Episode 39: GreenBiz 2026 – Less noise, more execution

The transcript highlights below have been edited for clarity 

Mark Lee

Welcome to this next episode of the Sustainable Connections Podcast. Today I have an all ERM special for you. A group of us just attended GreenBiz 2026, one of the big U.S. corporate sustainability conferences. It took place in the middle of February in Phoenix, Arizona. It's been running for about 18 years, definitely one of the flagship convenings in the corporate sustainability space. We like to view it almost as a bellwether, a barometer of what's going on in our field. We learn a lot as a team in attending and participating, and from all of our colleagues, clients, and others who assembled there.

Happy to welcome to the discussion with me today, Annie Longsworth, who is a Partner and communications lead for value creation at ERM Shelton, part of ERM. Annie, please say hello and tell us where you are today.

Annie Longsworth

Hi, everyone. I'm sitting in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is the headquarters of ERM Shelton. We are the communications and marketing agency that sits inside of ERM.

Mark Lee

Great and normally, Annie, you're here in the Bay Area with me, which is where I am today. Doug Park is another ERM partner. He is our Global Partnerships Director. In this case, partner and partnerships don't have anything to do with one another. Doug, can you tell me what it means to be the Global Partnerships Director at ERM and also where you're talking to us from today?

Doug Park

Great. Yes, I do say the word partner very often during my day. As Global Partnerships Director, I help to manage the relationships that we have with leading technology companies, service companies that can help to better facilitate and create more impact for our clients when ERM plus a partner work together. And so that's where we're seeing a lot of value and a lot of traction over these past few years as we've really leaned into that strategy. But I've been at ERM for 15 years and come from a climate change background, and I'm based in Washington, D.C., enjoying a new fresh coat of snow.

Mark Lee

It's winter wonderland, especially a bit of a jolt after much better, more blue sky weather in Phoenix last week.

Finally, rounding out our panel today is Oliver, who you're going to hear me call Ollie Forster, another partner at ERM, this time working in our ERM climate markets. Ollie, can you explain what climate markets is at ERM and why you're doing the work?

Oliver Forster

Climate markets is focused on carbon markets as the kind of climate market of choice. And I get to spend all my time speaking with ERM partners, as Doug calls them, about carbon markets and how they fit in. I think lots of ERM clients are still at the point where they're trying to work out how do carbon markets help with their overall climate strategies. So that's what I'm focused on.

What happened at GreenBiz 2026?

Mark Lee

Yes, I'm completely confident we've already lost our entire audience on partners with a capital P and partners with a lowercase p. So we're not going to do that anymore unless we're talking about partnership, which we will inevitably will. Maybe we can evolve to collaboration and we'll find a way to make it make sense for those who are just getting the audio of our conversation today.

Annie, like me, you've been to a lot of GreenBiz events over the years. I think it's definitely evolved over that long arc of time. Of course, it's also evolved just in the last 12 months. I thought we could draw in your experience and perspective and give us your sense of the mood, some of the themes, and the why of the 2026 conference.

Annie Longsworth

It is definitely sort of a bellwether, especially because it takes place in February. It sort of sets the year to some extent. It also tends to occur in February right around politics. So last year, 2025 was just after the inauguration. I think that that had an impact on the crowd, because 2025 was pretty glum, it’s the way I would describe it. There was a lot of stoicism, not a lot of optimism. It was very much where we started hearing the phrase, “we're still doing the work”, “we're just getting the work done”. And that was a theme that kind of threaded all the way into New York Climate Week and throughout last year.

I was encouraged that going into GreenBiz this year and throughout the week we were there, I felt like even though the headwinds haven't necessarily changed and perhaps have even become more intense. At least they're more clear. At least we know what it is we're fighting against a little bit more. And so just to make a really bad analogy, maybe we're flapping our wings just a little bit harder against those headwinds. I sensed a lot more determination, maybe even a stubbornness, like more like this work matters, damn it, get out of our way kind of thing. We are going to demonstrate to you the value of the work we're doing, and we're going to move forward with partnerships and collaborations and demonstrate our results to you. So, a little bit more ferocity, a little bit more determination, and it was very welcomed in my mind compared to last year.

