at the European supermarket chain ALDI Nord, adding that the lack of legal certainty has made it difficult to finalize workflows. 

“We’ve had to proceed based on assumptions,” he said, despite the company’s support for the EUDR’s goals.

Even as the ink dries, another potential shake-up looms. Under the deal, the European Commission must deliver a “simplification review” by April 30, 2026, assessing the law’s administrative burden — particularly on smaller operators — and suggesting ways to ease it.

Crucially, the review “should, where appropriate, be accompanied by a legislative proposal.” In other words, the rules could change yet again before they even take effect.

Graphic credit: Tom Howarth

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In these market hotspots, second-life sales are mainstreaming beyond fashion

When soccer parents in Evanston, Illinois, need new cleats or shin guards, many frequent Play It Again Sports for a secondhand bargain.

The store is part of Winmark Corporation, which operates five brick-and-mortar resale brands, including clothing (Plato’s Closet, Style Encore) and children’s gear (Once Upon a Child). The Minneapolis-based company reported $31.7 million in net income for the first nine months of 2025, a 4 percent increase from 2024. That’s steady performance, although modest next to recent bullish projections for online resale.

Lately, the sports-goods franchise has seen more competition from digital portals for athletes, in addition to eBay, Facebook Marketplace or OfferUp, where athletic items already trade heavily.

That dynamic is playing out across more product categories, thanks to inflation, tariffs and shifting consumer sentiment. Seventy-five percent of resale is not in fashion, according to the OfferUp 2025 Recommerce Report. It projects secondhand’s portion to approach 8 percent of all retail sales, growing by 34 percent by 2030 to $306.5 billion. Another estimate forecasts 12.5 percent annual growth through 2029.

And as returns are expected to hit 15.8 percent of new-product sales in 2025, off-price retail is projected to grow 8.7 percent annually through 2032. That’s motivating brands and retailers to partner with portals to sell open-box products.

Circular economies have traditionally been the domain of independent shops, nonprofits and informal community networks. Lately, reverse-logistics software and AI are bringing new efficiencies and centralization of distributed goods.

‘A growing economic engine’

“Recommerce is more than a trend,” stated California Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove. “It’s a growing economic engine that provides consumers with affordable, high-quality goods and gives entrepreneurs, small businesses and resellers access to trusted, thriving marketplaces.”

This summer, the Democrat joined bipartisan members of Congress to form the Recommerce Caucus. eBay, Poshmark, Etsy, OfferUp and Depop expressed support.

Recommerce is mainstream, reflecting “a broad movement propelled not just by affordability, but by sustainability, self-expression and community values,” said eBay Chief Sustainability Officer Renée Morin.

In November, eBay’s 2025 Recommerce Report showed that 81 percent of its customers were motivated by cost savings, while 68 percent felt good about “giving items a second life.”

Collectibles led eBay’s third-quarter sales, followed by motor parts, luxury goods, refurbished items, clothing and sneakers. Dedicated portals for children’s toys, sports gear, furniture and kitchenware are also growing.

Clothing

New online circular economies echo the path of apparel, where brick-and-mortar retailers generally fail to transition online. For example, Goodwill Industries shut down its GoodwillFinds fixed-price website in March. Yet younger digital brands like ThredUp, Vinted and Poshmark are bridging the gap to move clothes from consumers’ closets to virtual shopping carts. Reverse logistics companies Archive, Trove and Tersus are finding new collection-and-sorting efficiencies with AI.

Secondhand fashion sales will grow more than twice as fast as new sales, reaching $367 billion globally by 2029, according to ThredUp’s 2025 Resale Report. More than half of those buyers are online.

Furniture

Sourcing items for her online shop the Curio Collectress has become harder, Michele Cicatello says. “Now thrift stores are cool,” she adds. IKEA created Pre-Loved online sales in 2024, and Humanscale launched branded online sales. Chairish and 1stDibs cater to vintage buyers. Everyday pieces are still resold via charities or P2P services.

