Key takeaways

• International Maritime Organization agrees to emissions intensity fuel standard.
• System include options for shipping companies to buy credits if targets are missed.
• Projections from environmental groups suggest the framework won’t deliver on net zero.

Plans to impose an emissions levy on international shipping, decided Friday by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), were simultaneously welcomed as a critical step forward and decried as flawed due to significant holes in the process for accounting for emissions.

The uneven reception reflects intense divisions among negotiators and the resulting compromise the IMO was forced to make when its Marine Environment Protection Committee wrapped up discussions in London. 

The organization had previously committed to transitioning the industry to net zero by around 2050, and the committee had been tasked with finalizing a mechanism for doing so. European Union nations and allies were pushing for strict emissions standards, while a coalition including Brazil, China and others advocated for more flexible mechanisms. 

Global tax

The resulting agreement is a hybrid mechanism that resembles emissions trading schemes. Owners of large vessels will face gradually increasing emission-intensity requirements, culminating in as much as a 43 percent reduction by 2035, compared to a 2008 baseline. Companies that fail to hit targets will have to pay a fine, use credits accumulated by beating targets in previous years or purchase credits from other owners.

The requirements will come into force in 2027, pending approval at a IMO meeting later this year. They are being described as the first global tax on greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmental organizations who attended the negotiators were not celebrating, however. One key issue surrounds biofuels, such as those derived from vegetable oils. Among “drop in” fuels — those that can be used without modifying ship engines — biofuels will be attractive to ship operators because they are the cheapest and most readily available, according to the non-profit International Council on Clean Transportation. 

When estimating the impact of these fuels, the council and other organizations argue that it’s not enough just to look at the emissions generated by growing and burning the fuels. Producing biofuels can displace crops used for food and animal feed, increasing the risk that non-agricultural land, including forests, will be converted for farming. The council noted in a statement that the IMO’s aviation counterpart, the International Civil Aviation Organization, includes such indirect emissions in its accounting and that EU maritime rules limit or exclude food or feed-based biofuels. The IMO’s new framework “does neither,” said the council.

Net zero miss

Other groups questioned whether the combination of financial penalties and fuel targets would be sufficient to transition the industry to net zero by 2050 as the IMO intends. Researchers at the non-profit Transport & Environment (T&E) projected the likely impact of the new framework and concluded that the emissions savings would fall short of both the IMO’s stated goals and a trajectory aligned with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. “Overall, the outcome of these two weeks of negotiation was disappointing,” said Felix Klann, T&E’s maritime transport policy officer.

The glass-half-full view of the negotiations? That any kind of conclusion was reached. President Donald Trump complicated an already fraught process by withdrawing the U.S. delegation while the talks were underway. The framework also needed to be put to a vote, an unusual step for an organization that generally operates by consensus. The Global Maritime Forum (GMF), a non-profit focused on decarbonization that partners with many shipping companies, was among the organizations to note that the framework falls short. But, the GMF added, “Given ongoing geopolitical tensions and trade disruptions, this binding agreement represents an example of multilateralism still at work.”

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Key takeaways

• The sustainability profession needs to decide if it’s to raise the bar and become a trusted profession or be co-opted to sanitize increasingly destructive corporate and political activities.
• If professionals decide to raise the bar, they must do so via four core qualities: knowledge, competence, ethics and accountability.
• One defining feature of trusted professionals is their higher duty of care to society.

For many sustainability professionals, these are disorienting times. Between the rollback of climate policy and environmental protections to the erosion of evidence-based truth and science itself, it’s difficult to rise to the challenges associated with creating a long-term sustainable society.

While we still believe in the potential of the sustainability profession, it’s time to reevaluate its purpose. We need to consider why the profession has failed (so far) to usher in the needed course correction. 

That’s why we’ve drawn on lessons from more established professions that have earned the public’s trust to help the sustainability profession find its next iteration.

The role of professionals in society

Our most trusted professions have developed to fulfill widely recognized societal needs. The Hippocratic Oath, for example, states, among other things, “do no harm.” To wit, we’ve seen the medical profession improve people’s health, well-being and life expectancy. Similarly, professional engineers apply science to create infrastructure and technologies that improve human well-being, safety and, in some cases, environmental protection. While imperfect, most people agree that these and other professions benefit society in major ways compared to a world in which they don’t exist.