Mark Lee

I attended both events last year, this year also, and I have that same sense of you. Last year there was a promise, a commitment we're going to keep on keeping on, which was the name of a summary piece we wrote after it last year. We know how 2025 turned out in terms of geopolitical, economic, and sustainability field volatility. In a way, if I push back and say, Annie, you're making the same promise to me again. Why do you believe it this time? Why is there a better mood coming out in 2026?

Annie Longsworth

I think partly because I have to believe it. So that's like the one answer. We have to believe that so that we can keep doing this, right? But the other is just the conversations that I had with clients who talked about, they've already made the investments. Their companies are already invested in this work. They've already seen the returns in many ways, and they recognize that not only is not going backwards an option, but holding still isn't an option either.

And so, you've got to keep going forward. But again, it's not that resigned version of we've got to keep on keeping on. It's a little bit more of we know this is important work, we know that this contributes to the bottom line, and we're tired of being sidelined a little bit. We're actually going to get in and start demonstrating it as more of a business strategy. We're going to show you how sustainability is a business strategy, a revenue driver of value creation lever, which I know we're going to talk about later.

Mark Lee

We are for sure. Before we do that, Doug, Ollie, you haven't been going for two decades, but you've become regulars at GreenBiz over the last few years and with complete freedom to agree or disagree with Annie's perspective on this, love to get from each of you your top line takeaway from this year's event.

Doug Park

I agree with Annie that 2025 was glum. I think that's a very good word. But I'm also pretty heartened by the fact that I feel like the level of uncertainty, the pushback has actually sharpened sustainability dramatically. This year I was very impressed by the amount of progress many of our clients have made. And that's where I think there's this real shift from ambition, setting net zero targets, even just a couple of years ago, last year was more about what Annie discussed, but the year before that, it was really a big focus on setting net zero targets, how to deal with various scopes of emission, reporting, disclosure, all that was real, and was obviously necessary. We have to get those foundations correct and understood.

But this year, I really saw the question as being, how do we operationalize this? How do we drive sustainability, sustainability data, sustainability insights into other core business functions that can benefit from that information, whether it's pushing that data into your sales team, your operations team, seeking energy efficiency for OPEX reduction, whatever it is, we're seeing that actually take place. There are some external factors influencing that. There are macroeconomic trends, tariffs, pushing clients to make public statements that they are going to seek a certain amount of operational efficiency. That has a sustainability lens to that, obviously. That is decarbonization in most cases, right? If you're looking at energy efficiency, for example. So we're seeing this pressure and this uncertainty in some ways accelerates some parts of the overall corporate sustainability agenda. I see this as becoming more integrated and more focused on actions and outcome than on ambition, so that was really quite good.

Mark Lee

So Annie’s talking about bringing proof of value creation. You're talking about a sharpening, almost a performance under pressure kind of thing. Ollie, what about from your point of view? What did you see? What did you feel at Green Biz 26?

Oliver Forster

I'm not sure if it's a new theme for this year entirely, but I do agree with Doug in that everyone's talking about operationalization. At the start of the decade, we saw a lot of companies selling big targets. Everyone's had about a five-year run at trying to progress towards those. I think now that we're halfway towards 2030 or even more so, people are really trying to work out how do we make up the really hard work of driving down our scope three emissions particularly. I think that ties into the supply chain theme that Doug was talking about.

It also ties into my area, which is carbon markets, where carbon markets look to be shifting gear a little bit. There's been a lot of focus on quality over the last two to three years. Now it's kind of transitioning into, okay, how do we drive the scale? How can we use this tool? How can it legitimately count towards some of those, some of those decarbonization goals that companies have set? Another thing to note is that water was so prominent on the agenda this year. I think that's in part because data centers have just really transformed in people's consciousness from being this thing we didn't think about much a couple of years ago to being really front and center in a lot of places. I think water really is so important for data centers and ties into that.

Key insights from our GreenBiz panels

Mark Lee

Yeah, I agree, I'm not sure the breadth of the nature agenda was as present at GreenBiz as it has been in some past years, but water as an element of that certainly felt like it was to me.

