Moving From Performative to Practical Climate Action

Heading into Climate Week 2025, I wasn’t sure what to expect. With the political headwinds facing environmental policy and ESG in the U.S. and abroad, I anticipated a more cautious, even defensive tone. What I found instead was something different and frankly, more energizing: rooms full of people who were not only undeterred, but more focused, pragmatic, and determined than I’ve seen in years. The message across sessions was clear: sustainability is maturing. (Or, can I be provocative and say that it IS mature, it’s just in the early stages of its maturity?) It’s no longer about ambition for ambition’s sake and “making the business case.”  It’s about execution, materiality, and accountability. One of the most resonant frameworks came from Jim Andrew at PepsiCo as he encouraged us to focus on systems change: - Acceleration: Not just moving faster, but increasing the rate of change. - Intention: Knowing your role in the system and acting with purpose. - Alignment: Ensuring all stakeholders are pulling in the same direction. This mindset shift (from PR to performance, from morality to materiality) is especially relevant for those of us in complex, capital-intensive industries like automotive. Electrification, decarbonization, and circularity aren’t just technical challenges, they’re systems challenges. And systems don’t transform through isolated wins. Many companies are now reassessing their 2025 and 2030 goals. Not to walk them back, but to reset the strategy and to focus on what’s truly material, achievable, and impactful in today’s context. That’s not a retreat. It’s a sign of maturity. As sustainability leaders, we need to ask ourselves: Are we still chasing headlines or are we building the operating model for long-term resilience? #ClimateWeekNYC #SustainabilityLeadership #SystemsThinking #AutomotiveSustainability #Materiality #Accountability

I’ve dedicated nearly two decades to fighting climate change through architecture—and it’s time for honesty: We are failing. Sustainability became theater—a performance of vanity certifications, hollow metrics, and exclusivity that often misses genuine impact. We’ve chased headlines and flagship buildings, celebrating a few elite projects with 80% carbon reductions, while neglecting thousands of buildings that could easily and affordably achieve 40-50% reductions. Why? Fair weather sustainability stopped being about practical, cost-effective solutions that benefit both the planet and our budgets. Instead, it evolved into a club of specialists, consultants, and gatekeepers. Rejecting simplified modeling tools and pragmatic strategies hasn’t just complicated sustainability—it has effectively stranded our efforts. Now, with chilling political headwinds and shrinking budgets, architects are abandoning sustainability projects with the desperation of people jumping off the Titanic. Sustainability efforts are being defunded, deprioritized, and forgotten. It’s happening. But we don’t have to drown: My hope is that AI-driven sustainability offers measurable, repeatable, and affordable decarbonization—practical climate action accessible for every project. Traditional sustainability has run aground. It’s time to embrace radical simplicity, efficiency, and scalability via AI. Are we ready to move beyond sustainability theater and toward genuine climate action? Let’s discuss. #architecture #sustainability #climatechange #ai #decarbonization #innovation

I've seen LinkedIn posts today lamenting the downturn in #CDP scores, wondering what it means and how we’ll assess climate performance going forward. Let me offer a different perspective. For those of us focused on real-world climate outcomes (setting aside, for a moment, those focused on corporate financial risk), the emphasis on entity-level frameworks—whether for target-setting or disclosure—was never the right foundation for driving or evaluating real climate outcomes. Even if ambitious and perfectly executed (which most are not), corporate commitments and disclosures cannot deliver the systems-level transformations needed to decarbonize our global economy. Real climate progress requires coordinated, sector-wide or economy-wide transitions—across electricity, transport, buildings, industry—integrating evolving technologies, engineering solutions, institutional reforms, public policy, and aligned financing strategies. These transformations *cannot* be achieved by the sum of individual targets/strategies, nor are they meaningfully captured—or incentivized—by existing disclosure frameworks. Consider the tech sector. Data centers could be powerful drivers of clean energy investment, grid modernization, and digital inclusion—especially in emerging markets. None of this would be reflected in footprint-based reporting. In fact, such metrics disincentivize companies from entering high-emissions markets where they could have the greatest impact. (indeed, many risk-assessment frameworks will have similarly perverse consequences of disincentivizing investments in vulnerable areas or areas where data is unreliable - rather than driving solutions in those places.) Similarly, V2G technologies can enhance grid resilience and accelerate renewable integration—but this too requires coordinated policy, infrastructure, and regulation across automakers, utilities, and governments. It’s a systems solution, not an individual one, and current frameworks neither incentivize companies to pursue it nor report on whether they do. We’ve spent years demanding and tracking corporate targets, only to be disappointed when they shift, disappear, or fail to add up. But climate action isn’t the sum of individual efforts, as these frameworks suggest. It’s about changing the systems that shape corporate decision-making. As systems transform, companies will change too—some as leaders, co-designing the solutions -- and others as laggards, forced to change as systems do. (*which goes back to my parenthetical above: if interested in a company's financial resilience more than real climate outcomes, then some disclosures could be helpful; CDP scores mainly report on how companies assess and manage risk, not on their performance. As I wrote yesterday, we often confuse/conflate financial resilience & risk management with real climate outcomes; the posts on CDP scores are a case in point.) Paul DeNoon Darius Nassiry Vanessa Fajans-Turner Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment