From ambition to implementation: 6 takeaways from Trellis Impact 26

In the weeks since Trellis Impact 26 wrapped up, attendees have largely converged on a handful of recurring themes in their post-event reflections. Across LinkedIn posts, the comments and conversations have centered less on ambitions and future possibilities and more on the present-day realities of execution. Trellis Impact 26 offered a preview of where sustainability leadership is today: a challenging but impactful period where implementation defines success.

In takeaway posts, terms such as “implementation,” “infrastructure,” “resilience” and “operations” appeared far more frequently than familiar sustainability language such as “net zero,” “carbon neutral” or “ESG.”

While many of the reflections focused on practical challenges, they also carried a notable sense of optimism. Rather than questioning whether sustainability progress is possible, our audience is discussing how to accelerate it.

Below, culled from more than two dozen LinkedIn responses, are the themes that are shaping sustainability in the “implementation era.”

Sustainability has entered its implementation era

Corporate sustainability has entered a new phase, one defined less by setting goals than by delivering on them. For years, the field focused on building frameworks, defining targets and publishing commitments.

At Trellis Impact 26, attendees repeatedly observed that the conversation has moved beyond why companies should act to how. The harder question now is how to execute at scale while balancing cost, resilience, regulation and business priorities.

Multiple attendees described this shift: “We’re no longer debating why circularity matters. We’re wrestling with how to make it work,” summarized one attendee.

Execution and methodology discussions surfaced across artificial intelligence, circularity, supply chains, climate tech, reporting and operations.

AI became the clearest example of that shift. 

AI is now an infrastructure challenge

AI has evolved from primarily a technology conversation into an infrastructure one, with attendees consistently focusing on the systems and technologies required to scale it responsibly.

“The scale and speed of deployment are creating a new industrial ecosystem, with constraints in power, materials, and talent driving innovation.” 

Rather than treating AI, energy, water and climate as separate conversations, attendees increasingly framed them as interconnected systems challenges. This theme surfaced across discussions of grid capacity, water, power, cooling, permitting and supply chains. Attendees are focused on building the physical systems needed to support AI at scale.

As AI infrastructure expands into more communities, community engagement is becoming just as important as technical innovation.

Social license matters more than ever

As AI infrastructure expands, attendees emphasized that technical expertise alone won’t determine which projects succeed. Multiple posters suggested that social license, community trust and local engagement are becoming just as important as power, water and permitting.

“Community engagement is emerging as a differentiator: Building local trust through early engagement and prioritizing human-to-human relationships is increasingly critical, with greater emphasis on direct dialogue and listening to navigate rising community expectations.”

The message across attendees’ comments was consistent: Long-term success will increasingly depend on earning trust through early engagement, transparency and ongoing dialogue.

Data must replace promises

As AI moves from experimentation to implementation, companies are increasingly expected to demonstrate measurable progress rather than ambitious commitments. Promises are no longer enough, with one attendee writing, “Show me the data.”

Another attendee put it even more directly: “Promises are cheap. Data is the new credibility.” Whether discussing AI or broader sustainability strategies, commenters emphasized that technology doesn’t replace human judgment or the need for credible evidence.

As implementation defines the next phase of sustainability, measurement will determine its credibility.

Scaling sustainability requires collaboration

As sustainability challenges grow more complex, attendees repeatedly described the need for cross-sector collaboration. Progress increasingly depends on partnerships between utilities, technology companies, developers, policymakers, suppliers and customers. As one attendee put it, “No one solves this alone.”

The same idea surfaced repeatedly in circularity discussions, where one attendee described it simply: “Circularity is a team sport.” The most successful organizations will be the ones best equipped to work across increasingly interconnected systems.

Business resilience is replacing sustainability

“Sustainability is increasingly framed as a business resilience issue,” remarked one poster. Resilience emerged as one of the strongest recurring themes across attendee reflections. 

Rather than treating resilience as separate from climate action, many reflections described the growing convergence of mitigation and adaptation. Organizations need strategies that both reduce emissions and help workers, operations and communities adapt to climate impacts.

Resilience has become the business case that connects sustainability to long-term value, operational continuity and risk management.

The last decade of corporate sustainability was about defining ambitions. Trellis Impact 26 made it clear that the next will be defined by delivering on them.