I want to go deeper on some of the things we touched and also explore in a few other directions as well. Annie, I want to come straight back to you on these questions of value creation. I think we've had a bit of conversation since the event saying we thought there was almost maybe skepticism around the phrase or the term value creation. You ran a session on value creation and how to integrate sustainability into commercial strategy, how to make it into a growth lever instead of just something that creates an aura. From your own perspective, and from what happened on your panel, I'd love to hear how that conversation was playing out. Some of the questions that people asked from the audience too. How were they interrogating this notion of sustainability as driver of growth, as driver of value?

Annie Longsworth

I'll kind of take that in three parts. First around the language, then some of the examples that my panelists provided, and then I can share the audience response. I do think there is some risk right now that value creation as a phrase is becoming meaningless. Which is not where it was a couple of years ago. It's sort of become anything and everything. And so, when I think about value creation, we're talking about revenue protection, risk mitigation, and most importantly, in my mind, revenue acceleration. So, it's got to be tangible, it's got to be measurable. Ideally, you are talking to the CFO about value creation along with the sustainability leaders. So, you're thinking about tangible business value, cost savings, innovation, risk mitigation. It has to also connect to the traditional sustainability metrics that we all know matter, like greenhouse gas emissions or water reduction. Those are what sort of gives it the flavor and the backbone, but it's the financial measurable metrics that to me indicate that it's value creation.

In practice, we had three really different panelists. And the topic was officially called monetizing sustainability. So Rachel Hurley, who leads sustainability at the private equity firm, Paine Schwartz Partners, shared an example of a company that they invested in called HGS Bioscience. It's a company that produces humic and fulvic acid products. But one of the off shoots of this product was that there was an adjacent carbon sequestration opportunity. Their products turned out to sequester just a mass amount of acreage. And so it opened up a whole new revenue stream. That to me was sort of a prime example of value creation, where you're saying, here's a sustainability initiative. Here's something that's a byproduct that we didn't expect. Here’s an adjacent market, it opened up a new revenue stream.

Another example came from Patty O'Brien, who's the Chief Sustainability Officer of Teknor Apex. She discussed Teknor's collaboration with a company called New Light Technologies. They make a product called Air Carbon, which is capturing methane from abandoned mines. And so, when you combine the AirCarbon with Teknor Apex's compound solution, they can deliver a carbon free custom compound solution, which is just an incredible unlock for Teknor Apex, which is essentially, a scope three provider to so many different industries. So, there's another one where we see sustainability as the catalyst for true value creation.

Mark Lee

Is there now an intentionality to this, that people are setting out to solve sustainability problems by saying the solutions I bring forward must also be revenue generating? Or is that the nice and that happens some of the time?

Annie Longsworth

I think it's a “both and”. I would consider decarbonization and some of the very intentional risk reduction and cost reduction strategies part of value creation as well. Then there's this sort of commitment to innovation that can unlock something that is either intentional or in some cases unintentional, like with the description of the PSP portfolio company. And we talked about that a bit in this panel of the open mindedness and being willing to look at it from a point of abundance as a point as opposed to a point of sacrifice, which is so much sustainability comes at this. We come at this world as like, what do we have to give up? And I think what value creation does is it allows us to think about what can we gain? And it is a different mindset and a different willingness within a company.

Mark Lee

I believe so deeply that we've got to get much better at sustainability narratives that explain why people will experience better products, services, quality of life, everything on the other side of driving a more sustainable economy and outcomes. We're still learning better how to do that.

Doug, I'm going to pivot to you. We're not drawing a direct connection to what Annie said, except, I'm going to touch on the partnerships piece, and I think part of our ability to figure out how to do sustainability well depends on collaboration and pooling thoughts and ideas. I heard at GreenBiz that you're now responsible for about 100 partnerships in total, and a lot of them have a technology focus. We hosted an event at GreenBiz with Salesforce, and we were digging into the role of AI in sustainability. And maybe that's the bridge to what Annie was saying about making things drive value and drive growth, is the question at that event on how people are using, how do people want to be able to use AI and agents to improve and accelerate their sustainability work, to get more done at scale faster. So one, correct me if the interpretation is wrong. Two, tell me what the conversation was about that in a bit more detail. What are people actually doing to apply AI and technology to sustainability solutions?

