Dec 3, 2025 6 min read CSO

Data, practicality and resilience: Chief Sustainability Officers share 2026 predictions

With regulation taking a backseat next year, the focus will be on efficient reporting, resilience and local action.

Melodie Michel

As a tumultuous year comes to an end, Chief Sustainability Officers are preparing to focus on practical, locally-based and data-driven solutions to increase business resilience in 2026.

2025 saw regulators in Europe and the US walk back previous initiatives to increase corporate transparency around sustainability: the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate disclosure rule was buried for good under the Trump administration, and the sustainability Omnibus drastically reduced the scope of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) in Europe.

Most of the sustainability leaders in CSO Futures’ network agree that compliance will not be the main driver of action next year. “Looking at 2026 and beyond, it is clear that we are – at least the foreseeable future – past peak sustainability disclosure regulation,” as Riikka Paarma, Chief Strategy and Sustainability Officer at global indoor air solutions provider Halton.

That said, the focus on transparent reporting remains, driven largely by customer and investor expectations. Lamé Verre, Director - Net Zero at The Crown Estate, believes that as compliance becomes less of a driver, “companies will move from box ticking to more integrated reporting” – more operationally and stakeholder-driven, with a growing focus on transformative data and KPIs.

From compliance to value: Watch CSO Futures' webinar on how sustainability leaders can prepare for 2026

AI, data and transparent reporting

The shift from ‘reporting for reporting’s sake’ to collecting and communicating data with a clear ambition to drive decision-making and action started some months ago: in January 2025, CDP CEO Sherry Madera and Fidelity International CSO Jenn-Hui Tan shared their advice on how to turn reporting from a tickbox exercise to an engine of change, investment and growth in a CSO Futures webinar titled ‘Data for action’.

Adam Read, Chief Sustainability Officer, SUEZ UK, notes: “We are seeing demand for explicit data from our customers that goes well beyond straightforward reporting; they want a clear, granular understanding of the real-world outcomes we create for them – be it carbon reduction, greater resource efficiency, waste reduction, biodiversity uplift, more circular material flows or positive social value.”

“Ensuring our customer facing teams have the guidance and support to fully reflect this offering to our market – and are able to transform the data into compelling real-world stories – will be one of our main focuses throughout the coming 12 months,” he adds.

In this context, CSOs are also attempting to reduce the time their team spends on data collection and reporting by focusing on the most material data points and unifying the many different reports they previously produced for different stakeholders.

They’re also likely to turn to AI-powered solutions – with Microsoft CSO Melanie Nakagawa famously stating that AI freed up 70% of her team’s time last year.

Alex Holt, Chief Sustainability Officer at supermarket chain Ahold Delhaize, believes data and AI will be used as “accelerators” in 2026: “Continued progress in turning measurement into management, enabling retailers to better map true footprint of products from farm to shelf, and give customers clearer information with each passing year. Expect a sharper focus on quantifying the business value of sustainability initiatives, with measurement and data-driven decisions becoming the engine for real progress.”

Resilience at the centre of the narrative

While ‘sustainability’ and ‘ESG’ may have become divisive terms over the last year, everyone can rally around the concept of resilience – encompassing both climate and profitability. Chief Sustainability Officers have long been aware of the need to be more inclusive and avoid antagonising people with acronyms and technical jargon, and they may just have found the right angle with resilience.

“The sustainability transition, particularly in the areas of decarbonisation and circular business models, has not gone away. Sustainability is growingly interlinked with resilience – be it energy security or materials supply – and current geopolitical trends may well accelerate certain areas of the green transition,” explains Paarma at Halton.

Holt is also seeing resilience as a key piece in the 2026 sustainability puzzle, particularly for the food system: “As geopolitical uncertainty and climate pressures challenge supply chains, partnerships with farmers and suppliers on regenerative agriculture remain critical, and long-term security of key ingredients is essential.” She adds that a top priority for Ahold Delhaize next year will be “making the healthier choice the easy choice”.

“Healthier diets are not only better for people – they’re better for the planet and for business. Making nutritious, affordable, and more sustainable food the easy, everyday choice delivers co-benefits across health, climate, and long-term growth. Affordability will remain central, and a new wave of collaboration and technology (including personalisation) helps increasingly realise this,” Holt says.

