After much progress over the last two decades, corporate sustainability is at a crossroads. A shifting political landscape—intensifying rivalry between nations, increasing social polarization, and a populist backlash against sustainability efforts—is radically redefining the conditions under which corporations must survive and thrive.

Some prominent companies have quietly watered down their ambitions while others are already back-pedaling. The U.S. government is swiftly unwinding sustainability commitments and there is pushback against new European reporting requirements.

This begs the question: Has the corporate sustainability movement become unsustainable in its current form? As sustainability and business strategy practitioners, we offer our perspective on this existential question for the movement.

Why Planet Will Eventually Trump Politics

While in the short term, it seems reasonable to expect a further unravelling of the corporate sustainability agenda, all may not be lost. There are reasons to believe that several countervailing forces will eventually overturn this clear regression and lead to a renewed emphasis on sustainability, albeit after a messy interregnum which could last several years.

1. Enormous progress has been made on renewable energy.

This was in no small part shaped by China, which was responsible for 40% of the world’s renewable energy capacity expansion between 2019 and 2024. Renewable energy has become not only economically viable, it’s even an object of geopolitical competition.

Of course, decades of global investment and capital expenditure ensured such leaps forward were possible. In the last decade alone, $300–400 billion per year has been invested into power grids around the world enabling widespread electrification. These investments secure infrastructure that lowers the marginal cost of renewables and makes rolling back progress harder. In 2023, renewable energy represented nearly a quarter of the EU’s final energy use.