Our most credible and trusted professionals distinguish themselves through higher levels of knowledge, competence, ethics and accountability. They consistently demonstrate these qualities amid high uncertainty, challenging power dynamics and potential conflicts of interest. 

A core, defining feature of professionals is their higher duty of care. For some of the most respected professions such as doctors and engineers, that duty of care is widely expected and legally mandated. For example, a clinician makes decisions based on advanced understandings of human systems (respiratory, circulatory) and unique patient needs. While most of us are concerned with health, we’re not all qualified health professionals. The same could be said of sustainability. With our most trusted professions, the public expects a higher duty of care from professionals because, in many ways, their lives depend upon it. 

Four qualities to professionalize sustainability 

Today, sustainability professionals run the gamut from chief sustainability officers to “green” marketing experts to procurement specialists. The multitude of sustainability qualifications, standards and certifications often focus on making an impact in a particular context, but not on the profession itself. Professional associations such as the International Society for Sustainability Professionals and Association of Climate Change Officers focus on knowledge, competencies and community-building – but not on ethics, duty of care or accountability.

At the same time, the profession is increasingly influenced by companies and politicians obstructing meaningful progress in favor of short-term business, economic or political goals. Instead of being asked to consider broader systemic change, sustainability professionals are tasked with positive marketing stories, stakeholder relations or reporting. Just look at Microsoft’s recent decision to walk back its ambitious carbon positive ambitions in favor of accelerated energy consumption for AI expansion. 

What’s more, criticism of sustainability professionals is growing, damaging the credibility of the nascent profession with accusations of “creating the illusion of progress” or “sanitizing the destruction.” 

If the profession is to become credible and trusted, elevating these four core professional qualities is necessary:

Knowledge: One of the biggest differences between professionals and non-professionals is the depth and breadth of their knowledge. Sustainability professionals are systems thinkers who understand peer-reviewed and evidence-based sustainability science, planetary life support systems and limits. They also understand humanitarian principles related to intra- and inter-generational equity and human rights along with procedural principles for co-creating regenerative solutions with diverse communities.

In practice, sustainability professionals typically complement fundamental knowledge with “instrumental” tools, such as renewable energy technology, corporate sustainability reporting or economic analyses. Credible professionals can distinguish between what’s instrumental and fundamental; a surgeon may use advanced surgical tools but never forgets how the circulatory system works. Similarly, sustainability professionals may develop a business case, while also understanding that contributing to fit-for-future planetary systems is fundamental. 

Competence: Professionals apply knowledge; they not only know something but can do something. They use leadership qualities, skills and integration capabilities that create new, fit-for-future realities, such as facilitating multi-disciplinary networks to transform energy systems into net-zero emissions. 

Ethics: To earn credibility and the public’s trust, sustainability professionals must also follow robust ethical principles. In practice, this means that at a minimum, sustainability professionals are empowered to provide informed, well-reasoned, diplomatic advice to employers, clients and governments without fear of reprisal.

Unfortunately, employers and/or powerful corporate lobbies and government actors can unreasonably restrict or punish sustainability professionals for speaking and acting ethically while those who engage in misinformation are sometimes rewarded. This underlines the importance of strengthening a professional community that’s willing and able to “speak with the voice of its members” to protect individual professionals. Conversely, when professionals act unethically, associations can carefully adjudicate and potentially sanction their members.

Accountability: While professionals’ primary responsibilities are to their clients and employers, those who earn widespread credibility and trust also demonstrate an ethical commitment to the health, safety and well-being of society.

On the path to professionalization 

Sustainability professionals are at a crossroads: either raise the bar or be co-opted to sanitize increasingly destructive corporate and political activities. To further advance their standing, sustainability professionals can strengthen their professional qualities as described; organize strong and principled professional associations; and advocate for the highest standards of professionalism, including a higher duty of care to society. 

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Key takeaways

• Microsoft has signed a deal for 3.7 million carbon removal credits over a 12-year period
• Project developer CO280 will generate the credits by capturing emissions from pulp and paper mills
• Many U.S. mills are situated close to suitable geologic storage reservoirs

Could the pulp and paper industry be transformed into an engine for carbon removal? That’s the tantalizing possibility raised by a deal between Microsoft and CO280, a project developer focused on capturing and storing carbon dioxide emitted from pulp and paper mills.

The tech giant will purchase 3.7 million tons of removal credits from CO280 over a 12-year period, the developer announced today.