Office furniture has created B2B opportunities. Rheaply moves furniture and lab equipment, transferring 158,000 items in 2024. Reseat helps companies decommission furniture, saving 40 to 50 percent and meeting sustainability goals, using digital product passports.

Children’s gear

Small shops like Chloe’s Closet in San Francisco and Nesting House in Philadelphia serve parents buying pre-owned kids’ gear. Startups are expanding consignment models for strollers, baby slings and toys.

GoodBuy Gear works with brands like Graco and Baby Jogger to sell returned items. Kidsy partners with Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Target. Baby gear marketplace RebelStork rebranded as Rebel in 2025 after 300 percent sales growth, raising $25 million in Series B funding. It expanded in 2025 to kitchenware, housewares and furniture.

Sports gear

As Rebel also plans to start selling athletic and outdoor equipment, it faces several rivals. SidelineSwap counts 2 million participants; eBay Ventures invested. GearTrade saw 80 percent growth in 2024 for outdoor gear. 2ndSwing Golf specializes in used golf merchandise.

Kitchenware

Kitchen bric-a-brac is a staple of thrift shops and tag sales. B2B marketplaces have long distributed unsold or returned kitchenware in bulk from retailers. What’s new is a direct-to-consumer focus, with Rebel and others seeing an opening. Kitchen Switchen launched in 2024 as a peer-driven “Poshmark for kitchenware.”

Electronics

Circular electronics markets are booming, aided by manufacturers and retailers. Refurbished electronics sales are projected to grow 10.2 percent annually through 2032, from $61.8 billion to $121.9 billion.

BackMarket is running a Manhattan pop-up to grow consumer confidence in refurbished merchandise. It predicts $3.5 billion in 2025 sales after counting 25 percent growth in 2024. Rival Refurbed had double-digit growth in 2024, reaching $294 million. Meanwhile, peer-to-peer listings for smartphones and laptops abound on Mercari, Swappa and OfferUp.

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Amazon enters the matrix to pinpoint supply-chain emissions

Amazon is the latest company to test an analytical approach that can illuminate emissions data that’s often hidden within supply chains. By shining a light on flows of commodities and connections between companies, the approach can help tailor programs aimed at supporting suppliers in decarbonizing.

Amazon’s Scope 3 emissions, which include emissions from its supply-chain, totaled 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2024, close to three-quarters of the company’s footprint. Figuring out which suppliers in that ecosystem to engage with in order to drive down emissions is a challenge that the company has been working on for some time, said Chris Roe, who leads Amazon’s work to reach net zero by 2040.

Amazon also needed to better understand where those emissions come from, added Roe: “We need to dive deep into not just the companies but the commodities that are core to deeper tiers of our supply chain.”

Into the matrix

To do so, Amazon adapted what’s known as an input-output (IO) model: a matrix that describes how different sectors of an economy are connected. Among other things, policymakers use these models to estimate the likely impact of specific projects, such as a stimulus package or a city hosting a major sporting event. 

When combined with environmental data, IO models can also generate spend-based emissions factors, a widely used, if crude, tool for estimating the emissions associated with purchases of everything from construction materials to semiconductor chips. In this case, Amazon tweaked the process to preserve the supply-chain data in the IO model. This creates a series of data points describing the emissions generated by the network of companies that sit behind Amazon’s direct suppliers.

“Spend-based approaches get thrown under the bus because we’ve only tried to use them one way — and that one way is really limited,” said Tim Smith, founder and CEO of TASA Analytics, a consultancy that uses a similar analytical approach and counts Microsoft among its clients. “There’s a lot more richness in this data that is available and useful.”

Intervention points

Armed with a more detailed picture of where its emissions come from, Amazon is now considering how to use the data to shape its supply-chain decarbonization efforts, including programs that support suppliers in accessing renewable energy. 