Doug Park

ERM and Salesforce hosted a dinner during GreenBiz where we were able to bring number of clients to sit around, talk, have some great food and some great conversation. But during the upfront part of that dinner, we had everyone go around the room and say how they were using or intending to use AI to advance their overall sustainability agenda. Most of the responses were what you would expect. Which is automating data reconciliation, gap filling, emissions factor matching, identifying anomalies, et cetera, right? And this is great. I mean, this means that you can spin up an agent. Maybe it's on Salesforce, maybe it's another technology, but you can spin up an agent in order to make some of that menial work faster. That's sort of like phase one in AI adoption.

There was one client who I was speaking to at dinner who actually had a much more sophisticated use case. This gets to Annie's point around, how do we accelerate revenue? How do we think about sustainability as something that we gain rather than something that we give up? This client had started to use AI, she was using AI in her team to help with that basic efficiency gain. That gave her time to think about, step two, how do I aim this at revenue generation? She was leveraging AI to identify certain customer segment, in order to then market more sustainable products to that customer segment. And so, she had much more clear visibility and she was working with her marketing team, she was working with her sales team and actually integrating some of that sustainability data into other core functions across the business. That is the next step more clients need to take, right? To move beyond this, mentality of AI can help me do my job faster. It can, it absolutely can. Can AI help me promote my company, improve our profit margins, create better products? And that's where there's a huge potential. But all that depends on you getting out of the weeds and looking at the overall horizon of opportunity.

Mark Lee

When AI makes me faster, what do I do with the time that I have as a benefit? And how is that turned into opportunity or return? I like that through line there, Doug.

Ollie, you talked a little bit about carbon markets and your role in carbon or climate markets inside ERM. You also had a panel on the topic at Green Biz this year. You talked about quality and anybody who follows this part of the sustainability field knows that it's been a rough series of years for carbon markets in some ways, right? That the quality standards haven't been consistently high enough. It's created issues around trust. I think we've rebounded, right? The last 24 months, it's much better again. But you dug into this with your panel, and they help provide some definition of what high quality means and why credits are still so important. So, I'd say climate is one of the big themes that runs through Green Biz every year and every sustainability event. Carbon markets, climate markets are an essential part of that to my mind to work well and provide that last mile kind of solution once people have reduced. What was the conversation like about the state of quality and how much we can trust what's available to us?

Oliver Forster

Yes, so the panel was called “Diamonds in the Rough”. It was all about how as a company can you zero in on the high-quality credits in this kind of landscape of lower quality credits. So, it's all about identification of higher quality and then also what steps can you take knowing that to get your arms around and secure your access to supply of the higher quality stuff. Yeah, I mean, you characterized it well, Mark. In 2023, the whole carbon market had this moment of soul searching where there were some high-profile criticisms in the media saying that credits weren't of high enough quality. Also, the emergence of tools like ratings agencies, which were saying the same thing. They were saying, hey, we've started to look at the quality of all these different projects and we actually see a really mixed bag. There's some good, but there's more bad than you would want. So, since that time, over the last couple of years, the really big focus for the market is on defining better thresholds for quality. A defining element of that has been called the core carbon principles and trying to set out this universal threshold across all these different carbon market and carbon credit standards. What's an acceptable hurdle rate for quality? And so that has been running over the last couple of years. Just now we're starting to see the fruits of that. That's why I said in the introduction that it feels like a bit of a gear change moment where we go from defining what good looks like to actually being able to use this tool and actually rolling it out.

One is when you look at the pipeline of new carbon credit projects, the average quality is much higher than the existing stock. So that suggests that people now know what good looks like and they're building the carbon credit projects of the future with that in mind. And then the other thing we talked about on the panel was that last year, for the first time, you could actually see a price premium for quality. So, we know what good looks like. If you're making a good credit, you can now sell it at a premium than if you're making a bad credit. So that is so central to how these markets are going to change and how we're going to embed quality throughout the system.

Mark Lee

You mentioned the principles, who gets to set the rules? How are the principles being evolved and is it open and transparent and the stakeholders get to participate?

