26 June, 2026

What does the future hold for sustainability?

That’s the theme explored in our latest Sustainability Leaders Panel report, What do the next five years hold for sustainability? Every six months, together with our partners at Echo Research and Mishcon de Reya, we ask sustainability professionals to share their thoughts on where sustainability is and where it’s heading, and this time, we asked them to turn their attention to the future. We shared the results from the fifth wave of research at our 30th birthday event last week where we came together to explore how to navigate the changing landscape.

At first glance, the current context looks challenging: political pushback, regulatory uncertainty, pressure on DEI and net zero, and growing scrutiny around corporate claims. But the picture from senior sustainability leaders is more nuanced. The story isn’t one of retreat, but of transition. We’ll go deeper into the way in which data and AI are reshaping the sustainability landscape next week, while this week, we focus on how sustainability is changing how it shows up in organisations.

Sustainability is becoming more risk-led, more connected to reputation, and more embedded in the way businesses make decisions. It may become less visible as a standalone function, but more influential as part of core strategy, governance, reporting and resilience.

The report highlights some important shifts, notably:

52% of panellists expect sustainability to become a primary strategic driver over the next five years. At the same time, a meaningful minority (16%) expect it to decline in importance, reflecting waning organisational appetite.

9 in 10 believe future progress will depend as much on organisation-wide sustainability literacy as on specialist expertise. This means commercial teams and functional leaders building sustainability into their everyday decision-making, and building sustainability into value creation mechanisms and recruitment mechanisms.

One implication of this is that sustainability professionals will need to become (even more) effective at working in different contexts and in ways that are maximally flexible. The most important skills identified for the role of the sustainability professional are stakeholder engagement, change leadership, digital and AI literacy, and systems thinking, alongside growing emphasis on organisation-wide capability.

The future of sustainability may be less about standing apart, and more about being properly built in. Read more about this, how sustainability professionals expect regulation to shape performance, and where investment is beign targeted in the full report and if you’d like to apply to join the panel, you can do so here.

 

By Claire Jost, Emma Lindsay