Why 2037 trumps 2030

This is article 4 of 4 in The New Age of Sustainability series. Here is article 3.

Roy Amara’s law holds that we overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. The same is true of change agendas. In that spirit, 2030 is close enough that we can already judge it by what is visibly failing. 2037, by contrast, is far enough out to be judged by what has actually compounded over the intervening decade.

There is a harder-edged reason to move our time horizon. 2030 falls inside what I have long called the U-bend. That is the dip where the system in place – here, the order built after the Second World War – has run out of steam, while the systems that will replace it are not yet on their feet. The bottom of the U is the worst place from which to judge anything.

The UN sustainability goals will expire while the disruption is still building. Their targets will be missed, and the verdict will land at the worst possible point in the cycle. It will be read as the failure of sustainability itself, rather than of one particular theory of how change happens.

Our 610 experts have already priced the outcome: 10% believe the world reaches net zero by 2050, 5% that most companies meet their 2030 climate goals. Are they right to be so despondent? If we continue with the current approach, probably. But the clear signal from our respondents is that, even if they don’t have all the answers, system change is now urgently needed.

2037 will be the fiftieth anniversary of Our Common Future, the Brundtland report that started all this. That is time enough for completely unexpected positive developments to gain real traction, Green Swans as I have called them.

What the horizon has to hold

Stretch the planning window to 2037 and two kinds of event come into view that a 2030 frame leaves out.

Gray Rhinos, as the first piece in this series set out, are highly probable, high-consequence and neglected. Rhinos already in view include a China–Taiwan blockade, with 2027 the widely cited readiness window, severing advanced-semiconductor supply and freezing the world’s busiest shipping lane; estimates of the damage run to $10 trillion of global GDP.

Alternatively, you might want to worry about “Q-day” arriving before post-quantum migration is finished. About the H5N1 virus gaining human-to-human transmission. Or even about a VEI-7 volcanic eruption, at roughly one chance in six this century and among the most underpriced factors in most people’s risk registers.

Almost none of this is currently priced in. And yet almost all of it sits inside a 2037 planning horizon, even if almost none of it fits inside a 2030 one. These sorts of disruptions are not a separate agenda from the sustainability transition. Instead, they suggest the sort of conditions under which the transition will actually have to be delivered.

The herd in plain sight – fifteen disruptions ranked by whether they are hurting or helping progress, with access to renewable energy the only one running the other way

Green swans, meanwhile, are the same logic running the other way: exponential, potentially regenerative shifts that tip faster than anyone expects. The anchor is the solar–storage–electrification nexus – not one curve but many, the cheapest electrical power in human history pulling everything else along. Renewable energy access is rated as 78% positive, the strongest enabler in our survey.

One key accelerant is AI for science: revolutionary work on such things as materials, grids, drug and crop discovery, and nuclear fusion. Then there is repricing. Carbon pricing, the EU’s carbon charge on imports and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) all put a price on damage that has so far been free. And once something carries a price, it can be owned, traded and invested in. Carbon, nature and water are becoming asset classes.

But green swans do not promise a series of soft landings. Instead, they signal a different kind of turbulence. The same compounding logic that makes solar cheap also leaves oil refineries worthless long before the end of their working lives, and concentrates power in the hands of whoever owns the new choke points.

Every green swan produces losers, and losers vote, lobby and litigate. A green swan turns into a gray rhino when its side effects are foreseeable but ignored. The risk is adoption that doubles and doubles again, governed by rules that improve one committee meeting at a time.

Two forces that only resolve on a 2037 view

The first is the hardening nexus of liability. In the US, state litigation against Meta has been one proof of concept: in March 2026 a California jury found Meta and Google (via YouTube) liable for addictive design – the first verdict treating a social platform as a defective product – and in August, 29 state attorneys general settled for roughly $17 billion with court-ordered product defaults attached.

Indeed, litigation capacity may prove the most underpriced asset in the system, and the frontier is expanding from environmental issues to social ones, including youth mental health, algorithmic harm, and labour conditions in value chains. Our experts rate the judicial system 61% on impact, up five. In the Meta case, a court delivered in one settlement what a decade of voluntary standards could not. Despite attempts to undermine it, the law and courts are likely to be called on increasingly as backstops.

The second force centres on generational change. Some $80–140 trillion is likely to pass from the Baby Boomers to younger, more values-driven heirs by mid-century, and with the money, at least potentially, comes a values handover.

Fifty-five percent of our respondents say the sustainability community itself needs generational change, against 8% who disagree. Academics – the group closest to the incoming generation – turn out to be the most radical constituency in the survey, at 77% for radical revision.

What we are asking of you

This series of articles has been built around our just-launched Green Paper, in which we are testing five assumptions in public. Each is a condition that would have to hold for Ken Pucker’s verdict – that sustainability is moving from soft to nearly invisible – to be proved wrong. They are as follows:

1. First, that 2025 was the floor rather than a pause in an ongoing weakening of the sustainability agenda – with some arguing that 2030 will be the nadir of the field’s fortunes.
2. Second, that regulatory enforcement capacity will survive the politics in key jurisdictions.
3. Third, that the new cast of corporate and institutional actors will accept the agenda being imposed on them – so far, we have inferred it from the levers mentioned by our respondents; we did not ask them directly.
4. Fourth, that price signals can move faster than the physical damage. And, if so, in what circumstances?
5. Then, fifth, that at least some of the instruments built for voluntary disclosure will harden and transfer to tax authorities, insurance underwriters, and legal experts.

If you think any of those is wrong, and are prepared to share your reasoning, we would much rather hear it now than in 2030, let alone in 2037.

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