Being a change maker requires more than subject matter expertise; it takes a particular blend of soft skills: empathy, exhortation and creativity, to name just a few. These videos — all under 10 minutes — offer practical insights for honing the unquantifiable qualities that help innovators and other leaders flourish in the workplace, from motivating colleagues to managing time to persuading bouncing back from failure.

The Way We Think About Managing People Is Dead Wrong 

(Running time: 7:40)

West Point graduate and Gulf War veteran Lori Tompos — one of the first women in combat arms — has been developing leaders and teams for decades, and in this TED Talk, she sets the bar — projects need to be managed; people need to be led — then sets the tone: Her definition of leadership is heavy on purpose and empowerment, light on micromanagement and control.

The Secret to Talking about Climate Change 

(3:56)

This video, inspired by the research of Renee Lertzman, who studies the psychosocial aspects of climate change communications, offers ways to gently yet effectively broach the subject with the less green-minded people in your life, from organizational stakeholders still not sold on the importance of reducing emissions to your in-denial uncle. TL;DW: It’s as much about listening as talking. 

The 7 Keys to Creative Collaboration 

(2:18)

Team projects: love ’em or hate ’em, they’re an inescapable part of professional life. So too are the miscommunications and missed deadlines that often accompany them. Except now you can escape them! Give this clip two minutes and it will put you on the path to more positive group experiences, ones that manifest lots of synergy while generating minimal stress.

How to manage your time more effectively (according to machines) 

(5:56)

Sustainability professionals face demanding mandates and constantly changing regulations. How can you stay on top of it all? This popular TED Talk draws on computer science to suggest practical and achievable solutions. Spoiler: There’s much to be learned from the way computers organize tasks and manage time.

Harvard’s stress expert on how to be more resilient 

(9:04)

As oceans rise — and funding falls — so might your stress levels. In this video, Aditi Nerurkar, a physician and health communicator with expertise in burnout and mental health, explains the differences between adaptive and maladaptive stress, as well as mechanisms for rewiring your brain to boost resilience. The impact that has may well stretch beyond work and into other corners of your life.

6 Sustainability Interview Questions & Answers 

(9:13)

You’ve found your dream sustainability role and proofread your résumé; next up: the interview. Whether you’re gunning for climate analyst or CSO, this video will help you answer questions both industry-agnostic (Tell me about yourself) and sustainability-specific (What climate technology trends are you following?) with clarity and confidence. 

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NVIDIA, the world’s most valuable company with a $4.3 trillion market capitalization, adopted its first corporate social responsibility strategy almost 20 years ago. From the start, its agenda centered largely on human rights, supply chain management and philanthropic issues. 

Its priorities shifted in August 2023, when the company hired the assistant general counsel from hard drive maker Western Digital, Josh Parker, to revamp its sustainability strategy. Two years later, the company has stepped up its emissions reduction initiatives with two new commitments, validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and disclosed in June 2025. 

But the biggest priority for NVIDIA’s sustainability team is advocating and steering continuous improvements in the energy efficiency of its graphics processors, a crucial component of the construction boom in data centers meant to power artificial intelligence.

“We cannot unlock the next level of performance for AI if we don’t deliver really dramatic improvements in energy efficiency,” Parker said. “It becomes a practical necessity to help us advance AI. It also is exactly what our customers want, because it lowers their total cost of ownership, of course, and also makes it easier just to build data centers in an energy supply-constrained environment.”

NVIDIA’s biggest buyers — including cloud companies Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft — desperately need to speed up AI processing times to have any hope of reaching their emissions reduction pledges. A single “AI factory” can use 100 to 200 megawatts of power annually — that’s on par with a traditional manufacturing facility, as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang notes in the company’s 2025 sustainability report.

“We work very closely with our customers on decarbonization,” Parker said.