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AI threatens Big Tech’s clean energy agenda

The “speed to power” aspirations of Amazon, Google and Microsoft — fueled by their collective investments of roughly $750 billion in data center expansion in 2025 and 2026 alone — are upending their climate goals.

All three reported double-digit emissions increases in their 2025 environmental sustainability updates, largely driven by electricity: Reported emissions for power consumption leapt by more than one-third at Amazon and Google, and by more than 20 percent for Microsoft.

Insatiable power appetites

Google’s electricity consumption surged by 37 percent in 2025 to 43.6 million megawatt-hours — the biggest single-year increase in its history and roughly enough to power the state of Washington for a year. 

“As the rapid evolution of AI is increasing our energy needs, the shift to clean energy is hitting major bottlenecks — like long delays in connecting new energy projects to the grid, fragmented power grids, and a shortage of reliable, around-the-clock clean power,” Google said in its 2025 environmental report, published June 30. 

Since 2019, Google’s power consumption has risen 250 percent. Its location-based electricity emissions, which fall under Scope 2 of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s carbon accounting rules, rose 37 percent from 2024 to 2025. 

Location-based emissions are calculated using regional grid market averages; market-based emissions inventories include factors such as green tariffs or renewable energy certificates.

Microsoft reported a 21 percent increase in location-based Scope 2 emissions; its overall electricity consumption rose 24 percent to 37 million megawatt-hours.

Amazon didn’t disclose its overall electricity consumption in its 2025 environmental report, published July 1. The company reported a 34 percent increase for its Scope 2 emissions, but it doesn’t say whether that information is location-based, i.e., based on regional grid market averages; or market-based, which includes factors such as green tariffs or renewable energy certificates.

Amazon also didn’t break out emissions data directly related to Amazon Web Services, although it publishes other metrics such as power usage effectiveness, which measures the power a data center uses for cooling versus running computing equipment. The closer to zero the better.

Amazon’s average usage effectiveness across its data center fleet is 1.14. Google’s ratio is 1.09, and Microsoft’s is 1.17. 

What to watch next

Despite their voracious energy appetites, Amazon, Google and Microsoft stand behind emissions reduction commitments pegged to 2030 and beyond. 

Here’s why: Over the past decade, the three companies have signed contracts to put more than 115 gigawatts of renewable energy, mostly solar and wind power, onto the global electric grid. 

The companies are planning on investments in nuclear energy as a linchpin. Amazon contracted for almost 2 gigawatts of nuclear power last June and signed deals for two new nuclear projects in 2026. Microsoft is backing several next-generation fusion technologies and Google has committed to capacity in Ohio. None has been as bullish as Meta, which has deals for up to 7.7 gigawatts.

Big battery investments will also play a role. At the end of 2025, Amazon had 15 solar energy projects paired with energy storage, approximately 2.3 gigawatts in capacity. Google has made several bets on long-duration batteries, to extend the value of solar and wind contracts. (This is also a priority for Meta.)  

Expect also a sharper focus on Asia.

Amazon supports roughly 2.2 gigawatts of clean energy in the Asia Pacific region, still largely tied to fossil fuels. (For perspective, its overall portfolio globally is about 40 gigawatts.) Google explicitly lists Asia as a sticking point for “carbon-free” electricity purchases, although it signed deals last year in Malaysia and Japan. Microsoft is funding the Southeast Asia Clean Energy Facility, which has so far put $230 million into early-stage projects.

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Why Meta is betting on long-duration storage and ‘space solar’

Meta’s investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure, along with policy shifts that favor fossil fuels, will make it tougher to reach its net-zero goals, but the company isn’t backing off its big-bet climate commitments.

“What has changed is the terrain in which we are operating,” said Blair Swedeen, Meta’s global head of net zero and sustainability, during a Climate Pioneers interview last month on the mainstage of Trellis Impact 26. “When we set these goals in 2020, things were very different.”

Swedeen stepped into his role in April 2023; he previously managed growth partnerships and new business development for the company.

“I’ve been at the company for about 12 years and spent a lot of time operationalizing programs, figuring out how to mobilize against goals and a lot of time cultivating partnerships,” he said. “A lot of those skills ended up being transferable.”

Meta faces the same challenge as the three big AI and cloud computing services vendors: how to manage the tension between ambitious net-zero pledges and rapid data center expansion. Amazon, Google and Microsoft all reported double-digit emissions increases in their latest environmental sustainability reports. 

