Sustainability Book of the Year 2026: Announcing the Winners

📚 Read more about the Sustainability Book of the Year finalists

Good writing changes minds. There has been no shortage of facts on the scale of the climate crisis, yet the data has struggled to move hearts in a time of fatigue and fragmentation. A successful ecological transition requires trust, imagination, and responsibility in the global community, and is consequently a cultural challenge as much as a technical one.

Books about climate and sustainability have never been more plentiful. Finding the ones that actually matter to the professionals driving the transition is a different challenge. As one of the world's leading sustainability data and media platforms, reaching over 700,000 readers globally from C-suite executives to policymakers, illuminem holds a unique position to celebrate the most influential works in sustainability of our time.

We invited everyone in our community to nominate their favourite sustainability book, either recent or yet to be published, and most nominees made it onto our shortlist. We then turned to you – our followers on linkedin and our dedicated Club members, to cast votes on your chosen winner.

Twelve nominated titles. Two voting channels – illuminem's LinkedIn community, which cast 1,012 votes, and our illuminem Club members, who submitted 132 responses. The final ranking reflects the results from both channels. The nominees are pioneering books shaping the way the community reads, debates, and acts on sustainability every day.

To read more about the books on this ranking, click here.

Top 3 by LinkedIn community vote

1. The Carbon Paradox — Renat Heuberger, Steve Zwick & Marco Hirsbrunner

2. Standardising Carbon Markets, Improving Transparency — Kalyani Inampudi & Jonathan Rackoff

3. The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives — Sybil Derrible

Top 3 by illuminem Club vote

1. The Carbon Paradox — Renat Heuberger, Steve Zwick & Marco Hirsbrunner

2. Connecting the Dots: Environment, Health, Safety, and Human Rights — Kathy A. Seabrook & Tanis Marquette

3. Nature as Capital — Markus Müller & Anna Katharina Meyer

Sustainability Book of the Year in English: The Carbon Paradox

Renat Heuberger, Steve Zwick & Marco Hirsbrunner | 38.2% of the combined vote

The Carbon Paradox takes the English-language category by a considerable margin. A fictional work based on facts, it confronts one of the thorniest questions of our time: how do we fund real climate action in an imperfect world?

Three university students, galvanised by a viral video of a girl swept away by floodwaters, travel to the tropics of Demba to help implement carbon-funded climate solutions and find themselves working through twenty-five paradoxes hiding in plain sight. Every fix sparks new dilemmas that challenge everything they thought they knew about climate finance and global justice.

As Steve Zwick has put it, there is too much technical detail out there for a casual reader to absorb, and traditional policy books are too abstract and theoretical even for experts. Framing the book as a coming-of-age novel was a deliberate attempt to make the complex universe of carbon markets accessible without oversimplifying it.

The book began life on illuminem itself as a series published one year ago for the illuminem community, starting with The Paradox of Carbon Credits. illuminem has long been home to the most trusted carbon academy in the field, having trained thousands of sustainability professionals on carbon topics entirely for free.

About the authors

Renat Heuberger is a Swiss serial entrepreneur and impact investor active in climate and nature technology since 1999. He launched myclimate, one of the first voluntary carbon offset organisations, before co-founding South Pole, which he helped grow from a startup into one of the world's leading climate finance companies. Channelling investment into nearly 1,000 projects across more than 50 countries, it has contributed to the reduction of over one billion tonnes of CO₂. He has been recognised as a Social Entrepreneur by the World Economic Forum's Schwab Foundation and serves as co-founder and CEO of Terra Impact Ventures.

Steve Zwick is an environmental consultant, analyst, and journalist whose career traces the intersection of finance, media, and climate, from the trading pits of Chicago to covering European business for TIME and Fortune, where he earned two shortlistings for Business Journalist of the Year. He previously served as Managing Editor of Ecosystem Marketplace and is the founder of the Bionic Planet podcast, focused on environmental finance.

Marco Hirsbrunner is a Swiss entrepreneur and impact investor who co-founded Terra Impact Ventures and was instrumental in building South Pole's operations across East and Southeast Asia. He currently serves as co-CEO of Svarmi, an Icelandic company specialising in geospatial and nature data.

Sustainability Book of the Year in Original Language: The Environmental Republic

Giulio Boccaletti | 9.3% of the combined vote

Forthcoming from Princeton University Press, The Environmental Republic challenges the false choice between environmental protection and human freedom, making the case that place-based institutions can deliver both sustainability and human development through genuine self-governance. Boccaletti reclaims republicanism as the political framework best suited to a planet under environmental stress, reframing the natural world not as a constraint on liberty but as its republican foundation, and positioning the environmental republic as the serious alternative to technocratic management, activist moralism, and the organised scepticism of vested interests. 

It is a deliberately political argument, and one that goes against the tide. Where much of the sustainability debate has retreated into technical optimism or moral exhortation, Boccaletti insists the core failure is institutional. The illuminem community agrees.

About the author

Giulio Boccaletti is a globally recognised expert on natural resource security and environmental sustainability. Trained as a physicist and climate scientist, he holds a doctorate from Princeton University, where he was a NASA Earth Systems Science Fellow. He has held senior positions at MIT, McKinsey & Company, and The Nature Conservancy, where he served as chief strategy officer and global ambassador for water. 

He is currently Scientific Director of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. His previous book, Water: A Biography, was named among The Economist's best books of 2021 and translated into nine languages. His Italian-language works, Siccità and Il Futuro della Natura, have established him as a leading voice for European and non-anglophone audiences on environmental issues.

A final word

The sustainability transition will not be won by data alone. It will be won by the people who understand it deeply enough to explain it, argue for it, and inspire others along the way. The books in this list are foundational to that work.

It is heartening to see that thousands of readers have discovered and engaged with these titles through the momentum of this award: proof that when a community of practitioners turns its attention to a book, the ripple effect is real.

Congratulations to all twelve nominees, and to this year's winners. illuminem will open nominations for the second edition of the Sustainability Book of the Year Award in due course. Follow illuminem on LinkedIn to stay informed on all the latest on sustainability, or join the illuminem Club to walk the walk with us.

illuminem's medals for the 2026 Sustainability Book of the Year Winner and Finalists

The publisher-updated front cover of Renat Heuberger's "The Carbon Paradox" featuring illuminem's medal