The year 2025 marks a pivotal year for sustainability leaders as a new environmental, social, and governance winter sets in with a new global political reality. Sustainability leaders are operating in a much looser regulatory environment, with key sustainability reporting regulations such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive delayed and some of its key provisions weakened. This year, leaders should focus on how sustainability delivers measurable business results. Organizations must move beyond sustainability merely as a compliance or virtue-signaling exercise and use it as a strategic lever for operational efficiency and business growth.

The Forrester sustainability team has just released its latest research paper, Top Recommendations For Your Environmental Sustainability Program, 2025, giving view of the five key actions that sustainability leaders need to take in 2025. Here are a few highlights:

  • Transfer energy to renewable sources to reduce costs and increase resilience. All organizations should evaluate energy transfer because it reduces scope 2 emissions, reduces costs, boosts energy resilience, and is relatively straightforward to achieve. International Energy Agency analysis shows that renewable energy transfer strategies also shield organizations from energy price volatility. Sustainability leaders capitalize on energy transfer by showing how it’s driving down energy costs, increasing profits. Energy audits, clean-energy target-setting, and renewable energy partnerships are all necessary tactics to achieve the potential cost savings.
  • Integrate circular economy principles to drive profitability. Forrester predicted late last year that circular economy commitments by organizations would accelerate in 2025. Leading firms, such as IKEA, Decathlon, and Cisco, are implementing circularity within their product lifecycles to reduce waste. Reducing waste leads to less acquisition of new raw materials as well as less energy usage to create products. It also improves operating margin, which drives higher profits. Furthermore, executives get to add services for maintenance, repair, and recycling as a new revenue stream. Sustainability leaders must educate their product teams about how implementing circularity boosts profitability of their products. They must also upskill teams in ecodesign and lifecycle assessment methodologies. Finally, leaders must invest in sustainability tools to help them calculate product carbon footprints to spot where the efficiency opportunities exist.
  • Prove operational effectiveness with sustainability reporting. Sustainability leaders can do more with their sustainability reporting programs than simply demonstrate compliance to regulations. Leaders can use sustainability data to show where sustainability strategies are delivering concrete business results, such as increasing revenues. Sustainability leaders must implement sustainability management solutions to not only automate compliance reporting; they must also establish a robust measurement framework to track and measure ROI and operational improvements.

Forrester clients can read our report here to find out more and can contact any of the other authors to request a guidance session to discuss our recommendations.