Meta isn’t expected to release its next sustainability report until later this year, but the location-based electricity emissions from its data centers rose 16 percent in 2024 (the latest year for which data is available). Meta’s data-center electricity consumption increased 21 percent in the same timeframe.

Challenge: speed to power

The need for speed to power is forcing Meta to contract for as much electricity as it can to run new data centers directly, including new natural gas capacity, through grid connections and on-site resources. 

For example, Meta’s Hyperion data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana — its largest yet — will gobble 5 gigawatts of energy from new natural gas generation alongside solar plants and energy storage.

“When we partner with utilities, sometimes natural gas is part of the solution,” Swedeen said. “It’s unfortunate that that’s part of the equation, but the interconnection queues can be four to seven years, right now.”

That reality is driving Meta’s sustainability team — which began sourcing renewable energy in 2013 (before most other big tech companies except Google) — to rethink its clean electricity contract priorities.

Meta and Amazon were the two largest corporate buyers of clean energy in 2025; each signed slightly more than 10 gigawatts in new contracts. Meta’s total portfolio is more than 30 gigawatts globally; nearly 12 gigawatts are already online. Now it’s putting more weight on matching electricity consumption with “stable” sources. 

As of January, Meta had committed to buying more nuclear power than any other U.S. company through existing technologies and next-generation startups, approximately 7.7 gigawatts of capacity. It has also pledged to buy 150 megawatts of electricity from advanced geothermal projects being developed by Sage Geosystems, which are scheduled to come online in 2027.  

This shift has required new contract structures. “All of this investment has really opened up new capital for new technologies that just wasn’t flowing previously,” Swedeen said. 

“We have a number of different ways that we structure agreements on new technology,” he explained. “Everything from committing to be able to take that capacity in the future, reserving that capacity in something that’s much more structured — depending on the maturity of the technology.”

Enter ‘space solar’

Meta is also looking for ways to “extend the usefulness of those renewables that we’ve already procured,” said Swedeen. 

For example, the company’s contract with Noon Energy entitles Meta to up to 1 gigawatt, or 100 gigawatt-hours, of long-duration storage to supplement its existing solar and wind relationships. 

Noon’s modular solid oxide fuel cells can dispatch power for several days when generation from intermittent sources dips. The first project to be deployed on Meta’s behalf is for 25 megawatts, or 2.5 gigawatt-hours, by 2028. Once that installation is completed, Noon will deliver on the rest of the capacity.

Meta has also inked a deal with Overview Energy, an early-stage satellite company that is developing technology to collect solar energy from space and beam it to existing solar farms on the ground in the form of near-infrared light. The idea is to maximize the value of existing assets and allow solar installations to generate electricity around the clock.

“It sounds like science fiction,” Swedeen said. “It’s an early stage technology but it’s quite exciting.” 

Meta is helping fund Overview’s initial demonstration in 2028; the startup seeks to deliver its service commercially by 2030. 

Watch the entire Climate Pioneers interview.

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Why The Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist says our climate theory of change was always broken

For two decades, a quiet assumption has propped up corporate climate strategy: Eventually, extreme weather, wildfires and other disasters will get bad enough that corporate boards, political leaders and the rest of us snap to attention and finally take on the hard work of countering, and adapting to, the climate crisis.

Katharine Hayhoe wants that assumption retired.

The atmospheric scientist, Texas Tech professor and chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy — and author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World — recently joined me and my “Two Steps Forward” podcast co-host, Solitaire Townsend, to talk about why hope beats doom as a communication strategy and what that means for companies watching their own climate commitments slip.

Her clearest example of the broken theory of change is Hayhoe’s home country (although she currently lives in Texas) of Canada. It endured its worst wildfire season on record in 2023, with parts of the country burning coast to coast. The conventional prediction: The federal election nine months later would be a climate election. Instead, voters elected Mark Carney, a former UN climate finance envoy, on a platform that included scrapping the consumer carbon tax.

People didn’t get more motivated to act. They felt overwhelmed and detached because a wildfire that size made the problem feel unsolvable at an individual level.

“The behavioral science is very clear that it’s not enough to make people act,” Hayhoe told us. Worry alone, without a sense that action matters, doesn’t move people — or companies.

The efficacy problem

That’s the piece Hayhoe thinks sustainability teams undervalue: efficacy (rather than urgency). She frames effective climate communication as connecting three things — head (what’s happening), heart (why it matters to what you already value) and hands (what you can actually do). Most corporate climate messaging, she argued, starts and stops at the head, piling on data that raises alarm without giving people — or companies — a next move that feels achievable.