“This science-based model allows us to identify where to focus our efforts within the supply chain to pursue these decarbonization opportunities most effectively,” said Roe. “It also gives us the ability to estimate the emission reduction potential when our suppliers take action on carbon-free electricity adoption.”

Companies can also use the method to collaborate with peers, because even the wealthiest cannot afford to decarbonize an entire supply chain, noted Smith. “You can start building a coalition of the willing,” he said. “And I think that’s the next step of how to scale implementation.”

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How climate goals create business value at Atlassian, Workday and Cox

Sales executives at Atlassian noticed a steady increase in the number of strategic customers requesting information about its emissions reduction and climate goals throughout 2025.

Those questions prompted deeper conversations between the software company’s business and sustainability leaders as it strategizes about how to win those deals, especially as investments in artificial intelligence accelerate. Now, Atlassian’s net-zero aspirations are factored into strategic sales conversations. 

“It’s never going to be 90 percent of our revenue, so I want to be really pragmatic,” said Jessica Hyman, chief sustainability officer at Atlassian. “But what I position it as is a signal. This is a signal that this is something that customers care about.”

Conglomerate Cox Enterprises has experienced a similar evolution.

Corporate sustainability began as a way to drive change and savings throughout Cox’s operations but turned into the catalyst for entirely new businesses, such as one started to manage electric vehicle battery recycling, said Meredith Lindvall, assistant vice president for waste, water and nature (biodiversity) with Cox.

“It’s really not just how we get the work done, it’s actually the future of the business,” she said.

Their insights are part of a special Climate Pioneers project filmed during Trellis Impact 25. The sustainability leaders were asked to reflect on this question (among others): How does your sustainability strategy contribute business value to your organization?

Highlights from those conversations are featured below. (See how to thrive at sustainability’s “reckoning point” for more of their recommendations.) 

Upsell strategic customers

For key clients that have net-zero goals: “I know they’re going to have an expectation for Atlassian, as part of their value chain, for making progress on our own net-zero goal.” — Jessica Hyman, chief sustainability officer, Atlassian

“I really focus on expertise, capability, risk assessment and value creation. If I do those right, if we can build that for the company, we help them make better investments.” — Dave Stangis, a partner at investor Apollo Global Management

“We’ve seen hundreds, we track this every year, of [requests for proposals] come through, that come to the sustainability team’s desk, that ask specific nuanced questions on climate. Ten years ago, we weren’t seeing that, so we see this as an opportunity to build that trusted relationship.” — Erik Hansen, chief sustainability officer at software firm Workday

“Our clients, the leading financial institutions around the world, and some of the leading merchants that you’ve heard of around the world, they expect their partners to be on the front edge of sustainability and climate action. So for us, we have to be able to engage with those clients and be credible.” — Rob Whittier, head of climate and sustainability at payments company Visa 

Create new revenue lines

“Cox has several investment theses around clean tech, so there’s lots of different ways that we’re doing that that are new parts of the business — like Cox Farms, which is indoor agriculture. We also own Nexus Circular, which is around plastics recycling.” — Meredith Lindvall, assistant vice president for waste, water and nature (biodiversity) with Cox Enterprises 

“There are standard partnerships where we may integrate sustainability in different ways. There’s also new areas where sustainability actually creates new sponsorship categories and creates new revenue for the organization.” — Becky Dale, vice president of sustainability, LA 28

“Finance has one of the greatest roles to play in the future that we all hope we’re going to see. If we don’t finance the change we want to see, it’s not going to happen.” — Kelly Fisher, head of sustainability for the Americas at financial services firm HSBC

Attract and motivate talent

“We know that doing the right thing, talking about the right thing, making it part of your narrative, is an important part of employee branding.” — Kevin Rabinovitch, global vice president of sustainability and chief climate officer at food and beverage company Mars

“Everything ultimately gets done by a person at our company, and if they’re not engaged the momentum gets lots, the activities don’t get done, and we ultimately don’t move as fast and can’t meet the moment.” — Aaron Binkley, vice president of sustainability at data center operator Digital Realty

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Why big batteries will be in vogue in 2026

Steelmaker Nucor and data center operator Aligned are among the small but growing number of corporations investing in energy storage systems at or near their facilities — a trend expected to accelerate in 2026. 

