At the height of corporate sustainability’s rise, it was described as the next great frontier for business. In 2022, Marisa Drew, Chief Sustainability Officer at Standard Chartered, summed it up: “This is the greatest investment opportunity of our lifetime… Sustainability has the breadth and magnitude of the industrial revolution but operating at the speed of the digital revolution.” 

It captured the mood of the moment – sustainability chiefs multiplying across industries, investors demanding action, net-zero pledges filling annual reports. Hope was in the air.  

Three years later, the mood has changed.  

In August 2025, the United Nations’ Net-Zero Banking Alliance  collapsed under legal and political pressure, after members faced antitrust investigations and mass defections. HSBC and Barclays were among the last to quit, admitting the group “no longer has the membership to support our transition.” At the same time, banks from Wells Fargo to Standard Chartered have been scaling back sustainability roles. 

What once looked unstoppable now feels fragile. The sector has tumbled into what the Gartner Hype Cycle calls the valley of disillusionment – the stage where inflated promises fall down to hard realities, and only the ideas built to last will endure. 

The valley of disillusionment 

This corporate swing into the “valley of disillusionment” is the metaphor former Head of Sustainability and CEO of H&M, Helena Helmersson, used as she addressed the World Retail Congress this year. Sustainability is now squarely in that valley, according to Helmersson. Commitments feel fragile, progress is patchy, and priorities have shifted under the weight of Covid, war in Ukraine, political unrest and the disruptive rise of AI. 

The downward slope is evident not only in corporate commitments but also in the behaviour of the financial system that underpins them. On the investor front, support for ESG shareholder resolutions collapsed to record lows in 2024 — just 4 of 279 passed, according to responsible investment campaign group ShareAction. The retreat was led by the world’s four largest asset managers — BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street and Vanguard — who together manage some US$23 trillion, more than the GDP of the entire EU.

Despite their scale and influence, they backed just 7% of key environmental and social proposals. ShareAction estimates that had they supported them, an additional 48 resolutions would have passed, including one at Mondelez International, maker of Cadbury and Oreo, that sought disclosure of the risks tied to its continued operations in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

For many specialists who built careers in green finance or reporting, it has become, as one CSO told Financial Times this month, “a tough time to be in the business.” 
 
But disillusionment isn’t the end of the story. If companies can navigate this trough, the model suggests, they can climb toward the “slope of enlightenment” – the point where purpose and profitability finally align, and sustainability moves from glossy side-project to durable business driver, as Drew told us, sustainability will have the magnitude of the industrial revolution.

The language of change

The danger of lingering in the trough is that climate change does not pause. Scientists warn of the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a system that regulates global climate. Its collapse would redraw rainfall patterns, devastate agriculture, and raise coastal flooding risk. 

In other words, while investors hesitate, the climate system is already climbing it’s own curve, with or without business.

For years, CSOs have insisted that their function cannot live in isolation. Sustainability, they argue, has to become a thread running through every part of the C-suite – and through the decisions of every employee. 

In Paris, Carine de Boissezon, Chief Impact Officer at EDF, puts it this way. She began her career in investment banking, where she witnessed firsthand how far investors were from understanding the critical issues posed by climate change. When EDF’s CFO invited her to join the utility, she seized the chance. 

“One of the key competencies of a sustainability officer,” she explains, “is the ability to translate across different ‘languages.’ My passion has really been about taking what I understand from the company’s decision-making and communicating it in terms that investors and analysts can grasp. Often, decisions look straightforward on paper – like in an Excel file – but in reality, the pace of change is very different.” 

For de Boissezon it’s a language issue, but for other CSOs, it’s more about influence over direct authority. As Ellen Jackowski, Chief Sustainability Officer at Mastercard, told Futur/io this year: “When you think about who makes the most significant decisions inside the company to address your sustainability vision or make progress against your goals, in the case of Mastercard, it’s probably our Chief Technology Officer… or it could be our Chief Product Officer.” She argues that for her, it’s being able to adapt across an organisation to embed decisions with sustainability at the forefront, by understanding people and influencing.  

Yet the memory of sustainability’s early days persists. “Historically, CSOs have acted like stealth PR executives — their primary task was to tell an appealing story about corporate sustainability initiatives … deflect reputational risk,” write Robert G. Eccles and Alison Taylor in Harvard Business Review.  

Others highlight structural constraints. “Our budget is among the first to be cut … because the chief financial officer cannot see how we make money for the business,” a sustainability head in Hong Kong told Reuters. 

Their experiences underscore a reality for many CSOs: the role is rarely about holding the biggest levers of power. Instead, it’s about motivating leaders and baking it into the day-to-day mechanics of the business.  

Making the box bigger

Emma Stewart at Netflix describes CSOs as specialists in “making the box bigger”, in expanding what counts as value by blending science, business and humanity. Gwenaelle Avice-Huet who had a brand new role of Chief Strategy and Sustinability Officer at Schneider Electric shows what happens when strategy and sustainability are fused at the top, turning climate ambition into measurable business outcomes. And Helena Helmersson’s own trajectory from head of sustainability to CEO of H&M illustrates how these once-peripheral roles can become proving grounds for executive leadership that influence investor decisions.

As Sandrine Dixson-Declève, honourary president of Club of Rome, suggests, perhaps CSOs are really ‘CEOs-in-waiting’, leaders already schooled in balancing contradiction: growth with limits, urgency with patience, resilience with reinvention.
 
History suggests the valley of disillusionment is not the end, but the hinge. What emerges on the other side will not look like the glossy ESG era of 2020, nor the retrenchment of 2025. There are hopes it will be sustainability stripped of illusion, yet more deeply embedded in the mechanics of value. The real question is not the job title, but whether sustainability becomes inseparable from value.