NVIDIA’s latest technology architecture, called Blackwell, is 25 times more energy-efficient than its predecessor and 50 times more efficient than competitive offerings, according to the company. Translation: 40 trillion watt-hours of electricity can be saved annually by using technology accelerated with its graphics processors, NVIDIA estimates.

The company will use a new SBTI-validated emissions intensity pledge to measure ongoing progress: the goal is to reduce the emissions intensity from use of its products by 75 percent per PetaFLOP, or one quadrillion floating-point operations per second.  

“It’s the operation of our products that is, by far, the biggest impact from an emissions perspective,” Parker said. “So whatever we can do to make our products more energy efficient is the most impactful thing we can do.”

Deeper focus: supplier emissions

The emissions associated with NVIDIA’s production activities, however, are also skyrocketing. The company’s greenhouse gas inventory doubled from 2023 to 2025, to 6.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to its 2025 sustainability report. 

NVIDIA’s reduction targets call for a 50 percent cut for operations (Scope 1) and electricity consumption (Scope 2) by 2030, which account for less than 1 percent of the total. The company is “fabless,” meaning it relies on partners to manufacture its chips. The biggest single portion of NVIDIA’s reported footprint is purchased goods and services at about 6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equipment in FY25. 

Two years ago, NVIDIA adopted a pledge to encourage two-thirds of its suppliers to adopt validated emissions reduction targets by 2026. It beat that goal by a year with 80 percent for the fiscal year ended Jan. 26. It has required reporting on water, energy and emissions since the 2014 timeframe. 

“Setting our own science-based target was actually one of the things we thought was important to do before becoming more ambitious with our supply chain decarbonization, because we want to make sure our suppliers know that we’re doing the same things we’re expecting of them,” Parker said. 

NVIDIA is stepping up the push, although it will stop short of mandating them. “What we’re doing is asking them to set science-aligned targets — so, targets that are consistent with the Paris Agreement,” he said. “We’re not requiring that they be validated by SBTi.”

The bulk of NVIDIA’s supply chain lies outside the U.S. — the single biggest facility being built on its behalf is in Guadalajara, Mexico. But the company has said it will spend $500 billion to ramp up domestic manufacturing, with facilities planned in Texas.

Parker’s corporate sustainability team of six people reports to a steering committee that includes members of NVIDIA’s executive leadership; it also updates a board-level governance committee semiannually. The next phase of NVIDIA’s strategy is a work in progress. 

“What we’re doing now is tactically trying to find what’s the best path,” he said. “Does it involve more domestic manufacturing in the United States? Does it involve more advocacy for regulatory reform? Does it involve investment in local renewable energy projects? We’re trying to figure out where the bottlenecks are, and then working both upstream and downstream to try to tackle these together.” 

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

Corporate sustainability reports, in their current form, started to appear in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A variety of factors led to this: high-profile environmental disasters (the Bhopal gas disaster and the Exxon Valdez oil spill, for example); the release of the Brundtland Report on sustainable development; and the development of the Ceres Principles, which “called on companies to acknowledge their environmental impacts and act more responsibly to help protect our communities and economies.” 

However, as the manifestations of a changing climate become clearer, investors and customers started asking companies to provide specific information about their exposure to risks related to climate change. That’s how climate risk assessments emerged in the 2000s, with the launch of the Carbon Disclosure Project and the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures, as a way to provide the investor community with credible projections of how climate change could financially affect companies.

Recently, climate risk assessments have become mandatory under some state regulations such as in California and under Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Yet many sustainability teams and CSOs face challenges navigating the complex models and future scenarios these assessments require. That’s because they often lack expertise in the areas of risk assessment and financial quantification of risks and are unable to find consistent, uniform guidance in how to do so.