The motivation: The need to add reliable, lower-carbon electricity capacity quickly in an era of increasingly constrained supply. 

Nucor’s installation in Arizona, engineered by service provider Ameresco, will provide it with access to 50 megawatts (or 200 megawatt-hours) of electricity at a steel factory that uses an electric arc furnace to produce 600,000 tons annually.

The batteries will be integrated with 25 megawatts of solar energy. The batteries are operational, but the solar won’t be switched on until next year. The project is on Nucor’s land.

“This is pretty unique, but it opened our eyes to the need for heavy industrials to add power,” said Jon Mancini, senior vice president for solar and battery energy storage systems at Ameresco. “They can save money by putting in batteries. Over the past year, we’ve been taking a lot of inbound phone calls that are looking to do something similar.”

The motivation for Aligned’s contract in the Pacific Northwest, orchestrated by another service provider, Calibrant, was similar. It’s for a 31-megawatt (62 MWh) battery energy storage system at a data center that handles artificial intelligence services and other high-performance computing applications.

“With this [system], we’re converting our load from a potential grid liability into a dynamic grid asset, providing the regional utility with the tools needed to accelerate our ramp,” said Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap, in a statement. “And we’re doing it responsibly, without impacting ratepayers.”

Record year for additions

Utilities, business and energy providers around the world are expected to deploy 92 gigawatts of energy storage in 2025, a growth rate of 23 percent, across a wide spectrum of duration capacity, scales and technology types, according to an October forecast by BloombergNEF. The U.S. and China are the two biggest markets for installations.

The prospects for commercial and industrial additions in 2026 are far more modest given the overall market, but the phaseout of tax incentives for solar and wind projects has more businesses with emissions reduction agendas considering energy storage as a way of reducing their electricity costs and adding new capacity that isn’t fired by fossil fuels.

Most commercial and industrial installations use lithium-ion technology, but some companies, such as Google, are investing in formats that can last far longer — up to 24 hours.

There are many drivers, particularly the opportunity to reduce electricity bills by switching to batteries during periods of peak demand, industry executives and analysts said.

“We are also seeing growing interest in behind the meter energy storage co-located with data centers,” said Isshu Kikuma, analyst for energy storage with BloombergNEF. “That said, interest does not necessarily translate into actual deployment, at least not yet, as we are only seeing a few deals.”

Flexible finance

While the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed tax incentives for clean energy resources such as solar and wind, companies investing in energy storage can still benefit from investment tax credits that cover part of the project costs. 

“The administration looked at reliability and deemed that storage was a net positive when it comes to reliability,” said Ethan Paterno, a partner in the energy practice for PA Consulting. 

One caveat: The technology used is subject to foreign-entity-of-concern requirements that favor domestic vendors, which will affect how projects qualify.

Some states offer virtual power plant or microgrid incentive programs under which utilities pay battery owners for reducing their load on the electric grid during certain peak periods of demand, in exchange for rate cuts.

Kaiser Permanente benefited from a $8.3 million grant to Faraday Microgrids, which installed 2 megawatts of on-site solar panels and 9 MWh of battery storage technology to reduce the electricity costs at the Ontario medical center in Southern California. The installation can serve as a source of clean backup power — an alternative to the usual diesel generators — for up to 10 hours.

Distributed resources allow operators to add capacity where it is most needed, said Jigar Shah, co-managing partner at strategy firm Multiplier. “Even in places where there isn’t a specific financial incentive, there is a speed to power incentive,” he said.

