Together for 2025 Community Forum
After a politically turbulent 2024 when many internal strategic decisions were put on hold, 2025 promises to be the year of ‘getting on with the job’. Mandatory sustainability reporting begins in earnest in 2025, and there are only five years until the world is meant to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The debate about the future of ESG will continue, which is why harnessing digital and AI to collect impact data will be critical to continue making ‘the business case’. The Los Angeles wildfires this January are yet another reminder that climate change will continue to disrupt and dominate everything and must be part of everyone’s strategy – whether social impact or supply chain procurement. COP 30 in Brazil at the end of the year will be a critical opportunity to hardwire regenerative and nature-based solutions into business.
- Resilience Reimagined
Challenge: With geopolitical instability, supply chain disruptions, and climate shocks, resilience isn’t optional—it’s essential.
Opportunity: Modernise resilience by fostering local supply chain partnerships and embedding digital tools and data collection that help build the case for inclusive growth. New frameworks to measure returns on resilience suggest companies with higher scores are better positioned for future financial performance. Looking after mental resilience matters too, because the scale of the challenges ahead is vast and cannot be solved overnight or in isolation. Focus on progress over perfection.
Question: How can sustainability teams re-imagine resilience in 2025 – delivering on reporting requirements and continuing to make the business case for ESG whilst still finding time to innovate?
- From Sustainable to Regenerative
Challenge: Pushed by a mixture of ecosystem collapse, resource scarcity and regulation, companies are reevaluating how they source, produce and package products.
Opportunity: Adapting and creating new, more circular models of production – is being seen across food, textile and consumer sectors but is far from being ‘business as usual’ yet. Without a focus on regeneration, the renewable energy boom risks repeating past harms—forced displacement, resource exploitation, and biodiversity loss (IHRB). Double materiality assessments, required by new reporting standards, and initiatives like Natura’s integrated profit and loss statement can help to shift mindsets to recognise that business futures depend on natural capital.
Question – How can regenerative, nature-based solutions become central to mainstream business strategy in 2025 – and how can we harness Brazil’s leadership at COP 30 to help us?
- Social and Environmental Goals Align
Challenge: Despite pushback in some countries, businesses view DE&I and climate change as the two top social impact priorities (Diligent).
Opportunity: Finding ways to align these efforts could unlock unique opportunities to tackle both simultaneously—such as empowering diverse talent to lead climate solutions. Alignment will also help deal with trade-offs that might arise in the transition to a low-carbon economy, which could leave some people behind (for example, emissions reduction options like near-shoring, leading to job losses for small-scale farmers or workers).
Question – how can sustainability and social impact teams build greater shared goals and strategies in 2025?
- The Power of Living Wages
Challenge: Last year, 23 million more people were living in extreme poverty, and only 17% of the Sustainable Development Goals were on target (UN). The Business Commission to Tackle Inequality (BCTI) has warned that global inequality now constitutes a systemic risk that erodes trust in economic and political systems, undermines social cohesion, and drives unrest.
Opportunity: Living wages can transform lives and unlock progress across the Sustainable Development Goals. Over 650 companies have committed to faster adoption (UNGC). New regulations, like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, require action on adequate and living wages and equal pay for work of equal value -which will help overcome persistent gender pay gaps across the entire value chain. So, while regulatory reporting is consuming 43% of ESG budgets (IBM), try to harness these investments to innovate—building scalable, living-wage supply chains that support communities and businesses alike.
Question: What hurdles are stopping your organisation from adopting living wages in 2025, and who still needs to be convinced?
- Collaboration is the New Competitive Edge
Challenge: Achieving impact at scale requires sector and system-wide responses, whether it is living wages, Scope 3 reporting or social norms change. Yet global fragmentation and polarisation, the backlash against ESG and shrinking civil society space are arguably making this harder.
Opportunity: Key areas to focus on include initiating industry-wide partnerships (e.g. The Mondra Initiative led by major UK supermarkets that is standardising carbon footprinting, and using AI driven technology for scope 3 emissions reporting); working with governments to overcome pre-competitive challenges to enable more business to business collaboration and co-creating solutions directly, with local suppliers, workers and communities.
Question: How can partnerships between and across sectors become more locally designed and led in 2025?