Oliver Forster

After those negative media articles, there was a group started that was chaired by Mark Carney called the Task Force for Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets. That then span out into two organizations, one of which is called the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets, or the ICVCM. And it's the Integrity Council that make these core carbon principles. They've gone through a very broad stakeholder engaging consultative process in order to define these 10 principles and have been assessing the different carbon credit methodologies for alignment to the core carbon principles.

Mark Lee

More proof that Mark Carney is a man who has just worn an extraordinary number of hats in our field and beyond. It's incredible where his fingerprints appear. I'm going to take your breakdown there at its word, that we've got a high integrity group driving the development of the principles. You then said we can see that in the pipeline, the credits available now are higher quality. How can we see that? How do we know?

Oliver Forster

Two tools, I would say have really transformed the market. So, one is the core carbon principles, which I mentioned already. Basically, if you develop a carbon credit project today, you're going to do so to a methodology that's aligned with the core carbon principles, because that's so important to how marketable your credit is going to be in future.

The other thing, which I would say has changed the game, are ratings agencies. There are now three or four ratings agencies, which are trying to do to carbon markets what we have and take for granted in bond markets, for example. To say this project is AAA rated, or this project is double B rated, or this project is D rated. The ratings agencies maybe sprung up around the same time as the market criticism have now been working through projects. Most of them are rated a good proportion of the market now. You can see that about 20 percent of projects that exist today are above a triple B, which is often taken as a threshold for usability. If you look at the pipeline, it's more like 40 or 50 percent or above triple B. So, you can see that there's the kind of movement towards higher rated projects.

Mark Lee

I'm going to ask you one more thing, Ollie, and that's the name of your panel. It was “Diamonds in the Rough”. That implies it's still a bit of a wild west. You have to search for the diamonds in the rough. There's lots of rough. So it does sound, though, that we're moving through that in a positive way. What do you think is a next misconception or correction either misconception that needs to be overcome or a correction that the market still needs to work optimally.

Oliver Forster

There's an awful lot more. As you said, it's diamonds in the rough because still today, if you were to just pick a carbon credit project at random, it's likely that there are going to be things that you wouldn't choose if you were more selective. So as I said, it's about 20 percent, we tend to think, kind of stacks up with this new high quality landscape. I think the most interesting thing that carbon markets have got a crack now is demand. Over the last two, three years, it's all been about quality. It's been about the supply side. But now actually, the focus needs to be on how we use those tools, how corporates can legitimately use them towards their climate targets. It's all about counting and progress and what role this tool plays. And that the market hasn't focused on in the last couple of years. But I can see that starting to change. I think if we have this conversation in a couple of years' time, that's what we'll be talking about.

Mark Lee

Got it. Supply has improved, maybe put a floor or a foundation under itself. Demand needs to be probably rebuilt, right? Fully rebuilt so we can move forward.

Doug, I'm going to spin back to you and I want to talk again about partnerships and there's a technology overlap, but maybe stepping away from just AI. I think it's fair to say there's a ton of single point solutions in the technology market, technology platforms, or tools that are designed to solve one specific challenge. And that's great, we need those kind of tools. But sustainability issues interact all the time. We talked about climate and nature earlier. They constantly interact and influence one another. Physical supply chain risk affects risk and cost in supply chains for companies. These things don't stay in nice isolated verticals or columns.

I think one of the things you'd said to me about the conference was you heard more conversation about ecosystems and the way these things need to come together to integrate, to maybe mutually support. What do we mean when we say we need these ecosystems to function better?

Doug Park

Sure, just to add on that, the market has a large number of high quality point solutions that focus on collecting a certain type of data for a certain outcome, right? Carbon accounting, nature, supply chain, disclosure. That's great. And if companies already have those in their technology stack, wonderful, right? But like you said, carbon touches supply chain, nature touches water, water touches siting, climate touches asset valuation, et cetera, and everything touches enterprise record and finance, right? So, SAP might be managing your overall procurement data, for example, or your operations data. How we look at this from a different lens is great. Most companies have an assortment of these point solutions. But how do you get these different data sets to interact with each other, to provide and surface new insights, not just for reporting, but back to some of the earlier conversations we've had aimed at value creation and the three buckets that Annie laid out very, very clearly, right? And so you have to think about, what is the ecosystem you need to stitch together? What is the overall enabling technology that's going to allow that?