Batteries are being added most quickly in Texas, California, Colorado, New York, New Jersey and the grid served by PJM in the mid-Atlantic part of the U.S. — where many new data centers are gobbling up the available power supply. California, Massachusetts and Illinois led in new deployments in the third quarter, according to research firm Wood Mackenzie.

“These markets are getting a lot of attention,” said Ameresco’s Mancini. “In 2026, we expect to see much more of this both from utilities that are using battery storage as well as their customers that have heavy loads.”

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What Prologis’ Suzanne Fallender has to say about using sustainability to drive revenue

When you sit at the intersection of sustainability and business, you learn what really moves a company forward. Suzanne Fallender — VP of Global Impact & Sustainability at the logistics real estate giant Prologis and a former corporate responsibility leader at Intel — has made a career out of converting aspiration into executable strategy. Her vantage point offers a sharp read on the field’s maturation.

“In the early days, sustainability lived off to the side of a business, focused on compliance and do-goodism,” Fallender said. “Today, that separation is gone.”

Indeed, even in today’s challenging political climate sustainability has become a full-fledged business engine: a source of risk insight, product innovation, competitive advantage, and — most notably at Prologis — a springboard for entirely new revenue lines. Now thoroughly entwined with business strategy, it’s an area leaders are scanning for value-creating opportunities.

The possibilities are enormous, especially with a rapidly shifting energy system subject to soaring demand and grid constraints. But Fallender noted a crucial guiding principle across all climate endeavors.

“Sustainability projects need rigorous payback analysis, just like any other deal,” she said. “That’s what lets us push the frontier without losing our footing.”

Below, she shares advice for navigating the gritty, opportunity-rich reality of corporate sustainability today.

1. Respond to what your user needs. “With e-commerce and AI accelerating, power supply has become one of the biggest constraints on global supply chains, with nearly nine in 10 companies experiencing energy disruption in the past year and seven in 10 executives reporting they fear outages more than any other disruption.This problem is acutely felt by our customers, since our buildings are located where the grid is most constrained: near major ports, highways and freight corridors. We met that need by turning our logistics facilities into energy infrastructure: Prologis has added rooftop solar, battery storage, microgrids and community solar programs, prioritizing locations that help solve both our customers’ operational needs and local utility challenges. With 825 MW of solar and battery storage installed and supporting our growth, we are on track to achieve 1 GW by the end of 2025 and are No. 2 for corporate onsite solar generation capacity in the U.S.”

2. Strengthen relationships — inside and outside your company. “Internally, you need to understand what drives each function and align your goals with theirs. For instance, we forged a strong partnership with Prologis’s global operations team so they could help us engage local teams on sustainability data accuracy. Externally, we spend a lot of time with utilities, listening to their challenges and finding middle ground. And customer energy use adds another layer of complexity: Those Scope 3 emissions are outside our direct control, making partnership and collaboration essential.”

3. Embrace challenges. “We’re moving quickly at Prologis, but there are real hurdles — we’re navigating permitting delays and a grid increasingly strained by AI and data centers. True collaboration with other stakeholders on these energy problems is complicated and takes time. The work is challenging and exciting in equal measure.”

4. Always be asking ‘What’s next?’ “There’s a glut of opportunity, which is why we rely heavily on data — from life cycle assessments for new projects to local-level modeling — to understand where we can have the biggest impact. We keep tabs on emerging technologies through our partnerships and ventures arm, which has led us to deploy solutions like low-carbon concrete, mass timber and self-healing materials. It takes real discipline to choose the best innovations to pursue, but that’s how we ensure we’re investing where it matters.”

5. Learn hard things. “People often assume sustainability is soft work, but it’s anything but. It requires real technical depth — data literacy, analytical prowess, strong stakeholder management. I tell people entering the field that pairing sustainability knowledge with a business specialty — in finance, supply chains or another discipline — positions you far better. And now AI skills are a must-have for everyone. The people who thrive can bridge disciplines and blend technical rigor with human collaboration.”

