· 7 min read
Sustainability in limbo: The growing political and policy uncertainty
Political uncertainty increasingly threatens corporate sustainability strategies as governments prioritize short-term electoral cycles over long-term climate commitments, creating strategic risks for companies requiring multi-decade investment horizons. President Trump's January 2025 climate policy dismantling—withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, declaring a "national energy emergency," and revoking Biden-era climate initiatives—has created immediate strategic challenges for companies that allocated capital based on previous regulatory expectations. Businesses face stranded assets, revised ROI calculations, and competitive disadvantages as regulatory support evaporates. Similarly, the EU's Omnibus Package retreat—removing approximately 80% of companies from CSRD sustainability reporting requirements and delaying Wave 2 and 3 implementation by two years—signals potential regulatory softening. While intended to reduce administrative burdens by 25% overall, this creates strategic uncertainty about future requirements and weakens accountability frameworks.
Companies must now factor regulatory volatility into climate investment decisions, potentially delaying transformative projects that could deliver competitive advantages. This uncertainty premium increases capital costs and may accelerate corporate relocations to jurisdictions with stable climate policies, creating first-mover advantages for regions maintaining consistent long-term frameworks. The resulting confusion may have the opposite effect of what was intended, potentially costing firms that have already invested in compliance measures while leaving businesses questioning whether to maintain robust decarbonization strategies or adopt a wait-and-see approach in an increasingly unpredictable regulatory landscape.
Beyond reporting: Why businesses must lead on sustainability
Sustainability is no longer just a compliance exercise. Scientific and real-world evidence confirm that sustainability is a competitive advantage; not just a regulatory requirement. The concept of double materiality is now central to corporate strategy, recognizing that sustainability risks not only impact the environment but also have direct financial consequences for businesses. Leading companies already leverage green premiums, enhanced supply chain resilience, and long-term value creation. Corporate sustainability spans ethical sourcing, waste management, and biodiversity conservation, but one of the most immediate and material challenges businesses face today is their carbon footprint. Internal pressures from employees, combined with external demands from investors, customers, and regulators, are making decarbonisation a defining factor in corporate resilience and investment attractiveness.
The current regulatory limbo is crystallizing a fundamental divide across the corporate landscape: sustainability pioneers and sustainability laggards. Pioneers—comprising approximately 35% of companies according to recent research—are embedding sustainability not just to comply with regulations but to drive competitive advantage, viewing uncertainty as an opportunity to gain first-mover advantages. These frontrunners recognize that by 2030, more than a third of company revenue will come from the climate transition, and they're positioning themselves accordingly. Meanwhile, laggards remain passive observers, waiting to see how others respond and often tying sustainability investments merely to product pricing rather than strategic integration. This bifurcation means that while regulatory uncertainty creates an indirect tax on all companies, it disproportionately benefits those who maintain robust decarbonization strategies. Corporate net-zero strategy, a key pillar of sustainability, goes beyond disclosure requirements and demands measurable, science-based actions to reduce and neutralize emissions across the entire value chain. Through my work with large enterprises on decarbonisation, I have seen firsthand how pioneer companies that prioritize emissions reductions across their value chain can secure preferential financing, strengthen supplier relationships, and enhance brand loyalty—creating sustainable competitive moats that laggards will struggle to replicate. Double materiality is not just about reporting - it is a strategic lens through which businesses can future-proof their operations while enhancing supply chain resilience.
The challenge: Lack of scientific clarity on net-zero pathways
Despite growing recognition of sustainability's importance, corporations face a fundamental challenge: the absence of clear, science-based pathways to net-zero. We lack clarity on what a net-zero world would look like—which industry-specific levers to deploy, considering technological evolution, at what costs, and with what contingency plans. Critical questions remain unanswered: what constitutes 'residual emissions' for a given company within an industry, and how much must organizations reduce within their value chains before resorting to carbon credit offsets? This uncertainty leaves businesses vulnerable to missteps—either risking corporate climate integrity, as flagged by the UN High-Level Expert Group (2022), or leading to 'greenhushing', where corporations downplay their climate progress for fear of backlash and greenwashing accusations.
