Sustainability in 2025 The briefing

The improving human conditions set out in Hannah Richie's excellent 'Not the End of the World' and Hans Rosling's 'Factfullness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think' anchored the conversation in positivity and hopefulness. During our first webinar of the year we were joined by Dan Magrath, Corporate Responsibility Manager at Gold Standard to explore the key trends and issues sustainability professionals will be faced in 2025. We discussed reasons to be hopeful, the challenges we'll face and how to make sure our teams and organisations thrive in the year ahead. We left with this to-do list as our rallying cry for the year:

1. Be intentional about what taking responsibility for climate and biodiversity impacts means for your business. It is not just a matter of complying with obligations and targets, albeit those are of utmost importance

2. Take a contribution approach to funding projects outside of value chains, as recommended by WWF, Gold Standard, Carbon Market Watch and aligned to SBTi's BVCM framework

3. Focus on the dual benefits of carbon and biodiversity projects. A broad portfolio of climate and nature projects can maximise impact for both the planet and your brand/organisation

4. Now is the time to get the barnacles off of the boat. A changing political context means that it could be the right time to reset policies that are no longer working or have been shown to not have high integrity. Now is the time to amend that implausibly early Net Zero target or drop an offset/compensation claim that is high risk-low reward, for example

5. Move from a claims mindset to a storytelling one. Storytelling that is true to our actions is how we can drive commercial outcomes through our sustainability efforts, helping us against the headwinds we're facing

6. Find out what your key stakeholders think about your sustainability performance and use that data to plug any perception gap

7. Respond to the upcoming consultations on SBTi and ISO's Net Zero standards - they matter

8. And finally - take care of yourself. We're all doing challenging work in challenging times. Have that cup of tea, join a community of climate professionals (like Can Marketing Save the Planet, The Conscious Travel Foundation and our community of friends at Pinwheel), and remember the lessons from Hannah Richie and Hans Rosling - we are making progress, we will succeed!