What I've seen over the past year or so is that, companies that are moving the fastest and that are actually able to realize revenue generation, for example, as per that example from the dinner at GreenBiz. That company would not have been able to target a certain customer segment and surface certain sustainability data through their sales team to that customer segment unless they had their ecosystem sorted and they had an enabling technology to push that, to collect that data, aggregate that data, and push that data to other core functions. So if a company is already using, let's say, Salesforce Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud to enable their sellers or their marketing team, well, then you just extend Salesforce to be that aggregation and single source of truth, pulling information from this other assortment of potential point solutions that you've already invested in. And so, thinking about that is going to allow companies to unlock quite a lot more rather than keeping this information siloed. So that's where I would really advise companies. If you want to really differentiate in the market, you have to get your data sorted, you have to get your system sorted, and you have to think about your overall architecture and how you're going to move data from point A to point B.

Mark Lee

So if I tie that back, Doug, to what you said about the individuals and their use of AI, where you said, you can get rid of the menial, you can accelerate your work, and then the question becomes, what do you do with the time and the efficiency gain that you've earned? Is it fair to say that from an organizational perspective that building an ecosystem instead of just single point solutions have their place, but instead of only using them building the ecosystem, then you get a catalyst effect that you build foundation that you can do more faster, build scale on top of?

Doug Park

Yes!

Looking ahead to how sustainability strategies are evolving

Mark Lee

I want to look ahead at how we now think things will evolve beyond GreenBiz 26, sustainability strategies and practices and the people who are doing the work.

Annie, at one of the events that we hosted, some of the conversation reflecting maybe on that mood in 2025, the glum part, one of the impacts or perhaps one of the reasons to be glum in the first place was that companies held sustainability disclosure and communications so very tight last year. I think there was literal fear about using certain terms and there was just uncertainty and nobody loves uncertainty. You don't want to step forward into a landscape where you don't know the direction. I think all of us on this podcast and our colleagues agree, communication is an essential part of leadership. Like leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. We've got to get both information and examples of what sustainability, leadership, and transformation looks like out into the marketplace if it's really going to happen, this net zero economy kind of thing and a just transition. It seems that there's a bit of a turn in the conversation about communications and disclosure. What do you see now in 2026? How are people carrying this forward, even if still carefully, is there a bit more momentum?

Annie Longsworth

Yeah, I think it's fair to say that communication came to a screeching halt last year. It was a very loud lack of communication at some point. It was very much out of fear and uncertainty. What didn't change, though, is people's desire for information, stakeholders' desire for information. Shelton's been doing research to consumers globally for 20 years. Consumers continue to make decisions based on sustainability all around the world. They want the information. They want to know that there's shared values with the organizations they purchase from. And then last year, we also did similar Business to business (B2B) research, which reinforced pretty much the same thing. 86 per cent of B2B buyers in US organizations say that knowing a company is a leader in reducing environmental impact somewhat or greatly improves their opinion of that company. So, consumers still want it. B2B buyers are still using sustainability as a purchase decision criterion.

And we also know, I think this is where I start to get a little bit frustrated, if you look at 2008 when there was a slowdown, or you look at COVID when there was a slowdown, the companies that continue to communicate through those lengthy periods of time are the ones that in the long run have a stronger financial return when they come back. The ones that stay strong, that stay active and keep using their voice are the ones that have greater returns and they show more resilience. So, we have data that says people want to hear it. There's a reason to keep talking. We know sustainability matters. And yet those arguments felt sort of like fruitless last year. I do think that based on just the conversations I had at Green Biz and just with clients in general, that is shifting again. There is a willingness to, in a nonpartisan way, really start talking about sustainability leadership again, being very careful about language so that nobody feels like it's a risk, but being very proud and connecting with those audiences again. So, I'm hopeful that it will come back.

Mark Lee

Yeah, and I see lessons, hopefully, usefully, in how the investor community is handling this right now, that I see major institutional investors explaining very carefully that they assess all kinds of risk always, and sustainability risk is a legit and significant part of their risk assessment methodology. So, they're figuring out the why and how of keeping that central in spite of some of the pressure around ESG  and some of the other language that they've used over time. I think if we can bring forward more of those stories about what consumers are demanding, what B2B customers expect, then companies have more platform on which to build all these stories, right?