Addressing corporate net-zero pathways requires a holistic approach with robust science-based guidelines spanning the entire corporate journey—from emission accounting and target setting to identifying key hotspots, assessing decarbonization levers and costs, implementing actions, tracking progress, and developing long-term net-zero strategies. While corporations receive support through existing frameworks such as the GHG Protocol for emission accounting and the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) for target setting and progress tracking, translating commitments into action faces two fundamental and interdependent challenges. First, SBTi's reliance on accounting conventions that, while 'acceptable' under the GHG Protocol, leaves clear gaps that can be exploited to evade accountability for value chain emissions. Second, the absence of robust scientific methodologies for complex value chains—often referred to as Scope 3 emissions, which typically represent 70-90% of total emissions—and sectoral interdependencies creates additional uncertainty. Without a structured, science-driven
approach, corporations risk making arbitrary or ineffective decisions, weakening the credibility of their climate commitments, eroding stakeholder trust, and ultimately jeopardizing long-term financial performance. Combined with shifting regulatory winds, these fundamental gaps are leaving sustainability practitioners in limbo where 'return on investment' considerations are once again taking center stage.
How science can close the gap: Developing industry-specific net-zero blueprints
The science of decarbonization has traditionally taken two broad approaches: a top-down focus on national targets and sectoral pathways—such as energy, agriculture, transportation, and heavy industry—and a bottom-up approach emphasizing individual behavior change. Between these national strategies and individual behavioral interventions, corporations play a pivotal role in decarbonization. However, developing individual net-zero strategies for each company is impractical given the scale of the challenge and resource constraints.
Instead, science must focus at the industry level, where companies with similar value chains and emission profiles can adopt science-based net-zero blueprints tailored to their shared challenges. For example, in the food and beverage industry, companies face common emission hotspots including agriculture, processing, packaging waste, and logistics. An industry-level net-zero strategy would establish standardized emissions accounting methodologies, realistic decarbonization targets aligned with climate science, cost-effective reduction levers, and robust monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) frameworks—ensuring coherent action across businesses while allowing for company-specific implementation.
Without such industry-specific blueprints, companies struggle to translate broad sectoral goals into actionable corporate strategies, leading to fragmented efforts, inconsistent methodologies, and misalignment with national climate policies. This gap undermines both individual corporate credibility and collective climate impact. Science must bridge this divide by developing granular, industry-tailored pathways that make net-zero strategies both scalable and effective in accelerating climate action.
By shifting toward science-based industry-specific net-zero blueprints, corporations can transition from reactive, compliance-driven approaches to proactive, strategic decarbonization pathways—essential for maintaining business viability, competitiveness, and resilience in a rapidly decarbonizing global economy.
Aligning corporate and government policies
Nation states can also benefit from clear scientific guidelines to craft effective, economically viable climate policies. Many governments that pledged to the Paris Agreement face a dual challenge: ensuring economic stability while driving decarbonization at the pace and scale required by climate science.
By adopting science-backed, industry-specific net-zero blueprints, policymakers can:
• Develop targeted incentive programs that reward corporations with credible, science-aligned decarbonization roadmaps
• Safeguard jobs and foster industrial competitiveness during the transition to a low-carbon economy
• Address unavoidable residual emissions through scientifically validated carbon removal strategies rather than relying on questionable offset mechanisms
• Create regulatory frameworks that provide the long-term certainty businesses need for strategic investment decisions
With these clearer insights, policymakers can design smarter regulatory mechanisms that drive genuine emissions reductions while maintaining economic stability and social equity. Science-driven, industry-specific strategies represent the missing link between corporate climate ambition and effective government policy implementation.
In times of crisis let science lead the way
As policy uncertainty persists and corporate sustainability faces increasing scrutiny from multiple stakeholders, one principle emerges clearly—science must lead the way forward.
Businesses and governments alike cannot afford to rely on fragmented strategies, vague targets, or reactive policy shifts that undermine long-term planning and investment. Industry-specific, science-based net-zero blueprints provide the clarity, accountability, and strategic direction needed to transform climate ambition into measurable action and tangible results.
The organizations that embrace science-driven sustainability today will not only future-proof their operations against climate risks and regulatory shifts but will position themselves at the forefront of a resilient, competitive low-carbon economy. In an era of unprecedented global challenges, scientific rigor offers the most reliable compass for navigating toward a sustainable future.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