The deal follows a smaller contract announced in December with Frontier, a coalition of companies that funds early-stage carbon removal projects. Support from these two heavyweight backers of carbon removal will help CO280 expand an existing pilot retrofit of a Gulf Coast mill to capture around 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide, said Jonathan Rhone, co-founder and CEO of CO280. He would not share a precise price, but said that the credits would cost less than $200 per ton.

The process has the potential to be “carbon negative” because the feedstock used in pulp and paper mills — small-diameter trees and waste biomass from timber operations — contains carbon captured by photosynthesis. Some of that carbon makes its way to the cardboard packaging, tissue and other paper products mills produce, but a majority ends up in “black liquor,” a waste material burned in the mill to generate heat.

CO280 sends the gases from that combustion through a liquid solvent that captures CO2. After a biomass steam boiler heats the solvent to release the CO2, the system pipes the gas around 40 miles to a site where it is stored underground in a geologic reservoir.

The company declined to disclose the precise location of the retrofitted mill.

‘Happy coincidence’

CO280 has more than 10 projects in development, according to Rhone. After the first Gulf Coast project turns on in 2029, he estimated that the company would add a “couple of million tons” of removal capacity every year.

CO280 declined to specify the cost of the retrofit. Rhone said that it’s in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The company’s rapid expansion would be made possible by what Rhone described as a “happy coincidence”: Many U.S. pulp and paper mills are based on the Gulf Coast, an area that is already being targeted for carbon removal projects because it has good options for geologic storage. That means there is existing infrastructure for importing and burning biogenic carbon in a region where the emissions can be stored. Add carbon capture to the equation, and a powerful removal option becomes available. U.S. pulp and paper mills emit close to 90 million tons of CO2 annually, according to CO280.

“Pulp and paper without a doubt is going to be a major player in the carbon removal space,” said Joe Sagues, a researcher at North Carolina State University who studies the removal potential of the industry.

Questions on the process

The long-term impact of these retrofits has been questioned, however. In a post published this February, researchers at the non-profit CarbonPlan noted that the ultimate goals of carbon removal are to deal with residual emissions from industries that can’t be decarbonized and to draw down excess carbon from the atmosphere. The researchers looked at facilities that produce ethanol from corn and observed that even after retrofits of carbon capture equipment, the process as a whole remains a net emitter. In that case, embedding removal in the industry can reduce emissions but won’t deliver on the goal of drawdown.

‘A fair point to make’

CO280’s first Gulf Coast retrofit will fit this pattern in that it will capture only around half of the facility’s biogenic emissions. But ethanol retrofits are more challenging to make carbon-negative, said Sagues: growing corn produces emissions, fossil fuels are used to make the ethanol and the large amounts of biogenic carbon are emitted when ethanol is used in vehicles. In pulp and paper mills, most of the emissions come from biogenic black liquor and could be captured as retrofits spread. In theory, the industry has a long-term path to negative emissions that ethanol lacks.

“I think it’s a fair point to make,” said Rhone of the CarbonPlan critique. Existing financial incentives, including the relatively high price of removal credits and federal tax incentives, provide a foundation for getting started, he added. More expansive capture systems can then follow if the economics work.  “Ultimately the goal is to get to completely net zero mills, but these are complex projects,” said Rhone.

The tax incentives include a tax credit for carbon storage known as 45Q, which was introduced in the first Trump administration and strengthened as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), as well as support from the Department of Energy. The Trump administration has not made its position on carbon removal clear, but the industry has watched nervously as key members of the DoE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which oversees several removal initiatives, departed after the election.

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Key takeaways:

• The success of Unilever’s climate transition action plan depends on stricter regulations for high-emitting sectors.
• The company will quit trade groups that remain misaligned 12 months after being put on notice.
• Unilever’s annual assessment of industry association is rare.

Unilever has distanced itself from two trade associations because their lobbying activities are misaligned with the consumer products company’s climate policy agenda.

In one instance, the company requested that the German Chemical Industry Association stop using Unilever’s name and logo in marketing materials because the organization is out of step with Unilever’s advocacy positions on renewable energy and carbon pricing. 

Unilever is also distancing itself from the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce & Industry, which represents the interests of an ice-cream manufacturing plant in Covington. That relationship will be reviewed in late 2025, along with several others, after Unilever divests its ice cream business.