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Chasing Net Zero: ambitious targets, meaningful achievement and intractable challenges

Our Chasing Net Zero series, a company-by-company look at the state of corporate decarbonization efforts in 2025, provides a set of parables about good intentions and meaningful action bumping up against intractable market forces and regulatory inaction.

Written by Jim Giles, Heather Clancy and Saul Hansell, the case studies began running in July. Our reporting, also featured in a session at Trellis Impact 25 entitled “The State of 2030 Climate Targets: Lessons Learned from the Chasing Net Zero Series,” has fueled ongoing conversations in the sustainability community, including a debate over the value of reducing emissions intensity rather than absolute emissions — so we wrote about that too. 

Many of the companies we’ve profiled — including Nestlé, Salesforce and Intel — have made significant achievements in lowering their carbon footprints. Yet few of them are on track to reach the goals set in a more optimistic and favorable time.

As Trellis contributor Alison Taylor, a clinical associate professor at NYU Stern School of Business, wrote in July, a focus on numbers alone can obscure real achievement and useful lessons: “The ultimate paradox in responsible business is that best and worst practices are often found side-by-side in the same industry. Sometimes even in the same factory.”

In the coming months we will publish more case studies, with a new focus for 2026 on management guidance from experts advising on what each one can do next. Subscribe to Trellis Briefing to follow the series and join in the conversation. 

Here’s what we’ve found to date:

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

The Swiss food giant has reduced emissions by 20 percent since 2018, hitting its interim target a year ahead of schedule. But the company’s roadmap relies heavily on carbon removals, a strategy that environmental groups have questioned.

Why IKEA’s $47 billion retailer is on pace to halve emissions by 2030, while rivals falter

Ingka Group, the largest seller of IKEA products, is investing in startups and technologies crucial for achieving its net-zero goal. The biggest challenge: How quickly can IKEA transition to lower-carbon materials?

GSK made the biggest climate promise in pharma. Can it keep it?

GSK promised to slash emissions by 80 percent by 2030 from 2020 levels, a far deeper cut than any of its rivals. The company’s path forward lies partly in a low-emissions replacement for its asthma inhaler, which accounts for half of its overall emissions.

Inside steel giant ArcelorMittal’s struggle to reach its 2030 climate goals

The largest steelmaker in the Global North set an ambitious decarbonization agenda in 2021. But oversupply and high energy prices are holding back low-carbon investment across the steel industry.

How AI forced Salesforce to reset its 2030 climate goals

Facing a surge in AI-related emissions, the $38 billion enterprise software company pivoted on its emissions plan to set a target it looks likely to reach as early as next year. The new target is based on cutting emissions per unit of profit, rather than absolute emissions.

How Intel’s sales tailspin sidelined its 2030 sustainability ambitions

The company that led the microprocessor revolution was long a leader on sustainability. Now, after a critical technology mistake led to a decade of business turmoil, it’s quietly scaling back its climate efforts.

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How Mastercard is trying to tame its digital carbon footprint

Companies in every sector are investing in artificial intelligence and digital services to create new business value, spurring hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on data center expansion projects by the biggest cloud-services players and co-location providers. 

Those investments will derail corporate emissions goals if they’re not managed properly. Getting ahead of that outcome will take closer collaboration between chief technology or information officers and sustainability leaders.  

“I know it’s not easy to carve out bandwidth to focus on this problem, but I would encourage all of my peers to do this,” said George Maddaloni, chief technology officer, operations at Mastercard.

Mastercard stepped up efforts to more closely manage its digital carbon footprint three years ago, before AI strategy was top of mind for every business executive. In April, the company formally made environmental sustainability one of the key performance indicators reviewed monthly by a new steering committee composed of senior executives, including CSO Ellen Jackowski.