That gap shows up at the top of organizations too. Hayhoe pointed to a version of corporate finger-pointing: The sustainability officer says she’d act, but the CEO won’t let her; the CEO says the board won’t allow it; the board says shareholders won’t stand for it. Meanwhile, the executives who deployed real capital and effort toward targets view those targets as failures when the numbers slip. That, Hayhoe said, is corroding the sense among business leaders that climate action is winnable at the exact moment they need to believe it is.

No more frameworks!

Her prescription isn’t another framework from the top. Asked what one underrated lever she’d hand a Fortune 500 CEO, Hayhoe skipped over tools like renewable power-purchase agreements and science-based targets. Instead, she advocated for internal education that connects climate to what employees already do, paired with an explicit invitation for ideas from people who’ve been doing the job for years — then elevating those ideas as the company’s own thought leadership. In other words, bottom-up input paired with top-down amplification.

Hayhoe was equally candid about her own field’s failures. She’s argued, in a 2018 Science essay (and video) titled “When Facts Are Not Enough,” that scientific literacy doesn’t reliably predict climate acceptance. Identity does. And in a 2024 paper, co-authored with Christel van Eck and Lydia Messling, she pushed back on the idea that scientists should present themselves as neutral, arguing that transparency about one’s own values builds more trust than false objectivity.

She’s putting that perspective into practice through her newsletter, Talking Climate, which is aimed at training more people to be trusted messengers in their own communities. As she put it, this conversation was never going to be finished in just one podcast episode.

Two Steps Forward is available wherever you get podcasts, including on Trellis.net. Find past episodes and show notes at twostepsforwardpodcast.com.

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Beyond ‘permanence’: A buyer’s guide to managing carbon credit reversal risk

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

The climate benefits of purchasing carbon credits hold only if the carbon stays out of the atmosphere. For many solutions, though, including nature-based ones like forest protection and restoration, that carbon can eventually be released. Forests burn, pests spread, land use changes. That release is called a reversal, and the risk of it is what the debate over “permanence” is really about: How long will the carbon stay removed, and how confident can a buyer be?

Permanence is among the most contested and confusing issues faced by sustainability executives when investing in carbon credits. The market usually frames it as a binary between “permanent” and “impermanent,” offering little practical guidance. 

Two recent white papers move the conversation from abstract debate to a usable toolkit. Together they offer corporate buyers a shared vocabulary and a clear menu of mechanisms for managing reversal risk.

“Buffer Pools & Beyond” comes from the Science for High-Integrity Frameworks to Transform Carbon Markets (SHIFT-CM) initiative, led by Yale University and The Nature Conservancy. “Contracted Durability” presents a framework from the Beyond Alliance, RMI and the American Forest Foundation. They were developed independently, yet they share the same core insight: Permanence is not a fixed property that a credit either possesses or not. It’s more useful, and ultimately more beneficial to the climate, to think in terms of durability, which varies along a spectrum.

Why the binary framing fails buyers

Carbon markets often use a 1,000-year time horizon to distinguish between permanence and impermanence. But this dichotomy masks important nuance: A high risk of carbon release for one project does not mean that all nature-based solutions offer only short-term storage. Some forests and soils have reliably stored carbon for thousands of years. Treating durability as a binary tends to push policy toward one of two failure modes: Nature-based pathways that are affordable and deployable today get eliminated, or they get approved without ensuring that the carbon stays stored long enough to back the projects’ claims.

Replacing the binary with a continuous concept of durability gives companies a more precise way to talk about how long carbon is likely to stay stored, how confident they can be in that duration and what it takes to close any gap. That enables buyers to match a credit’s durability to the claim the developers are actually making.

A shared vocabulary

The most immediately useful contribution of these papers is language. Both adopt a taxonomy that distinguishes between three kinds of durability:

  • Estimated durability: A projected estimate of the length of time a tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent will remain stored out of the atmosphere based on risk assessments of carbon loss from a given carbon sink. 
  • Guaranteed (or contracted) durability: the length of time a tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent is guaranteed to remain out of the atmosphere by an entity, often through contractual or legal means.
  • Realised durability: how long the carbon actually stayed stored, which can only be confirmed after the fact.