The actions were outlined in Unilever’s annual assessment of the lobbying and political advocacy positions of more than two dozen key industry organizations in which it has a membership interest. 

The company belongs to more than 600 trade groups. Those assessed — including the Consumer Goods Forum and the Personal Care Products Council — represent sectors where more stringent regulations and policies are needed to drive climate progress.

“Unilever is already making progress toward our climate goals, but enabling government policies will help us go further, faster,” said Rebecca Marmot, chief sustainability and corporate affairs officer at Unilever. “We’ve increased our direct advocacy on climate issues to reflect that. We need trade associations to do the same, bringing their considerable influence to the table, and growing climate engagement amongst their members.”

As a matter of course, Unilever would rather stay engaged with trade organizations, to create constructive change. If a misalignment lingers for longer than a year, the issue is taken up by the Unilever division that owns the relationship. “At this point, we will determine whether to withdraw our membership and make our withdrawal public,” Unilever said in its assessment. “In some instances, there may be a disagreement regarding positions taken, but Unilever may decide that its interests are best served by retaining membership.”

Fewer trade groups misaligned with decarbonization goals 

Unilever’s most recent analysis, released April 7, uses publicly available information from research firm InfluenceMap. It found that 18 of the 26 evaluated organizations have no “misalignment” with Unilever’s climate policy positions. That’s up from 13 of the 27 organizations considered in the 2024 edition. 

But only five organizations are actively engaged in supporting climate policies, while 50 percent are “passive” — meaning they don’t speak out either way. Unilever wants those organizations to do more.

With one exception, the same organizations were evaluated in the two assessments.

“After last year’s [report], Unilever outlined additional actions for trade associations to take,” the company said in its analysis. “Many were responsive to requests, but more work is needed to make sure these actions lead to policy changes, especially since the last review was recent.”

5 cross-cutting political priorities

Unilever’s climate transition action plan calls for the company to actively engage on the following policies:

• Convince countries to adopt national emissions reduction plans that will hold global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius
• Advocate appropriate carbon pricing levels
• Scale up renewable energy capacity, while phasing out fossil fuels
• Support forest protection and nature restoration
• Encourage the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to evolve carbon accounting standards to reward emissions reductions across corporate value chains

Unilever ranks as a leader among the limited group of corporations that actively engage on climate policy, and it was highlighted in 2024 by InfluenceMap for its influence on trade groups. 

“The review continues to raise the bar in driving best practices around how companies should be asking for stronger climate change policies while strategically engaging with their trade associations,” said Deborah McNamara, executive director of advocacy nonprofit ClimateVoice. 

Unilever is a bright spot at a time when many companies in the U.S. have “stagnated or gone silent,” she said. “I think companies need to be asking over and over again if enough is being done, and the answer is definitively no. This review however sets the path and shows what is possible.”

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Key takeaways

• The view that nature strategies are beyond companies’ capacity and budgets is outdated.
• It’s now the job of the CSO to make the case that funding biodiversity conservation and restoration should be part of the company’s overarching environmental strategy.
• AI is now making previously impossible projects viable.

Entrepreneurs, investors and companies gathered in London for a Nature Tech Summit on March 27th. The event, part of the world’s first “nature tech week,” revealed key insights to guide CSOs in their nature tech decision-making, including trends around AI, politics and data sources. 

Nature tech is booming, as startups in the field attracted about $2 billion in funding in 2024, according to Nature4Climate, up from $1.6 billion in 2023 and double the investments of 2018. 

However, as this young sector matures, CSOs face a potentially confusing smorgasbord of tech. Satellite forest data, drones, eDNA, bioacoustics ground sensing — the list continues to grow. Trellis attended the Summit to hear how companies can surf the trends and make the most of nature tech this year.

What is nature tech?

“From detecting deforestation to efficiently mapping species ranges, a new class of companies and technologies are making it possible for CSOs to account for their companies’ nature impacts,” said Kevin Webb of Superoorganism, a venture capital company focused on biodiversity, in an email.

“What a lot of the purists would say is that it’s any form of technology, anything from AI to drones to genomic sequencing, that is implemented to benefit nature,” said Ollie Potter, founder of The NatureTech Memos, a newsletter focused on the nature tech market.

Energy, pharmaceuticals and mining are the three sectors currently showing the most interest in nature tech, said Potter, but they are not necessarily the most at risk. “I think there is a different conversation to be had about which industries face the most material risk because of nature degradation.” 