Annie Longsworth

Yeah, I mean, one more add, Mark. Data is critical, and we know how important that is, and storytelling is equally critical. You know, like when you really think about how minds are changed through history, it's through storytelling. Let's look at the both/and of that one as well, that there's some great stories that can come from the work that's being done.

Mark Lee

Doug, one of the next parts of the story, if companies are already thinking how sustainability and technology fit together, what do they need to prioritize next to kind of leverage the next evolutions in the technology landscape for all the fear about AI and what it might do in terms of displacement? How do we prepare and embrace its potential instead?

Doug Park

I think the correct framing is to consider AI. AI is not the strategy. AI is the accelerator of your strategy. I think sometimes AI and strategy gets conflated. So take a step back and think about what is your strategy? What is the outcome that you need to achieve, inclusive of disclosure and reporting, for sure. But beyond that, too? How are you going to, how are you going to communicate that strategy to Annie's point? Often that may require a degree of technology and an ecosystem to support and the why dissemination or targeted dissemination even of that of that narrative. There are three critical steps. You have to have your data foundations. You have to think about how you de-silo your various technologies that target certain types of activities or run certain types of calculations or address certain types of sustainability issues. And then you need to really think about what is that broader architecture that will be required to ingest, transform, and push that information into the hands of other critical functions.

The overall goal is to make the business world more sustainable, to make our environment and our planet livable. But the goal to scale your sustainability ambitions right, is to align it with your company's value proposition. How do they generate revenue? Just like any other good function within a company's organization is going to be aimed at how do they promote and align and help generate more revenue for that company. And so, if we take sustainability and put it into that bucket, that's where we're going to get the scale, the investment, and the buy-in to do more.

Mark Lee

Annie, I think connecting to what Doug just said, I think you mentioned the 2008 economic crisis, COVID, we could have gone back to 2001 to the dot com boom. At each point we've seen what happened to sustainability teams and strategies. I think there's been building evidence all the way through that, that those who stuck the course did better over the longer run, not just in communication terms, but embracing the kind of strategy and platforms that Doug's talking about.

Ollie, we've had you in a carbon markets corner for much of the conversation, and I want to set you free for the last comment on the podcast today. Annie's been talking about storytelling. Doug's picked up an element to that. I think we've already had evidence from you that storytelling has been essential to the carbon markets world because we needed more robust principles, we needed evidence of quality, people need to stimulate demand. If you look ahead, what's the next part of the story that you think might be unfolding by the time we get to GreenBiz 2027?

Oliver Forster

You know what I think is a defining challenge at the moment for so many companies is scope 3. Lots of them have made pretty good progress on their scope 1 and 2 decarbonization, but scope 3 for so many companies is going in the wrong direction. I think we'll see more focus on that. I think we're actually already seeing new approaches, scope 3 decarbonization. I think the what we saw from Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) and the new draft of the net zero standard that came out in November was just this move towards more flexibility and putting more solutions on the table and trying to kind of open up so that companies can have impact, because otherwise their banks are in the corner and what could they do? They're in this position where either they walk from their climate targets or they do something. So, I think there's this kind of recognition now that that's where we've got to.

I think on carbon markets, governments are waking up to carbon markets as a tool. They've all got Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) as well, which are a fair analog to the way that corporates have climate targets. Governments also have their NDCs that they have to achieve. And for the governments that are serious about achieving those, they're engaging with tools and climate markets or carbon markets. I think that as an overall theme and the interaction between corporate voluntary action on carbon markets and government targets and how they use policy levers is quite an interesting space that we'll see in the future.

Mark Lee

Yeah, and that's an interesting place to leave us, that probably everyone who works in this space will be wondering what the next 12 months will bring in terms of governmental leadership on sustainability. Last year was quite a ride. Some predictions at GreenBiz 26 in the conversations I was part of saying, more challenge to come, but anticipation of better outcomes. Annie, you opened up with optimism, and I feel like I left the event with a positive feeling of where we might be heading also. This conversation with the three of you has done nothing but affirm and build on that for me. I want to say thank you so much to each of you, Doug, Ollie, Annie, for giving the time and the thought to today's conversation.

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