Provoking Discourse
A new survey of experts in the global sustainability community shows a majority of the 844 respondents think a "radical revision" is needed in the sustainability agenda.
Today, a panel from the business-focused-sustainability community presented results from a collaborative survey and study, “Sustainability at a Crossroads.” The work was prompted by the idea that governments, businesses, and other organizations are failing to deliver on the sustainability agenda. Chief among those organizations is the Congress of the Parties (COP) — “the supreme decision-making body” of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — which turns thirty this year and hold its annual meeting (COP 30) this November in Belém, Brazil.
“[U.S. President] Trump is a gift to our industry,” said one of the panelists, “because he is forcing us to think very differently.” Indeed, as previously reported on SustainLab, President Trump has now twice pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, one of the signature deals from the UNFCC (adopted at COP 21 in 2015). The U.S. Congress also recently delivered to President Trump legislation (“TOBBA”) that backslides even more on U.S. commitments to sustainability policies. Now signed into law, if TOBBA is enacted as written (always a question with the Trump Administration), it could kick off a “race to the bottom” in which even more organizations and governments ignore or rollback sustainability/environmental regulations (but please note that such a race can be avoided).
“Trump is a gift to our industry
because he is forcing us to think very differently.”
— John Elkington
As expected, the people whose business is to advise other businesses on sustainability distributed their “Sustainability at a Crossroads” survey results widely and highlighted particularly that “ninety-three percent of experts say the sustainability agenda needs revision, while more than half of those surveyed (56 percent) call for a radical overhaul.”
It was expected because, after all, helping businesses revise and overhaul sustainability measures is what the authors and panelists do:
Moderator: Mark Lee, ERM — a sustainability consultancy
Chris Coulter, CEO, GlobeScan — an insights and advisory firm
Clarissa Lins, Founding Partner, Catavento — strategy and sustainability consultancy
John Elkington, Founder & Chief Pollinator, Volans — a collective of experts advising on systemic change
Louise Kjellerup Roper, CEO, Volans
To those results, I am certain I am not alone in my skepticism (though I do not call myself a skeptic, I’m just hard to convince). Indeed, caution runs deep among journalists generally. But it also runs deep in the sustainability community about messaging, including who delivers the message. That caution includes even using the word “crossroads.” For example. Public Inc.’s Caleigh Farrell takes issue with crossroads framing because it “suggests we’re facing two equally viable paths: one that honors people and planet, and another that doubles down on unchecked capitalism and rising nationalism.”
For Farrell, “planet trumps politics — and it will trump their business, too, if they don’t act.” And to be fair to the “Sustainability at a Crossroads” panel, that message is also what I heard at today’s presentation and discussion. That’s even though some of the survey results as presented were overblown and could even be misleading. For example, in one graph (below), results were misleading because the horizontal axis was labeled to give the appearance of an overly steep decline.
The “Sustainability at a Crossroads” results also did not define what “sustainable development” or “progress” means, among other terms. So each of the 844 “qualified, highly experienced sustainability experts across 72 countries” surveyed may have had a different definition (a similar critique to that made previously on SustainLab about Morgan Stanley’s Sustainable Signals 2025 report).
All that said, the “Sustainability at a Crossroads” report did offer some information that was both easy to understand and useful, such as respondents attitudes and mindsets. For example, the authors segmented the 844 respondents into one of four mindsets — traditionalists, institutionalists, pathfinders, and radicals — and noted that all four groups think the sustainability agenda needs revision.
In other words, the survey/study authors themselves segmented their 844 survey respondents into the groups, with Chris Coulter, CEO of GlobeScan saying during the presentation that a statistical analysis (unpublished) showed “quite a robust segmentation.”
Traditionalists (42 percent of respondents) are the most aligned with the current agenda, favoring continuity and incremental improvements….
Institutionalists (9 percent) believe in strengthening institutional accountability. With a technocratic mindset and a strong presence in government and corporate roles, they favor regulatory tools like mandatory reporting and central bank oversight….
Pathfinders (23 percent) are reform-minded and optimistic, and they largely work in the corporate and government sectors….
Radicals (26 percent) are the most dissatisfied with the status quo. Predominantly from academia and NGOs, and concentrated in Europe, North America, and Oceania, they call for a radical overhaul of the sustainability agenda….
-- Excerpted from the Sustainability at a Crossroads report, published 15 July 2025Planet trumps politics — and it will
trump their business, too, if they don’t act.”
— Caleigh Farrell
So the headlining 93% agreement — that the sustainability agenda needs revision — even among these diverse mindsets/groups provokes discourse on what those revisions to the sustainability agenda should be. Such provocation was particularly evident in the Zoom chat (to which I contributed as well) and the number of questions put to the panelists.
Provoking discourse also aligns with the underlying framing of SustainLab itself: it is important to discuss sustainability because that presupposition of its importance, in turn, is used to derive “oughts,” such as we ought to clarify actionable approaches to sustainability and even we ought to act on those approaches.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of people — including especially in the U.S. — who are discouraged from discussing sustainability in all its many forms because of the backsliding on sustainability actions by the Trump Administration. Every day, it can seem even more discouraging, such as yesterday’s news that the Trump Administration says it won’t publish major climate change reports on NASA website as promised (Associated Press), which will make it “harder to find major, legally mandated scientific assessments of how climate change is endangering the nation and its people.” Harder to find means harder to discuss.
But whether a “New Art [is'] Needed for the Climate Change Deal” to get the Trump Administration again cooperating with the international community…
….or something else entirely does it (such as appealing to the presumed self-interestedness of the president’s youngest son)…,
…or there are still-to-be-defined “radical revisions” for a sustainable future and limiting climate change (the “Sustainability at a Crossroads” report)…
…it is talking about sustainability that encourages even more talk about sustainability, all of which drives action for sustainability. In short, talk begets talk and silence begets silence. That’s a feature of human behavior shown time and again for most any topic, including climate change, all of which continues to build evidence for the landmark “Spiral of Silence” theory proposed in 1974 (which itself presented evidence of Alexis de Tocqueville’s 19th-century analysis in which he wrote (in translation) “more frightened of isolation than of committing an error, they joined the masses even though they did not agree with them”).
So please — in the interest of provoking discourse about sustainability — share this post, discuss it, and invite others to do so as well.
In your habitat, what prevents you from talking with others about climate change, sustainable development, or sustainability in general?