The collaborations that last year defined corporate climate leadership are disintegrating.
As a result, companies are storing up significant commercial, operational, and reputational risks.
A study by Neil Hawkins and Keely Cooper at Harvard tracked shifts in sustainability strategy across 75 global companies between April 2024 and May 2025, including the top 25 firms by market cap in the S&P 100, STOXX Europe, and Fortune 500. The findings provide a snapshot of how leadership teams are responding to political pressures.
Two of the three trends identified affirm what many people working on climate and nature topics are seeing for themselves; that media headlines overplay corporate retrenchment from climate action, and most businesses are quietly accelerating action – a finding echoed by recent data from PWC and KPMG.
The authors argue that these behaviours mute useful signals to investors and policy makers about where the economy is headed and conceal the value and resilience created by historical sustainability actions.
Those two outcomes are a loss for everyone, but the third finding is more urgent – the weight of political pressure is collapsing collaborative efforts to solve shared problems. This is more fundamental than the first two trends because, as the Harvard authors put it, ‘coalitions don’t just send signals – they shape markets and change systems. They set baselines for what “good” looks like, establish procurement standards, accelerate adoption across value chains, and influence investor expectations.’
Reviving those collaborations should be the priority for companies as well as the NGOs, non-profits, and philanthropies who work with businesses on climate and nature issues.
No company is an island. Quiet action is not protection, it’s exposure. If a business is silently working to align with the Paris Agreement target of 1.5° they will be helplessly exposed if collectively the economy has to operate at 3° of warming.
Equally, no company can achieve all its climate and nature goals alone. At least one strategic objective will rely on removing external barriers which is almost always going to require companies to work together and with other types of organisations.
Whilst putting your head above the parapet to argue the case for collaborative action might feel like swimming upstream right now, it’s not. All businesses are in the same boat. They all have climate and nature related risks to deal with, resilience to build, and opportunities to go after.
The corporate sustainability teams managing mature strategies are likely to have played a big part in cross sector or pre-competitive collaborations aimed at solving a shared climate or nature related issue, but as the Harvard analysis shows those teams are now likely to find it hard to make the case for participation in those types of efforts.
To do that successfully, corporate sustainability teams need to reset how they communicate to the business. The world has changed. Last year’s narrative about the value case for sustainability is unlikely to be appropriate today. A recalibration should focus on explaining, with evidence, how the sustainability strategy has and can add value in specific areas of the business, whilst acknowledging where it has not and will not. That will help foster a renewed and credible understanding of why a sustainability strategy matters in an individual company context, moving away from generic management consultancy models of value and the overly simplistic idea that sustainability teams can win arguments just by swapping contentious words with synonyms.
Rebuilding internal credibility makes it easier to win the argument for business-critical collaborations. This should be a top priority for sustainability teams today and for the foreseeable future. As the Harvard authors say, ‘quiet progress may protect individual firms, but it carries a collective cost: Without visible leadership, the shared momentum needed to transform systems could face paralysis. If the market mistakes strategic silence for surrender, business risks losing the urgency and collective influence required to scale climate-aligned transformation.’
This case is now harder to make than it should be, but collaborations are the fuel for companies to achieve their climate and nature goals, improving resilience, reducing risks and contributing to growth.
Quietly going it alone will end in failure.
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