The art and science of climate risk assessments

These assessments identify, prioritize and ultimately mitigate the risks that companies face directly and through their value chains. Specifically they: 

• Determine the boundaries of the assessment regarding the company, its value chain and different geographies
• Identify the types of risks considered such as physical or transitional risks and acute vs. chronic risks
• Select future scenarios ranging from unabated warming to various policy scenarios implemented to address climate change
• Evaluate the sensitivity or vulnerability of each entity within the assessment boundaries
• Prioritize risks and details of risk mitigation efforts
• Describe the company’s risk management and governance processes and climate change-related opportunities

In our work supporting global corporations with their assessments, we’ve witnessed several challenges that can limit the depth and breadth of these assessments. 

Challenge No. 1: Assessments lack geospatial granularity 

Large global climate risk models have low spatial resolution. As a result, significant differences in localized facility physical risk exposures are lost. A facility on the shore of a river subject to flooding, for example, has a very different exposure profile from a facility on a knoll or hill — important differences lost in a low-resolution model. 

Similarly, large companies with hundreds — if not thousands — of assets will often group proximate locations to reduce the number of locations under consideration. While this approach can make the analysis simpler, faster and cheaper, it risks obscuring important differences in exposure. 

Solution: Two main approaches can help solve this challenge. First, measuring stations managed by federal agencies have been tracking data related to climate change (heat event days, frequency of floods, and buildings and populations exposed to extreme weather) for decades. This real-time, location-specific data enables precise risk estimations that can be applied directly to a company’s facilities across all physical risks for a baseline assessment. For those locations where this far more granular and site-specific data is available, this critical information can help climate risk assessors understand the challenges relevant to a specific site. 

The second approach is for those companies with hundreds or even thousands of locations. In those cases, we recommend that companies triage their facilities by grouping them within specific regions — such as ZIP codes — and screening for features such as proximity to riverbanks or low elevation. In 2017, the city of Boston took this approach by releasing a Climate Vulnerability Assessment that identified specific locations needing attention due to the unique characteristics of their siting. The assessment grouped sites by neighborhood, showing how this level of analysis could effectively highlight the key risks to each community. This helped flag sites needing special consideration in the assessment.

Challenge No. 2: Assessments fail to account for health-related impacts of climate change

State-of-the-art assessments tend to focus on physical building risks. Yet rising temperatures and heat-related health problems present a significant and growing risk to a company’s employees. For example, some studies show that productivity can plummet by 50 percent once temperatures exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit, affecting operations and revenue, while also increasing costs related to cooling. This has led some companies such as VF and Nike to adapt their supplier codes of conduct to outline standards their suppliers must maintain with respect to heat-related working conditions. 

But most climate risk assessments offer anecdotal connections between these factors and not substantive or empirical evidence. For those looking to quantify in financial terms the impacts of climate change, better methodologies are important. 

Solution: Numerous data sets and studies can help companies estimate the impacts of heat on a population. Studies from Columbia University on the impacts of power outages, UT San Antonio on heat-related deaths and the International Labor Organization on how heats impacts labor productivity help us understand how climate change affects human health. 

Challenge No. 3: There’s no uniform standard for financial projections

Unlike accounting practices which have a slew of standards, there’s no “GAAP” version for climate risk assessments. Today, climate change financial estimations range from vague to overly precise, which can call into question accuracy and precision of the proffered data. Compounding the problem, most companies limit their financial forecasts to five years at the most, which is much shorter than the time frames used in most climate-related projections.

Solution: Financial assessments based on climate risks can be in the form of an expected value calculation: 

EV=∑[Probability of outcome(i) × Value of outcome (i)]

In other words, the expected financial value is the product of the probability of the outcome and the value of that particular outcome summed over all possible outcomes. This is similar to how insurance companies project financial risk.

By using data and approaches consistent with how actuarial companies approach such calculations, we can arrive at a place where climate-related financial disclosures are credible projections of the actual risks that companies face due to climate change. Some organizations such as S&P Global and FAIRR have integrated these calculations, or similar approaches, into their risk assessments. 

As our climate continues to change and extreme weather becomes more unpredictable, it’s important that corporations understand the risk and opportunity landscape they’re exposed to and disclose that information publicly. Anything they can do to improve on the depth and breadth of their analysis will help them be more resilient and sustainable long into the future.