Industries at high risk include agriculture, cosmetics and fashion.

Five insights 

1. Companies need climate and nature strategies

“We work with some financial institutions, and a few of them say: ‘Can we just do climate? We can’t really do nature as well,’” said Jo Paisley, president of GARP Risk Institute, during a panel at the summit.

Although some CSOs might consider nature strategies beyond their capacity or budget, this view is outdated. To be sustainable going forward, companies must adopt both climate and nature strategies — irrespective of changing governments and political will in their countries. 

There was a subtle, if unmissable, political undercurrent at the Summit. Many speakers alluded to “shifting landscapes” or “uncertain times” in reference to Trump’s anti-climate policies and rightward trends in European countries. 

Gareth Thomas, Head of Research Innovation at London’s Natural History Museum, shared the clearest message: “Political shifts don’t change ecological facts.

“Nature doesn’t care about politics. Biodiversity is declining. Risk is increasing and instability is growing. The consequences of that remain as inevitable as they did back in December,” he said.

It’s now the job of the CSO to convince the CFO and other executive leaders that funding biodiversity conservation and restoration should be part of the company’s overarching environmental strategy, alongside cutting emissions.

“Often CSOs are bewildered about how to make the case for nature preservation in their organisation,” said Gilad Goren, executive director of the Nature Tech Collective, a nature tech accelerator. “But nature tech can actually help them make the case because these entrepreneurs can back the case up with actual data.”

2. Nature tech isn’t just for reporting

The NatureTech Memos has mapped the sector, capturing more than 1,000 startups in one big table. Some of them provide nature and biodiversity data, while others organize this data so that companies can use it. For example, companies might use nature tech to inform insetting or to make decisions about financing nature restoration projects.

“A common perception is that nature tech is about helping corporates report about their nature risks and dependencies, either through [the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive] or [the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures],” said Potter. 

But that doesn’t go far enough. These innovations also give sustainability leaders the quantitative data they need to demonstrate their companies’ supply-chain dependence on biodiversity and strengthen the case for funding nature strategies.

“I think more and more are going to look at the resilience of their business in terms of: Will I have commodity X coming my way or not?” said Goren. “And will I have issues with my supply chain unless I do something about it? Do I need to assess? Or do I need the actual intervention?”

3. Look for data validated by ecologists on the ground

A lot of forest data is gathered using satellite imagery. “The benefit of that is that you can get the data from anywhere in the globe, even where it’s hard to access,” said Sabine Nix, a spatial data scientist at Cecil, a nature data aggregator. “But you also need to be able to train models and validate your data using insights gathered on the ground.”

Cameron Nicol, head of marketing at Space Intelligence, a company using satellite data to map global forest cover, echoed that: “​​One of the challenges of using remote sensing to map landscapes can be getting the granularity to differentiate between what is actually a forest and what is a crop plantation of, say, coffee or cocoa. 

“We’ve been incorporating ecologist expertise into our mapping processes to ensure these forests and tree crops are accurately categorized,” he said.

4. Companies using multiple data sources should stay focused

As well as seeking data validated on the ground, Nix has noticed more companies using a combination of different datasets to inform decisions. “We’re already seeing customers using 10, 20 or 30 different data sources,” she said.

That being said, numerous experts advised CSOs to focus on the question they need to solve, rather than exploring and adopting multiple nature tech innovations as they reach the market.

“There are a lot of different offerings emerging in this space, from data providers to data organizers. CSOs should focus on improving their metrics and think about whether they want general data or specific data about their supply chains,” said Marco Albani, CEO of Chloris Geospatial, a nature data provider.

5. Accelerate data collection using AI

Of course, artificial intelligence is also transforming nature tech. From the micro (a start-up recording earthworm sounds to indicate soil health) to the macro (a company mapping forests in the tropics), large language models are increasingly prevalent. 

Such innovations can equip CSOs with new, previously inaccessible, data and enable them to return to projects previously deemed impossible.

For example, AI has sped up Space Intelligence’s satellite forest data collection, said Nicol: “We’ve now mapped 50 countries across the world and that’s taken us six or seven months, whereas, without AI machine learning, that same work would have taken six or seven years.”

[Join a vibrant community of leaders and innovators driving cutting-edge tools, business strategies, and partnerships to protect and regenerate nature at Bloom, Oct. 28-30, San Jose.]

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