Are Companies Actually Scaling Back Their Climate Commitments?

The headlines seem clear: Corporate ESG is retreating. Sustainability is under political fire. Coalitions are dissolving. Climate commitments appear dead. Under closer examination, however, a more nuanced picture emerges: Although a fraction of companies have pulled back, many more are staying the course, or even doubling down. They’re just doing it quietly.

In an observational, mixed-methods study, we tracked strategic shifts across 75 global companies—including the top 25 companies by market capitalization in the S&P 100, STOXX Europe, and Fortune 500—from April 2024 to May 2025. Combined with insights from 15 expert interviews, we identified how companies are adapting their sustainability strategies. This original data set serves as one of the first comprehensive, time-sensitive analyses of how political pressure is actively reshaping corporate strategy in real time, providing a high-resolution snapshot of the landscape now confronting boards and executive teams.

The political pressure is real. Yes, some companies are pulling back. This has resulted in the dissolution of coalitions, leading toward the erosion of collective action required for system-wide progress. But the data shows that, at the individual level, the majority of companies are not abandoning their sustainability commitments. A significant pattern of “greenhushing” is becoming evident, where strategic silence and symbolic adjustments intentionally conceal value creation and operational resilience built from years of investment, commitment, and progress. If greenhushing emerges as the dominant strategy, today’s quiet retreats may become a systemic failure to act.

In this increasingly complicated political environment, it’s important for business leaders to truly understand how their peers are reacting. The following analysis offers executives a clear understanding of recent corporate movement, or lack thereof, across sustainability programs.

Making Sense of Performative Corporate Behavior

Political scrutiny reached an inflection point following President Trump’s inauguration in January, when his early administrative actions made clear that he intended to dismantle climate-focused policies implemented by decades of predecessors. A series of state-level investigations, federal executive orders, and increasing shareholder activism has created an environment where highly visible sustainability efforts carry reputational and political risk. Yet our analysis shows that, counter to the headlines, companies have not implemented dramatic changes to their individual sustainability efforts en masse—though they have been abandoning meaningful coalitions.

Our analysis reveals three key takeaways:

1. Retrenchment headlines are usually misleading.

The story of mass corporate retreat from sustainability is largely a mirage. Yes, a handful of high-profile withdrawals have dominated news cycles, but in reality, only 8% of companies have materially rolled back their commitments, and another 5% have altered their public messaging while keeping their programs intact. The far bigger story is that 53% are holding steady and 32% are expanding their efforts.

This gap between perception and reality matters because perception drives market behavior. Media coverage of retrenchment can normalize inaction, embolden laggards, and distort competitive benchmarks. It can also undermine investor and shareholder confidence in sustainability as a driver of long-term value, creating a false signal that the market is cooling when, in fact, many are increasing their efforts.

What’s really shifting is visibility, not underlying strategy. Many companies have moved toward greenhushing to avoid becoming political targets. This quiet progress may protect individual firms, but it carries a collective cost: Without visible leadership, the shared momentum needed to transform systems could face paralysis. If the market mistakes strategic silence for surrender, business risks losing the urgency and collective influence required to scale climate-aligned transformation.

2. Greenhushing is becoming a dominant strategy.

Over half the companies in our study have chosen to downplay or stop publicizing their sustainability progress while continuing work behind the scenes. This bifurcation between what companies say and what they do is striking: Of the 85% that have maintained or expanded their sustainability programs, only 16% have publicly reaffirmed those commitments. What looks like retreat is widespread greenhushing taking root.

Greenhushing is not the same as abandoning the work. For many leaders, it’s a calculated choice to reduce political exposure, avoid activist backlash, or sidestep regulatory complexity. And in the short term, it can be a defensible tactic—especially for companies operating in politically volatile markets where public positioning could jeopardize near-term priorities.

While strategic silence may feel like the safest option in the current political climate, it comes at a cost. When companies withhold proof of commitment, they limit the market’s ability to recognize operational excellence and diminish the signaling power that drives competition toward higher standards. They also open the door for competitors to define the sustainability agenda—and risk weakening the investor confidence that links strong sustainability performance to long-term returns. For investors, customers, and potential partners, silence erodes the very trust that fuels long-term value creation. And when too many players step back from visible leadership at once, the collective momentum required for transformative sustainability action falters—leaving even the most committed companies unable to achieve impact at the speed and scale required.

3. Collective action is collapsing under pressure.

Once a powerful force for shaping markets, corporate coalitions are weakening. No industry demonstrates this more powerfully than financial services, where 100% of the companies in the study that were publicly affiliated members of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) or Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) have exited those voluntary membership coalitions. Where joint leadership across these platforms once amplified corporate voice and set industry norms, today many have gone quiet or disbanded altogether—as was the case for the NZIA, disbanded in 2024, and the NZBA, which paused all activities in July while it awaits a membership vote on restructuring. These high-profile withdrawals grab headlines—sometimes as a way to placate critics, sometimes because members lacked the operational alignment to deliver on shared goals. The result is the same: a weakening of the platforms that once accelerated sustainability and gave leaders strength in numbers.

Coalitions don’t just send signals—they shape markets and change systems. They set baselines for what “good” looks like, establish procurement standards, accelerate adoption across value chains, and influence investor expectations.

