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The conditions shaping corporate sustainability have not only intensified — they’ve broken in ways few expected. Last year we examined the public posture of 75 multinational companies to determine how political pressure was influencing their climate commitments and sustainability strategies. Using only publicly available information, we analyzed whether companies were progressing, holding steady or retrenching, and to what extent their actions matched the public narrative. (For more detail on the companies examined, see below.)
The result, originally published in Harvard Business Review, pointed to the rise of “greenhushing” as a response to the volatility, where a reduction of public exposure and communication intentionally masks programs that not only remain intact, but are in many cases accelerating.
One year later, intensifying political pushback in the U.S., combined with tightening regulatory expectations in Europe, has created an even more fractured global landscape, raising the question: Will corporate climate ambitions continue to retreat under sustained pressure, or be reshaped by it?
We revisited the same 75 companies to determine how responses are evolving one year later.
Across our findings, commitments appear stable in the aggregate — but beneath the surface those firms have materially adapted their strategies, communication and implementation, often in contradictory ways. This is not a simple story of retreat or progress. The research from this secondary observational period, extending through early 2026, reflects a deeper transformation: companies are no longer responding to a single set of expectations, but to multiple, overlapping markets that do not consistently align.
For sustainability leaders, the challenge is no longer deciding what commitments to make; it’s how to maintain coherence in a system that is no longer inherently coherent.
Three modes of fragmentation
If companies are no longer moving in sync, what is driving that divergence? The data points to three distinct shifts:
Stability is a false signal: Public commitments may appear stable, but comparing strategy across peer groups obscures how rapidly positions are shifting in practice. The direction of travel is a stronger signal; understanding how companies are evolving is more valuable than where they stand at a single point in time.
The global playbook is fragmenting: Companies are adapting to regional policy conditions that increasingly drive strategy in different directions. While tightening European regulation has long driven convergence in global corporate sustainability strategy, its influence today is being challenged by competing political and market forces. Rather than responding to a single regulatory center of gravity, companies are increasingly navigating multiple coexisting systems shaping corporate behavior.
Coherence is breaking down within firms: Commitments, governance, policy engagement and institutional affiliations no longer reliably reinforce one another. The result is a proliferation of mixed signals from individual corporations across markets, functions and stakeholders — and the introduction of visible credibility risks.
These trends point to a structural change in how sustainability strategy is developed and managed. Climate commitments no longer represent a unified, consistent signal; They are shaped by how firms navigate competing pressures across regions, functions and institutional contexts. For sustainability leaders, the challenge is no longer simply to set direction, but to manage tradeoffs across systems where competing pressures cannot always be reconciled. The task is no longer to eliminate uncertainty, but to manage it while continuing to move forward.
How to make progress without a playbook
If the playbook no longer holds, how should companies respond? Here are five shifts in managing sustainability strategy today:
Track movement, not just commitments: Most companies benchmark climate strategy using static commitments — but those are increasingly lagging indicators. What matters now is
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