The post 3 common climate risk assessment mistakes — and how to fix them appeared first on Trellis.

How will banks collaborate on the financial industry’s net zero progress? Do they even need to work together? Can the same financial institutions that enable fossil fuels help to usher in a low-carbon global economy?

Those questions hang in the air as the members of the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) are expected to announce a vote any day now over whether to remain a committed club with formal obligations or something looser, like a guidance-based framework.

The alliance has been on hold since Aug. 27 pending a decision pegged for September. It had already rejected binding requirements for members in April, following a rapid exodus of 20 major banks. The U.S. anchor members that have fled since December, including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, are also heavy fossil fuel financiers.

Each exit sparked outrage from activist groups that urged banks to halt oil and gas investments immediately. Other experts warned that the financial sector’s net zero targets would enter a “zombie” state, neither alive nor dead but ultimately aimless.

Yet most of the NZBA’s members, about 120, have remained despite an ESG backlash and threats by Republican lawmakers. Meanwhile, individual banks are neither dramatically ditching their climate goals or firing sustainability teams, despite some walkbacks and surface title changes.

“The infrastructure that has been built up over the last couple of years has been intact,” said Brian O’Hanlon, managing director of climate finance at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Washington, D.C. “And that, to me, is a very interesting sign.”

No ‘climate heroes’

But whatever the alliance decides, O’Hanlon and other climate transition experts maintain that it’s the wrong thing to focus on. The group had been useful as a scaling mechanism that elevated best practices, he said, but the real change comes where banks deploy capital.

“I don’t think we ever should have looked at banks as climate heroes, but they do sit on the edge of the greatest transformations in the economy,” O’Hanlon said. “We’re in the energy transition right now where we are asking banks to pan for gold when it comes to the energy structures and the deals of the future.”

The issue can be more creative, he added: “Let’s get into the cost. Let’s look into the deals. Where’s the innovation coming into place here?”

O’Hanlon’s stance aligns with that of Saskia Straub, climate policy analyst with New Climate Institute. The Cologne, Germany, group has found that the voluntary targets of large U.N.-backed financial alliances have not meaningfully advanced decarbonization in finance. 

Instead, banks should engage investees and direct finance to real-world, low-carbon activities in the short term, according to Straub. And high-emissions sectors like steel, cement and shipping should be a priority. “Particularly important is actively engaging with investee companies and introducing clear consequences if emissions from financed and facilitated sources are not reduced,” she said.

Watchdogs watching

In addition, pressure on banks needs to shift to pragmatic action on the infrastructure, incentives and institutional capabilities that help them deliver on goals and remain commercially viable, according to O’Hanlon. And if activists don’t understand how the heavily regulated institutions they seek to influence actually function, progress can stall further.

“Banks are not developing projects on the ground,” he said. “They don’t provide the menu, they don’t shop for the ingredients and they don’t set this up.”

Yet banks can use better intelligence about renewable energy options, including the capital expenditure of clients and regional contexts, according to O’Hanlon.

A shift to ‘collective learning’?

The NZBA is only the latest group wobbling under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which launched in April 2021 amid high hopes under then-COP 26 President Mark Carney. The NZBA sub-alliance quickly attracted some 145 banks representing $70 trillion in assets.

Four years later, however, the banking alliance may follow the path of GFANZ itself, which restructured in January and relaxed criteria for membership, even allowing companies without solid net zero goals to participate.

Such groups were useful as a mobilization and scaling mechanism that elevated best practices, but even since their launch more companies have integrated sustainability into their business, experts note.

The pendulum has swung away from collective action, according to O’Hanlon.  “Maybe we’ve gone from collective action to collective learning,” he said. “We are seeing banks and other parts of the financial sector learn from each other much faster in a state of competition, and that will give projects and companies of the future more choice at lower costs.”