The U.S. Plastics Pact had the ambition and potential to do exactly that, where voluntary, time-bound commitments focused on the achievement of a circular economy with plastic waste eliminated. A rapid-fire set of high-profile departures in May (1 in 4 from Food and Beverage and 1 in 8 from Consumer Retail within our cohort for analysis) may indicate a new trend in diminishing collective action for fast-moving consumer goods. When coalitions of this nature fragment, each company’s progress becomes an isolated effort. Competitors lose the reference points that push the frontier forward. Suppliers lose the unified demand signal that drives scale. And capital markets lose the benchmarks that help them price climate-aligned growth.

The collapse of these alliances represents more than lost symbolism—it’s a breakdown of the competitive engine that turns individual action into market transformation. Without bold leaders willing to stand together and stay visible, collective ambition risks devolving into collective inaction and stalled progress on a societal scale.

Signals of Resilience in a Volatile Era

Across sectors, companies are reacting to political volatility with a mix of retrenchment, passivity, and resilience—but the difference is not random. Three factors consistently predicted whether firms held their ground or folded under pressure: the degree of operational integration, the anchoring of value creation, and the stability of leadership at the top.

1. Operational Integration

The companies least likely to retreat on sustainability were those that had embedded it into their operating models—where climate commitments shaped product design, supply chains, capital allocation, and investor narratives. In sectors like food and beverage (75%), technology (70%), healthcare (67%), and industrial goods and services (67%), long innovation cycles, complex global sourcing, and cost-driven efficiencies made sustainability inseparable from performance. Once woven into operations, unwinding those commitments would destroy value.

By contrast, companies whose strategies rested on reputational positioning proved far more brittle. In consumer markets, where green marketing often substitutes for operational change, 64% of firms took public action under pressure—40% reaffirmed or expanded programs, but nearly a quarter scaled back or eliminated them. In highly commoditized categories such as personal and home goods, insurance, and retail, the dominant strategy was passivity, as companies sought to protect market share rather than confront political risk.

Perhaps the most overlooked finding: B2B firms were nearly immune to retrenchment. Fewer than 1% reduced commitments, while 52% deepened them—suggesting that insulation from consumer politics and a focus on supply-chain resilience allowed them to stay the course when others wavered.

2. Value Creation Focus

A decisive factor between companies that retreated and those that held their ground lay in economics: When sustainability was built into the value engine, firms stayed the course. TotalEnergies illustrates the point. While peers rescinded commitments and opportunistically scaled back up production targets, TotalEnergies maintained its investment in the transition to renewables and commitment to operational decarbonization—and outperformed competitors on key financial indicators. Theirs is a value integration story, not a branding one, where credible goals, disciplined capital allocation, and long-term execution reinforced equity performance, turning marketing posture into a profit model. 

Experts we interviewed echoed this dynamic: When political pressure mounted, those who stayed the course applied the same decision lens as with any strategic investment—does it sharpen competitiveness, reduce risk, or deliver measurable value? Where sustainability delivered cost savings, revenue growth, or resilience, leaders had the evidence to defend it even under political scrutiny.

Value preservation mattered as much as value creation. Private firms, insulated from quarterly earnings pressure and public market volatility, were far more resilient: 68% reaffirmed or increased commitments, compared to just 16% that reduced. Public companies, by contrast, gravitated toward caution, with 44% holding steady and 20% cutting back. Sustainability resilience, it seems, rests not only on its ability to create value but also on how well companies are shielded from the short-termism of public markets.

3. Leadership Stability

One of the strongest predictors of corporate resilience under political volatility is leadership stability. Long-tenured CEOs bring discipline: They align sustainability with core financial metrics, shield strategies from political whiplash, and seize market opportunities faster than more reactive peers. This consistency reflects both experience and trust—latitude earned through years of financial performance.

The data confirms the effect. Among CEOs with 11 or more years at the helm, 47% expanded or reaffirmed sustainability programs, while only 5% reduced them. By contrast, 69% of new CEOs (fewer than three years in role) made reactive shifts, signaling that fresh leaders are far more likely to bend under pressure.

The Risk of Misreading the Market

The visibility of retrenchment headlines and collapse of coalitions create a false signal for the market. For executives already weighing political and reputational risk, it can look like the tide is turning away from climate action. If leaders interpret the noise as a green light to pull back, they risk accelerating a self-fulfilling cycle. Further, the rise of greenhushing introduces a credibility gap that undermines transparency and the power of collective action. For capital markets, that silence is a blind spot—masking which companies are truly positioned to win in a low-carbon economy and weakening the signals investors need to reward performance.

Strategic ambiguity and long-term exposure will persist. Companies that retreat publicly may find themselves vulnerable to critique across the stakeholder spectrum: investors and shareholders, regulators, influencers, and other forms of politically aligned activism. Economic headwinds, trade policy shifts, and evolving ESG disclosure rules could pressure budgets and further reshape investor scrutiny.

For many executives, greenhushing is a pragmatic choice…for now. Less public attention means less political heat. But it also means fewer opportunities to shape norms, attract talent, and differentiate in markets where customers still value sustainability leadership. Perhaps most importantly, greenhushing undercuts the ability to sustain and reactivate coalitions.

Transparency—about goals, progress, and challenges—is the currency of collaboration. Without it, the connective tissue that once bound leading companies together frays even further. Partnered in coalition, companies can define industry leadership, shift policy landscapes, and accelerate adoption of new technologies.

Rebuilding that collective influence in today’s environment requires confronting the political risk head-on—not by ignoring it, nor by adopting a greenhushing strategy. But rather, by integrating sustainability so deeply into the enterprise that walking away would undermine the business itself. The most resilient leaders will be those who collaborate openly on sustainability, creating a competitive dynamic in which value creation and collective impact are mutually reinforcing.