In this context, Verre expects ⁠an “amplification of the food-water-energy nexus and its impact on lives and livelihoods”, enhanced by the cost of living crisis. “There’s a consensus that net zero might make us poorer in the short term but better in the long term,” she adds.

And while the concept of resilience has the power to unite a wide variety of people and teams, CSOs have their work cut out for them when it comes to translating it into concrete financial terms – think lost value assessments – and operationalising it.

“For Chief Sustainability Officers and their teams, the task is to translate this into actionable roadmaps for their organisation – setting ambitious but realistic targets, securing the necessary resources, and instituting the governance to drive execution and track progress. It also requires confident leadership in guiding the organization through change, adopting new technologies (AI), and upskilling talent. Today, sustainability spans far beyond environmental and social stewardship. It encompasses business transformation, data management, analytics, and empowering people across the company to make a positive impact, regardless of where they sit in the organization,” warns Vivi Hollert, Chief Sustainability Officer at specialty chemicals firm Nouryon.

Commercialising sustainability in a practical (and local) way

Hollert sees 2026 as a milestone year when it comes to the strategic integration of sustainability into business processes, which, to her, essentially means “commercialising sustainability – embedding it into the customer value proposition and using it to drive innovation, differentiation, and growth”.

“Companies are prioritising tangible actions and credible commitments that create real value for both the business and its stakeholders – including customers, investors, employees, suppliers, communities, and society at large,” she adds.

This may also mean more sustainability support for smaller players in large companies’ supply chains. As Verre puts it: “Businesses are starting to recognise they cannot deliver without the supply chain, which is made up of SMEs.”

Tangible actions will often involve a shift from a global view of sustainability – driven by a central team in corporate headquarters – to local partnerships, particularly as companies start to integrate their climate and nature strategies.

"For me, sustainability delivers its greatest value when businesses work shoulder to shoulder with local stakeholders to identify what really matters on the ground and drive change that reflects each place’s strengths and needs. Although, this must be paired with convening power and engagement on a national level to help drive forward policy, scale successful pilots, and bridge funding gaps,” notes Fiona Hyde, Head of Sustainability at Santander UK.

Her main prediction for 2026 is a focus on place-based, two-way convening, to turn local priorities into investable, scalable solutions through national influence – which she sees as “the single most important driver of an inclusive, measurable transition."

“This two-way approach – listening locally, while influencing nationally – creates real outcomes: new jobs and stronger local economies, which results in a transition that people recognise as fair and practical, not abstract,” Hyde adds.

A ‘landmark year’ for the circular economy

For Read at SUEZ UK, 2026 will be “a landmark year” due to the simultaneous roll-out of major legislation to spur a more circular economy in the UK: “Extended Producer Responsibility, Simpler Recycling, the initiation of the Packaging Deposit Return Scheme and preparing solutions for the capture and reprocessing of flexible plastics – and the introduction of the ETS on our energy from waste facilities and the passing of costs back to our customers – will dramatically impact the landscape,” he says.

“I believe sustainability professionals have a huge role to play in demonstrating the ‘art of the possible’ in circular economy innovation and, through insightful thought leadership, can bridge the gap between seemingly abstract environmental policy and practical business operations for our customers.”

This focus on practical implementation for real-life outcomes is common amongst the sustainability professionals interviewed by CSO Futures. For Halton, 2026 will be a year of “operationalising sustainability”, with a particular focus on anchoring sustainable design principles into product development and innovation, according to Paarma.

“Externally, we continue to deepen the collaboration with leading customers and customer industry alliances on various sustainability pilots, ranging from energy efficiency solutions for the hospitality industry to life-cycle assessment, sustainability data, and sustainable design projects with key customers across energy, maritime, and construction,” she adds, noting that all of these are meant to add value for all stakeholders.

Finally, it’s likely that the sustainability conversation will expand far beyond its euro-centric gaze in 2026, spurred by a diminishing focus on EU sustainability laws and the recent COP30 climate conference on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, where the voices of Indigenous communities and emerging economies were heard louder than ever before. “For interesting recent progress in sustainability and creating a market-driven sustainability transition, I’d move my gaze towards the East rather than the traditional ‘sustainability-driven’ regions,” notes Paarma.