Don’t be alarmed. The sustainability teams are coming

In 2025, the sustainability department isn’t the cool kid on the block anymore. The IRA tax credits are no longer fueling a boom in climate tech investment. Net zero and climate transition plans are no longer a staple of press releases, unless it’s about rolling them back. And ESG is just another string of letters—many investors don’t even know what they stand for.

“The tourists are gone,” as Mark Gudiksen, managing partner at Piva Capital, told CFO Brew. But that just leaves one place for sustainability practices to go—into a real business unit that can drive value for the company. And that means they’re going to start knocking on the CFO’s door.

Next steps. “Rigor and accountability is what [sustainability leaders] wanted,” Karimah Hudda, founder and chief catalyst at Illumine.Earth, said in a session on how ESG leaders can shift their role from compliance to strategic value at Trellis Impact 25 in San Jose last week. “We wanted to become part of the business.”

Even if government-regulated sustainability disclosures have stalled in the US, regulation is coming from Europe (albeit watered down), California, and Australia. According to Jessica Hyman, chief sustainability officer at Atlassian, her sustainability team plans to lean on the CFO and accounting teams’ expertise in mandatory reporting.

“I haven’t done mandatory reporting before,” she said during the Trellis Impact session. “I’ve been playing in the voluntary sustainability space. The accounting team has spent a lot of time there, and they probably have business processes and expertise.”

Jennifer Evans, executive director of sustainability and social Impact at Bristol Myers Squibb, noted during the session that investors are already looking at reports. She’s heard of investors comparing impact reports to 10-Ks and other disclosures. If something is listed as a risk on one, it needs to be listed as a risk on all company documents.

“We have to work in lockstep with those teams to make sure what they’re saying is what we’re saying,” she said.

Hyman is also pushing her team to revisit its work “in the context of company goals,” instead of through the lens of sustainability achievements like net zero, or moving her team beyond just being “climate champions.” She even went so far as to reevaluate the entire business case for sustainability and climate action. By doing that, she started speaking the CFO’s language of “operational efficiency:” How can her team save the company money and “get the business leaders to run a more efficient ship?”

“They want to care,” Hudda said of CFOs. “But they want to understand in their own ways.”