The post All eyes are on the Net Zero Banking Alliance, but the real action is elsewhere appeared first on Trellis.

The power of generative artificial intelligence is abundantly clear, yet surveys show only a minority of workers use ChatGPT or rival services on a regular basis. That’s partly because it can be challenging to figure out where to apply AI, and how to ask it to do what you want.

If you’re among those who are yet to see proven value from AI in your work, here are some useful prompts to get you started. Each is recommended by a sustainability professional who vouches for its usefulness.

For editing text

This prompt tackles what Luke Elder, a senior lead for sustainability reporting at Google, calls a common challenge in corporate reporting: synthesizing contributions from hundreds of different authors into a cohesive voice. 

“Our annual Environmental Report is drafted by many teams across the company,” said Elder. “While each provides critical data and insights, the final document must read as if it were written by one person. It also needs to align with our specific tone, follow our best practices for disclosure, and reinforce our core messages.”

To quickly refine draft text, ensure clarity and alignment with established style, Elder uses this prompt:

“You are an editor for our annual Environmental Report. Your goal is to review the provided draft text for clarity, conciseness, and alignment with our reporting tone. Refine the text to eliminate jargon, improve flow, and ensure it reinforces our key sustainability messages.”

To help the AI edit with the right tone in mind, Elder recommends either adding a few words to define that tone — “frank,” “plainspoken” or “ambitious,” for example — or pointing the AI toward a report that uses the tone you’re looking for.

For checking on supplier progress

Your suppliers are your partners on the journey to net zero, but how are they faring in their emissions reduction efforts? Renu Yadav, a senior program manager for global sustainability at LinkedIn, likes to evaluate her company’s suppliers using this prompt:

“Review [company name]’s latest sustainability report, highlight how their emissions are trending, and list their Scope 3 reduction strategies.”

Explained Yadav: “To drive our Scope 3 emissions reductions, it’s crucial to track the progress our suppliers are making toward their own sustainability commitments. This prompt helps me understand how our key suppliers are advancing on their commitments, which in turn informs our supplier engagement and risk management efforts.”

For anticipating media scrutiny

To prepare for the media questions that follow the launch of his company’s annual environmental report, Google Director of Sustainability Reporting Alex Hausman asks Gemini — Google’s AI assistant — to role-play a reporter and generate critical questions.

“This helps us build a robust internal Q&A document, ensuring our communications, marketing and other teams are prepared with clear, consistent and data-driven responses” said Hausman. “It allows us to be transparent and responsive while freeing up our team to focus on other high-impact work.”

Here’s his prompt:

“Imagine you are a reporter for a major news outlet covering corporate sustainability. Based on the provided Environmental Report, what are the most challenging and insightful questions you would ask? Then, draft clear and concise answers to those questions using only information found within the report itself.”

For making sense of frameworks

Hands up if you know the key differences between sustainability reporting frameworks from the Global Reporting Initiative, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and the Task Force of Climate-related FInancial Disclosures. For extra credit, lay out how new disclosure rules from the state of California and the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive change matters.

If this kind of thing is not your idea of a good time, Yadav has a prompt for you:

“Compare common sustainability frameworks (GRI, SASB, TCFD) and highlight their similarities, differences, and relevance for corporate reporting.”

“I use this to stay up to date with evolving ESG reporting standards, understand which frameworks are most relevant to my company and identify overlaps to minimize reporting efforts,” she explains. “This not only helps me understand the basics of each standard but helps me understand which framework investors or regulators are prioritizing.”

Got a favorite prompt?

We’re sure there are many sustainability professionals out there with equally useful prompts. If you think you’re one of them, send us your suggestions and we’ll share the best as updates to this post.

For a deeper dive, attend the AI in sustainability session at Trellis Impact 25, where Yadav and Elder will be joined by Google’s Anna Escuer and entrepreneur Olya Irzak to discuss how AI could transform how teams collect, analyze and act on emissions data.

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