A world in balance 2025: How organizations are maintaining climate commitments while navigating geopolitical headwinds

From climate regulation to resilience and competitiveness levers, organizations are finding ways to navigate the growing complexities that they are facing. Our 2025 “A world in balance” report shows that sustainability is still considered a core future-proofing strategy and, as such, remains firmly embedded in organizational priorities.

What’s everyone saying?

• Over the past year, media headlines have highlighted specific stories of organizations hitting the brakes on their climate commitments and actions. In June of this year, one Bloomberg headline read, in bold, capital letters: “Big business is abandoning its climate goals.”
• Recent events may have seemed to support this narrative, from the European Commission ’s choice to delay the rollout of key climate disclosure regulation, to banks across the world opting to exit the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), prompting the organization to consider dismantling its membership-based structure.

What do we have to say?

• Despite these signals, sustainability remains a priority for a vast majority of organizations. In fact, 92% of them are maintaining their net zero timelines, our survey of over 2,100 executives reveals. What drives them to do so is not just regulatory compliance but also, increasingly, business value creation. In fact, 75% of organizations say sustainability is a core future-proofing strategy for their organizations to drive long-term growth, competitiveness, innovation, and resilience, leading them to continue to invest in this area.

• While sustainability strategies historically focused on mitigation, climate adaptation is attracting more attention than ever. As climate impacts intensify, 86% of organizations report supply chain disruptions, 78% production impacts, and 73% raw material shortages. Accordingly, 56% of executives say their organization actively prioritizes climate adaptation within its broader climate strategy.
• But adaptation actions often stop at planning. Many executives consider their organizations “well-prepared” for several types of climate risk and most organizations have in fact taken foundational steps such as conducting climate risk assessments. Yet only 38% have upgraded infrastructure, 31% shifted suppliers or production to less climate-vulnerable regions, and 26% redesigned products, showing that organizations are confusing climate preparedness with strategic planning. Additionally, financing gaps continue to hinder adaptation, highlighting an urgent need for more accessible, scalable funding solutions.

• Amid all these challenges, organizations are turning to AI. From improving resource efficiency to optimizing energy grids, from accelerating climate innovation to enhancing climate modeling, AI is proving a powerful tool to achieve sustainability. Organizations recognize this potential: 64% of executives report their organizations are using AI to achieve their sustainability agenda.
• But AI’s environmental impact remains a critical consideration. From manufacturing, model training, and usage to end-of-life, Gen AI, for instance, consumes vast resources. But while 57% of executives report the environmental impact of Gen AI is being discussed in boardrooms, only 32% have taken steps to mitigate it. The research also indicates growing caution around Gen AI’s environmental footprint, with the number of executives believing that its benefits outweigh its environmental costs dropping from 67% in 2024 to 57% in 2025.
• Another key finding? While our survey confirms sustainability remains anchored in organizational priorities, momentum is slowing down. After a 22-percentage-point increase in 2022–24, our sustainability maturity index dipped by 12 percentage points this year. 65% of executives say that current geopolitics is slowing down sustainability investments and projects, mirroring concerns already raised last year. In addition, budget constraints, inadequate data and measurement systems, and operational silos are hindering progress.
• However, this may not be (all) bad news. Indeed, while immediate crises such as tariffs and trade disputes divert focus from long-term sustainability goals, geopolitical tensions may catalyze structural shifts like reindustrialization and energy diversification that ultimately accelerate sustainability efforts.
• Continuing to pursue sustainability action is all the more important given that 67% of executives say they are under increasing pressure to demonstrate credible, science-based progress toward net zero. In fact, 62% of consumers believe companies are engaging in greenwashing, up sharply from 52% in 2024. Yet only 21% of organizations have detailed transition plans with science-based interim targets and capital allocation.

We asked Cyril Garcia , Capgemini’s Head of Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility, what this means for organizations, and his answer was loud and clear: “It’s time to move from planning to doing”.

Who’s doing it right?

• Rising demand for wind turbines is putting more and more heavy-duty equipment on Germany’s already strained road infrastructure. Transporting this equipment via waterways might be just the right solution, but it requires information that is often hard to obtain, fragmented, and inconsistent or outdated. To overcome this obstacle, BAW (Germany’s Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute) joined forces with Capgemini Invent to create a publicly accessible database for heavy-duty transport handling centers, providing high-quality open data that facilitates more efficient and sustainable transportation.

What’s the bottom line?

Sustainability remains central to organizational priorities. To advance sustainability efforts and build resilience in a volatile environment, organizations should:

• Strengthen climate action credibility through concrete and financed near-term objectives. This means setting clear interim targets, allocating supporting capital, publishing transparent roadmaps showing how these targets will be achieved, and embedding sustainability into operational decisions and incentive structures.
• Build consumer trust through easy-to-understand messaging that can be acted on and is contextual.
• Advance from climate adaptation strategy to operational preparedness by embedding climate resilience into the core of business execution and building adaptive operations and supply chains.
• Ramp up circularity to reduce resource dependency by assessing indirect exposure and implementing circular strategies.
• Invest in next-generation infrastructure to enhance resilience by upgrading facilities with resilient features such as heat-resistant materials, elevated foundations, and smart technologies such as IoT sensors for real-time monitoring.
• Transform functions for future-readiness by shifting from siloed operations to collaborative ways of working, conducting frequent risk reviews, and implementing new operating models to address new, emerging risks.
• Enable sustainability progress through robust data systems and responsible AI. Organizations must build robust data systems that connect sustainability indicators with operational metrics to unlock insights and adapt strategies. To ensure AI delivers sustainable business value, organizations must embed sustainability across the AI lifecycle and build robust governance frameworks to ensure ethical, transparent, and sustainable deployment. To successfully implement this advice, organizations should seek out a partner that can help them navigate the risks inherent to the move toward a low-carbon economy in a complex, volatile world, effectively guiding them from sustainability strategy through to execution.

Looking for more?

• In rugby, sustainability is a crucial challenge: Determined to play its part, World Rugby has partnered up with Capgemini to create a Carbon Emissions Reporting Tool that identifies specific steps for reducing the environmental impact of major tournaments. The result: greater visibility into event-related CO2 emissions, a better understanding of carbon hotspots, and a surefire way to support more sustainable choices. Find out more there ⤵️

• In maritime logistics (which accounts for 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions), sustainability is pivotal to helping ships fulfill their role without continuing to harm the environment. Beyond the Sea ’s SeaKite addresses this challenge with an autonomous kite traction system for commercial navigation, fishing, research, and large-scale transportation. SeaKite’s autopilot is continuously adapting to changes in weather conditions and wind patterns, but this real-time optimization requires processing vast amounts of data. That is why Beyond the Sea enlisted Capgemini’s help to ensure a large amount of data could be collected and processed effectively. Find out how we met the challenge here.
• But technology can sometimes play an even more direct role in combating climate change, for instance by tackling forest fires through improved prevention, quicker responses, and more efficient recovery. The challenge? These technologies are often not integrated, hindering their effectiveness. Enter the TREEADS project, an effort by 47 partners in 15 countries to build a comprehensive forest fire management platform. Capgemini partnered with TREEADS to design a Command and Control Center, which can compose missions and communicate them to unmanned vehicles in real time during a field operation. By integrating information from ground sensors, onboard sensors, drones, and hot air balloons equipped with cameras, the system serves as a central hub for control and visualization of the approach. Find out more here.

And you, what are you saying?

How is your organization navigating the balance between sustainability efforts and operational challenges? Have you found effective ways to move from climate adaptation planning to actual implementation? Head to the comments section to share your thoughts and ideas!