There is no neutral ground left. If your peer firms are still treating ESG as optional, you are witnessing institutions betraying their own futures. Recent analyses – such as KPMG’s 2025 ESG Assurance Maturity Index reprinted on the ESG Foundation’s Keeping Current pages – reveal that 76% of businesses are still in early or mid-stages of ESG maturity. That isn’t a marginal lag – it is a chasm. If your board believes that PR spin or incremental policy tweaks will suffice, it’s time to admit: complacency has become a luxury you can no longer afford.
Peers who dismiss ESG with phrases like, “too much cost,” “burdensome regulation,” or “woke excess” are not defending their companies – they’re defending inertia. To say ESG is expensive without saying that inaction is more expensive is intellectual dishonesty. To insist governance or social fairness are optional extras when they increasingly determine access to capital is risk insanity.
Many procurement leaders in Europe are currently caught off guard by shifting sands in regulation – amendments in the February 2025 Omnibus have introduced both delays and narrower scopes for key directives (CSRD, CSDDD), and uncertainty over what compliance will really require. Those delays do not equal escape. They are signals. Signals that the regulatory system is adjusting, but also tightening its grip. Companies that treat this as “more time to adapt,” instead of “more pressure to deliver,” are those who will be left floundering when enforcement becomes unforgiving.
Look at Uzbekistan’s ongoing reform: state-owned enterprises are being compelled, by Presidential Decree, to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), including sweeping changes to governance and transparency. That may feel distant if you’re operating in Western markets, but it underlines how global standards are moving inexorably toward higher accountability. If large, previously opaque institutions in developing economies can embrace serious reform under top-down enforcement, what excuse remains for companies in stable democracies to lag?
Then there’s the matter of materiality: an article “Materiality: the new measure of sustainability” emphasises that risks and opportunities which companies once dismissed as “non-financial” are now central to survival. A supplier switch after Brexit, for example, which might seem operational or logistical, turns into a financial liability if it hits sustainability standards. If firms keep mis-assessing what truly matters – or underestimating the cost of inaction- they will see those costs inflicted anyway by regulation, market shifts, or reputational meltdown.
“Advancements in Solar Energy” is not just a feel-good story – it is a warning: technology is moving, government policies are tilting, and competitors investing in renewables are getting ahead. If your R&D budget, or your capital allocation plan, still treats solar (or wind, or low-carbon energy) as secondary, you’re effectively betting against market forces, environmental necessity, and regulatory direction.
Consider also “An Inconvenient Truth: Why Private Jets Have No Place in a Climate-Conscious World.” It illustrates stark hypocrisy: elites continue to champion climate action in media statements while indulging practices that multiply emissions.
When senior leadership authorises or overlooks such contradictions, it communicates that ESG is only for optics. But stakeholders – investors, employees, customers, Gen Z generally – can see through facades. They will judge companies not by what they say on glossy slides but by what they do when the private jet is taxed, or the jet-charter is regulated, or public outrage forces policy change.
It’s time to call out the Heads of Sustainability who silently shifted away from calling themselves Heads of ESG, because it was professionally expedient to kowtow to the Trump administration’s lead.
The moral core of ESG isn’t soft. It demands integrity, transparency, accountability – values the Quaker philanthropists for example embodied long before modern regulation. It demands that companies stop masking harm, stop cherry-picking data, stop assuming future forgiveness. “Sustainability” and especially “Purpose” – the new label de jour – can mean anything to anyone. ESG doesn’t ask for perfection; it demands alignment between what you say and what you do. That alignment is fast becoming mandatory, not optional. It’s hard. “Nothing worth having ever came easy,” as the saying goes.
The ESG Foundation will not be changing it’s name.
So here is an ultimatum: adapt now – meaning embed ESG into your core strategy and operations – or risk irrelevance. Because those who lead in ESG are not “nice” or “progressive” -they are the only ones looking to encourage resilient organisations in a changing world.
Those who have back-tracked are not courageous – they are betting that society, regulators, nature itself will ignore the contradictions. And that is a bet they cannot win.
If you’d like to join the ESG Foundation and continue to champion the obvious economic and social value of not giving up on people, planet and purpose, we’d love to hear from you: https://esgfoundation.org/join-us
(Picture credit: Pexels.com_Anna Shvets)