“We started with the data about what we run from a technology perspective, and then looked at how to allocate and assign a footprint to our different products and services based on that,” Maddaloni said.

Growing concern

Information technology accounts for an estimated 2-4 percent of annual global emissions, according to the International Energy Agency — a figure that’s growing rapidly as companies increasingly rely on digital services — with hardware manufacturing, life-cycle management and electricity accounting for the biggest chunks of the total. 

Large tech companies with aggressive emissions reduction goals, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, are struggling to achieve those targets in large part because of the more than $364 billion they spent this year on data center buildouts.

The potential ripple effect affects sustainability professionals beyond Big Tech. More than 60 percent of the leaders surveyed in August by The Conference Board indicated that data center energy demand was their greatest concern related to their company’s AI investments, followed by the emissions related to the services themselves.

The level of emissions generated by IT infrastructure, including data centers, varies widely from industry to industry. Enterprise technology contributes an estimated 60-65 percent of emissions related to electricity (Scope 2) and upstream and downstream business activities (Scope 3) at banks and financial services firms. For healthcare providers, the average is closer to 10-15 percent of Scope 2 and 3.

Mastercard’s data center footprint represents 60 percent of emissions from its direct operations (Scope 1) and purchased electricity. Those two categories account for 10 percent of its total emissions, which means Mastercard’s data centers contribute 6 percent of the company’s entire carbon footprint.

“This is a material topic for a handful of industries, including financial services,” said Bjoern Stengel, global sustainability practice lead at tech research firm IDC. “With the rise of AI, it became a mainstream topic overnight.”

Best practices for taming digital footprints

Over the past three years, Mastercard has managed to decouple its growth in its payment services from its emissions. In 2024, for example, the company’s revenue grew 12 percent, but Mastercard’s overall emissions decreased 7 percent.

Key to that achievement was the creation of a patent-pending management dashboard that includes real-time electricity consumption of Mastercard’s services (including the percentage that comes from renewables), information about server and hardware use and carbon-intensity metrics at the product, program and asset level.

The information is used to generate scores that the committee and division heads can use to compare and evaluate the impact of various decarbonization efforts. Among the metrics considered is the carbon intensity of the electric grid where a data center is located. 

Here are some specific tactics that have helped with Mastercard’s IT transformation:

  • Color-coding for dashboard scores: Teams can quickly see how their product or service is performing; red means that an initiative falls in the bottom third for energy intensity, renewable use and hardware efficiency.
  • Carbon profiles for each product or service: This includes customer-facing and internal assets. Product leads are responsible for understanding and managing energy consumption.
  • Proactive decommissioning: Mastercard removed more than 1,200 computer servers in 2024, consolidating the jobs they handled, and retired technology that wasn’t being used.
  • Closer scrutiny of cloud services and co-location partners: Mastercard has used that information, in some cases, to switch where specific services are running based on the carbon intensity of certain regions. It uses actual data from these suppliers, rather than spend-based estimates.
  • Emissions-sensitive software code: Mastercard is being judicious about the data chosen to train AI models, which keeps them smaller and saves energy.

Offense and defense

Sustainability leaders are helping the most mature organizations, such as Mastercard, both to manage the environmental impact of AI and to brainstorm ways it can be used to advance business value.

“Instead of looking at this as a siloed topic, look at this as part of the bigger AI ROI equation,” said IDC’s Stengel. “There are financial and nonfinancial sides to this discussion.”

AI enables companies to use information that’s been collected for ESG reports and greenhouse gas inventories for much more than compliance, said Sammy Lakshmann, a U.S. PwC partner focused on digital and AI-enabled sustainability strategy.

For example, data that the sustainability teams collect about extended producer responsibility laws offer important signals for product managers and finance teams about potential future fees, he said.

Likewise, real-time climate data could be used by retailers to adjust merchandising strategies or product inventories proactively. 

“The companies that are going to win are the ones that combine AI, sustainability and business value,” Lakshmann said.

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