Alongside these sits the durability threshold: the length of time carbon must remain stored to satisfy a given policy, standard, or claim. (the Yale/Nature Conservancy study  calls it “guaranteed durability”; the Beyond/RMI/AFF paper calls it “contracted durability.”)

For a sustainability executive, this vocabulary makes it possible to speak precisely with project developers, standard setters and boards of directors. Rather than  “Is this credit permanent?” the question becomes “What is this credit’s estimated durability, what durability is contractually guaranteed, and does that match the threshold my claim requires?”

The menu of mechanisms

The upshot is that  companies do not need to wait for perfect, centuries-long certainty before acting. A range of mechanisms already exists to manage reversal risk, and a wave of innovation is filling in the gaps. SHIFT-CM presents seven approaches broken into three strategies.

Risk-transfer strategies shift reversal risk from one party to another, usually by pooling it across many projects.

  • Buffer pools withhold a portion of a project’s credits in reserve to replace any that are reversed. They are by far the most common mechanism, with an estimated 10 to 20 percent of credits held in reserve, and nearly every major registry uses a version. 
  • Insurance provides compensation, in credits or cash, when a covered reversal occurs. It’s developing rapidly as a complement to buffer pools, though policies typically run only one to five years, and only credit-based payouts preserve the underlying climate claim.
  • Carbon trust funds (also called permanence trusts or funds) take a fee at issuance into an endowed, independently managed institution that assumes liability for monitoring and compensation, potentially well beyond the project’s own lifespan.

Purchasing strategies can extend durability.

  • Vertical stacking means over-purchasing upfront so that even if some credits reverse, enough remain to cover the claim.
  • Horizontal stacking means sequentially replacing credits as they expire or reverse, carrying the storage obligation forward, potentially into longer-duration storage over time.

Accounting strategies re-quantify a credit’s value based on its durability or climate impact, through risk-weighted portfolio approaches or the more contested time-weighted (“tonne-year”) accounting.

The “Contracted Durability” paper frames the challenge around two functions that any credible solution must perform across the full threshold: ongoing liability (someone responsible for monitoring and compensating reversals at every point) and compensation (tools to make good on a reversal). And it shows that buffer pools and insurance can compensate for reversals but cannot, on their own, assign liability across a long threshold.

Why this matters now

Forward-looking companies should understand these mechanisms now. The EU is defining durability and quality requirements for removals and international credits ahead of its 2040 target. California is shaping permanence standards in a range of legislative processes. The Article 6.4 Supervisory Body under the Paris Agreement is operationalising its standard on non-permanence and reversals, including the still-undefined concept of “negligible risk of reversal.” And SBTi’s updated Corporate Net-Zero Standard is reshaping how companies must treat short- and long-lived removals as they approach net zero.

What to do with this

Match the durability mechanism to the claim being made. Understand what tools are in place to compensate for any reversal that occurs, and for how long each holds. Recognize that combining risk reversal mechanisms will often manage risk better than any single tool.

The main takeaway is that the tools to invest in high-quality nature-based carbon credits with confidence already exist, and they are improving quickly. 

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Diversity of corporate climate action revealed by new scoring framework

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

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

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

Three pillars

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

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

Diverse results

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

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

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

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A decade of change in what drives corporate sustainability

New research from BSR and GlobeScan shows that the motivations behind corporate sustainability efforts have shifted over the past 10 years, with regulation becoming significantly more important in driving initiatives. In April and May 2026, GlobeScan and BSR conducted an online survey of corporate sustainability professionals working at companies with $1 billion or more in annual revenue to understand the current state of sustainable business and its evolution over the past decade.

The findings highlight how the relative importance of various drivers has changed since 2016.

The most striking development is the rise of regulation. Over the past decade, regulatory requirements have increased more than any other driver, reflecting a global environment in which sustainability is increasingly shaped by formal rules, standards and reporting expectations, and where growing regulation has pushed companies to focus more on compliance than on other motivations.

Consumer demand has also gained ground over this period. This suggests that external pressure is not limited to regulation, but is also being reinforced by expectations from consumers. By contrast, investor interest has remained largely unchanged, indicating that not all stakeholder pressures have evolved at the same pace.

Running parallel with these increases is a broad decline in several traditional business-oriented drivers of sustainability. Compared with 2016, factors such as market growth opportunities, product and process innovation, operational benefits and cost reduction have all lost influence. Internal drivers such as CEO interest and talent recruitment, engagement and retention have also weakened. The research specifically highlights the decline in growth, talent, innovation and cost-related motivations as notable changes over time.

