Why 2030 cramps our imaginations
From the perspective of 2037, if you can imagine yourself there for a moment, the “great deadline panic” of 2028 and 2029 already reads like deep history. Leaders frozen in the oncoming headlights, acutely aware they would miss targets they had declared in public. Some did not much care, arguing the numbers had been set by long-departed predecessors. But others fretted that the failure would further corrode citizen, voter, consumer and investor trust—as, in the event, it often did.
It had already become blindingly clear that the Sustainable Development Goals would fall well short. The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026 confirmed it with four years still on the clock. Li Junhua, then UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, put it plainly at the time: of the 139 targets for which reliable historical trends could be computed, only 36 per cent were on track or making moderate progress. Nearly half were moving too slowly. Fifteen per cent had slipped below their 2015 baseline.
Progress, yes. But nowhere near the promises made in the peak period of public commitments. And that’s why I conclude that we are going to relax at least some of our deadlines.
Why the 2037 horizon trumps 2030
Why? Well, recall Amara’s Law. We tend to overestimate a technology’s effects in the short run but underestimate them in the long run. The same holds true for the devoutly prayed-for sustainability transition. In headline form, that’s the case for resetting our collective clock.
And the date is not arbitrary. 2037 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Brundtland Commission’s Our Common Future, the report that gave “sustainable development” its modern meaning. Which is perhaps the natural moment to ask what half a century of effort has delivered.
Looking back from that same 2037 perspective, the late 2020s turned out to be the low point of what some saw as a giant economic and political U-bend. A time when stressed, interconnected systems—climate, energy, finance, food, supply chains, information—behaved less like machines than ecosystems, prone to sudden, cascading shifts.
It was a time of Swans, “Black Swans” in Nassim Taleb’s terminology, that is rare, high-impact events, obvious only in hindsight. But also of Grey Swans, which had been obvious for quite some time, but still surprised many. And then there were the Green Swans—my mirror-image term for exponential, positive, self-reinforcing breakthroughs that flip systems toward regeneration.
In search of pointers to the future, let’s look at the mysterious case of the vanishing Chief Sustainability Officer, or CSO, and at the long-standing challenge of embedding more radical people, with insurgent mindsets, in incumbent organisations.
The vanishing CSO
The Chief Sustainability Officer role emerged in the new century’s first decade—the title usually traced to DuPont’s Linda Fisher, appointed around 2004—with roots in the environment, health-and-safety and corporate-responsibility functions of the 1980s and ‘90s. It spread fast as net-zero pledges, ESG ratings, disclosure rules and supply-chain checks multiplied, until 79 per cent of large companies had one by 2025.
Then came the turn. With the ESG recession, political pushback and cost-cutting, the Weinreb Group’s 2026 tracker showed the number of US CSOs falling for the first time in fifteen years, and average seniority declining with it. Many still in post reported experiencing burnout.
By the 2030s, many core responsibilities had moved outward—to the CFO, who now routinely priced climate risk, and to chief risk, legal and economics officers. This left the empty corner office genuinely ambiguous from the viewpoint of 2037. It could mean sustainability had finally become everyone’s job. Or it could mean quiet abandonment. From outside the building, the two look pretty much identical.
Still, to be honest, one member of our Routes to Transformation team expressed strong doubts about any downward trend in CSO-related roles and function. Mark Lee, director of ERM’s Sustainability Institute, noted:
Vanishing CSO? I doubt it. Like your avatar Léa, I think the CSO is useful for accountability—and for wider expertise. And I see titles like this cropping up: “Vice President, Head of Enterprise Sustainability,” suggesting rebranding (as we are also seeing with sustainable investment). My bet is we keep CSO or similar figures and mandates (as we have seen with HR and Finance), where “everyone in the business is a people/finance—and now sustainability—leader,” but where a specialist function still sets strategy and leads/coaches others. And still does a meaningful chunk of work directly too.
Tempered, not broken
Underneath the question of what job description and office are needed sits a harder one. How do you plant radical ideas, and radical individuals, inside established institutions without the idea or the person being absorbed, burned out or otherwise lost along the way? Remember the parable of new wine in old bottles?
We now know a good deal about this. The main label, tempered radical, comes from Debra Meyerson and Maureen Scully: people who feel connected to their organization but disagree with some of its values, and so push for change gradually, through small wins rather than open revolt. A close cousin is the social intrapreneur, making the case for social or environmental innovation in the company’s own language—an idea that travelled through SustainAbility’s 2008 field guide, a project I co-led with Maggie Brenneke, and through the later work of David Grayson and colleagues.
Such people are disproportionately valuable and disproportionately at risk. The classic failure modes are burnout, cynicism, co-option, and unnoticed exits that take hard-won tacit knowledge out the door. Isolation is the common thread. Many we have spoken to over the years describe it as being in a minority of one.
What helps them last is unglamorous and well-evidenced: peer networks that normalize the struggle; senior sponsorship, so nobody faces every fight alone; legitimacy and framing skills; a real mandate with protected time and a small budget; career paths where challenging the institution advances a career rather than ending it. You cannot simply hire radicals and expect results—you must build an enabling system around them.
Early respondents to our 2026 Routes to Transformation survey made one further distinction I keep returning to. Asked what “radical” should now mean, some redefined it: not a dramatic break from the system, they said, but the hard, realistic work of changing it from inside. Radicalism measured by how much it transforms an institution, not by how loudly it opposes one. My sense, though, is that this is internal radicalism—whereas what we increasingly need is external radicalism, reinventing markets and, ultimately, politics.
The advisory board’s take
Again, there are disagreements. Léa makes the accountability case well. “A named officer can be held to account. A responsibility ‘shared across the C-suite’ can end up being held by no one. I don’t want the office preserved for its own sake—I want the duty to outlast the office. Absorb the job if you must. But write down who owns it and make the outcomes blindingly clear, or you haven’t embedded it. You’ve buried it.”
Kwame pushes back. “In my markets we never had the luxury of a separate sustainability office. It was in the business, or it was nothing.” Hiving the work off into a titled role always looked to him like a Global North indulgence, and the vanishing CSO reads as the rest of the world catching up. His test is financial, and the sharpest in the session. “I care about one thing—whether the money follows the mandate. Move the work to the CFO and fund it, and you’ve made it real. Move it there and starve it, and you’ve just hidden your retreat.”
Maya admits to some confusion. “If they’re moving the work to the CFO because they mean it, fine. If they’re moving it there so nobody must answer for it, that’s a layoff with a nicer press release. I’ve stopped assuming I can tell which.” On the support systems meant to keep insiders alive: “A mentorship scheme and a wellness app is not support. It’s a sedative. Give me protected time, a small budget and a boss who takes the blows when I push, and I’ll stay and get this right.”