Taken together, these shifts point to a clear rebalancing in motivations behind corporate sustainability. A decade ago, sustainability was more strongly associated with forward-looking business value, including growth, efficiency and innovation. Today, the emphasis appears to have moved more toward responding to external expectations, particularly regulation and, to a lesser extent, customer demand.

Bar chart comparing the most important corporate sustainability drivers in 2026 versus 2016. In 2026, regulatory requirements are the leading driver (76%), followed by reputational risks and benefits (60%) and consumer/customer demand (44%). In 2016, reputational risks and benefits ranked first (68%), followed by operational risks and benefits (47%) and market growth opportunities (35%). The chart shows a major rise in the importance of regulatory requirements (31% to 76%) and consumer demand (21% to 44%), while market growth opportunities, product and process innovation, and budget/cost reduction have become less significant drivers.

What this means

The changing drivers of corporate sustainability suggest a shift in how sustainability is understood within companies. As regulatory pressure has intensified and traditional business-case drivers have lost influence, sustainability appears to be increasingly framed through the lens of compliance and external accountability, rather than opportunity and value creation. While growth, innovation, talent and cost efficiencies remain important outcomes, they seem to play a less prominent role in motivating sustainability efforts than they did a decade ago.

This creates an important challenge for sustainability leaders. Compliance can drive action, but it rarely inspires transformation. Regulation can establish the floor, yet it is unlikely on its own to generate the investment, innovation and cross-functional commitment needed to deliver meaningful change. As sustainability becomes more shaped by external requirements, organizations may need to work harder to demonstrate how it contributes to growth, resilience, competitiveness and long-term value creation. The companies best positioned for the future may be those that can meet rising regulatory expectations while continuing to treat sustainability as a strategic opportunity and not simply a compliance exercise.

Based on an online survey of 124 corporate sustainability professionals at companies with annual revenue of $1 billion or more across sectors and global headquarters regions.

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Microsoft adjusts climate agenda as emissions leap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portfolio approach to electricity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carbon removal work continues

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

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

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

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McDonald’s reassigns its chief sustainability officer to beef strategy

McDonald’s Chief Sustainability and Social Impact Officer Beth Hart is returning to her roots in supply chain sustainability and sourcing as the fast food company’s new vice president, global category head of beef.

Hart’s new role combines responsibility for quality control, supply chain management and responsible sourcing, skills she previously put to use in supply chain executive roles for the U.K. division of McDonald’s and for supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, where she worked on sustainable sourcing, product development and brand management.

Hart was in the CSO position for slightly more than two years; she joined McDonald’s close to eight years ago. 

“Our team and partners around the world have shown what’s possible when purpose and partnership come together, and that’s something I’ll always carry with me,” Hart said in a LinkedIn post revealing her new role.

Hart’s responsibilities are being picked up by Suheily Natal Davis, an attorney who’s been focused on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at McDonald’s since January 2021. Davis, who’s been with McDonald’s for a decade, will start her new job as chief sustainability, social impact and inclusion officer after a summer sabbatical. 

“I’m proud to be entrusted with bringing these three areas of work together under one team as we continue to drive progress and meaningful impact across our people, our planet, and the markets and communities we serve,” Davis said on LinkedIn.

Like many other companies that made science-based emissions reductions pledges in the first half of the decade, McDonald’s is reviewing those targets. 

The fast food goliath recently warned that it will miss its goal to halve the industrial and energy emissions from its supply chain and franchise network by 2030, citing issues outside the company’s control. It will invest $1 billion in supply chain resilience programs, including regenerative agriculture and grazing programs, over the next decade. In her new role, Hart will have direct influence over how some of that money is spent.

Beef and agricultural commodities such as soy, palm oil, coffee and fiber for food packaging, which fall under Scope 3 of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s carbon accounting rules, make up the biggest share of McDonald’s footprint. The company has reduced related emissions by 3 percent since 2018.

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What’s your space strategy? Why organizations must determine what matters before markets do

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

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

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

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

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

Space may simply be the next example.

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

Relevance before validation

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

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

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

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

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

Before markets take shape

This dynamic is not new for sustainability practitioners.

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

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

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

Position before proof

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

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

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

The conditions you’re waiting for

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

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

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

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