Hello To 2026—And To Trump’s Entirely Accidental Gift
Thinking aloud about incoming system change
Trump a gift? What planet are you on? Have you seen the damage he’s doing?
Well, yes—but for readers who haven’t yet stormed off in a huff, let me explain the logic behind the title of this New Year essay.
First, though, a spoiler alert: I will argue that the Trump 2.0 era—now triggering a very different kind of system change from that previously envisioned by most change advocates—may ultimately be remembered as the stress test that proved that the embattled sustainability agenda is:
scientifically robust enough to withstand denial;
economically inevitable enough to survive deregulation; and
politically durable enough to regenerate after backlash.
History, helpfully, offers clues as to where all this may be headed. Global governance breakthroughs—from the League of Nations to the UN, for all their flaws—have tended to emerge after prolonged, existential shocks. Periods of global meltdown.
So, are we headed there again? My sense is that we are—and that the process has only just begun. Over time, if history is any guide, today’s right-wing denial and pushback may come to resemble an out-of-control forest fire: devastating in the moment, yet also creating the conditions for recovery and growth.
Meanwhile, according to Reuters’ just-published Global Sustainability Report 2025, and based on insights from more than 500 practitioners and decision-makers, the picture is less bleak than media coverage might suggest:
Yes, regulatory uncertainty is now the biggest challenge: 48% of C-suite executives cite it as their top concern. Yet leading organizations are already turning compliance pressure into competitive advantage.
And there is a growing focus on Scope 3 emissions. Notably, 25% of organisations now prioritize supplier incentivization.
But corporate commitment appears to be strengthening, not retreating: 75% of C-suite leaders now rate sustainability as a top priority—up six points in just six months—and 64% of organizations remain committed to Net Zero with unchanged targets.
Future historians may even conclude that President Trump and his fellow “know-nothings” barely altered the pace of the underlying scientific, economic, and political transitions. Instead, these pushback efforts may be interpreted as the final convulsions of a failing system. Viewed in this light, the disruption now underway is likely to force successful transformers to adapt, mature, and evolve.
This set of assumptions underpins everything that follows. Expect a personal overview of some of the things I have been learning in recent months—and where those insights are now taking me in terms of my broader theory of change.
The great bifurcation
No question, these are difficult times for the sustainability sector, even if the ESG world has been hit substantially harder. As a result, I expect a growing bifurcation—with business increasingly focused on optimizing value and return on investment, while a broader constellation of actors pushes for more transformative, system-level change.
With the now inevitable nod to AI, of which more in a moment, when I asked ChatGPT to summarize the current backlash against ESG and sustainability, I thought it captured the moment rather well.
The backlash is:
· a politicization of capital allocation;
· a reaction against elite-driven norm-setting;
· a pushback against the moralization of markets; and
· a struggle over who defines fiduciary duty.
What it isn’t:
· a wholesale rejection of climate science;
· a broad corporate retreat from decarbonization; or
· a serious reversal of clean-energy economics.
In short, while the rhetoric may be loud, the underlying transition—even if slower—is still moving. This summary aligns closely with my own reading. Indeed, I have come to believe that the ESG and sustainability efforts of recent years, even extended far into the future, would never have delivered the systemic change now required.
In fact, that was also one of the clearest messages to emerge from 2025, including from our Sustainability at a Crossroads study.
Transforming sustainability
When we partnered with GlobeScan and the ERM Sustainability Institute early in 2025 to survey sustainability experts across more than 70 countries, the results were striking—and stark. An overwhelming 93% of the 844 respondents believed the sustainability agenda must evolve, with 56% saying it must be radically revised.
A central challenge for 2026, then, is to understand what that radical revision might involve, how it can be achieved, and what it means for different sectors of the economy. That is something g the three organizations are now working toward.
Meanwhile, one conclusion already seems clear: good science is make-or-break—and must sit at the center of whatever comes next. But the science, too, must evolve, enabling it to cut through the background noise, better informing the transformations now unfolding in three linked domains: business, markets, and politics. But first, a few thoughts on why they now sit at the core of my evolving theory of change.
All I wanted for Christmas—a better theory of change
As seismic shocks cascaded from politics into markets and then business, I found myself wondering what it would take to achieve the seemingly impossible: turning the chaos of Trump 2.0 into a gift—or perhaps a seasonal pile of gifts.
Unimaginable, certainly for many of our American friends. But part of the answer, I suspect, lies in developing a more coherent and compelling case for system change—one oriented toward resilience and, ultimately, the regeneration of our economic, social, political, and environmental systems.
Along the way, it became clear that I really do need a better theory of change. Not to craft slick elevator pitches, which I actively avoid, but to create a shared structure for thinking about our collective direction: what counts as progress, what leads backward—and, crucially, how to stay oriented amid growing turbulence.
To be fair, I have not lacked a theory of change over the decades. It was simply embryonic—experimental and evolving. For some 50 years it has been anchored, first, in the need to transform capitalism, and second, in transforming the role of business and markets.
Early on, to be honest, our approach involved pulling every lever we could find. I used to joke that I envied James Bond—not for the obvious reasons, but because whenever 007 landed in a villain’s lair, he knew exactly which buttons to push.
I didn’t.
Instead, I pushed at whatever came to hand: brands and consumers; boards and corporate governance; stakeholders and their shifting priorities; auditing and reporting; business models and return on investment (ROI); supply chains and resilience—and much more besides.
Had you asked me to map it all on a flipchart, I would have struggled.
And that was paradoxical, given how often I worked with people obsessed with their theories of change—most memorably the social entrepreneurs that Pamela Hartigan and I celebrated in The Power of Unreasonable People, and those who backed them.
All of this led me to sketch the radically simplified “transformation compass” shown above. Rather than asking, What will happen, it poses a different question: Given multiple possible futures, what actions keep us oriented toward the ones we want?
Still, reality has a habit of intruding on even the most carefully laid plans. Over the decades I have lived through several pivotal years—1968, 1973, 1989, 2008—and now, again, 2025 feels like another, across multiple dimensions.
Consider the escalating tensions between the U.S. and China, with Europe as the piggy in the middle. We also have the backlash against climate science, ESG, and sustainability, prompting many companies to slam into reverse gear. Then, almost everywhere and all at once, 2025 became the year AI appeared to reach some sort of escape velocity.
AI grabs the wheel
Eight or nine years ago, as part of my ongoing scouting, I visited several AI companies to understand who they were, what they were building, and how they viewed the future and sustainability.
Since then, despite mounting concerns about the environmental footprint of data centers, power plants, and grids, I have come to believe that sustainability is probably out of reach without AI—provided it is the right kind of AI, owned by the right actors and governed in the right ways.
As it happens, a somewhat similar argument runs through Time magazine’s 2025 “Person of the Year” issue, devoted to the “architects of AI.” As the magazine puts it, 2025 was the year when “whatever the question was, AI was the answer.”
A cautionary note, however, came from Yoshua Bengio, warning that AI’s rapid progress is also amplifying unintended effects—risks that could grow far greater if current trajectories continue unchecked.
Meanwhile, AI became the Trump Administration’s number one scientific priority. Nor is the industry shy about politics: Big Tech lobbyists are pushing for AI-friendly regulation, while backers reportedly plan to spend hundreds of millions opposing pro-regulation candidates in upcoming elections.
This, in turn, raises a deeper question. Like the French with their ill-fated Maginot Line, has the sustainability field been intent on fighting the last war—focused on legacy sectors such as autos, chemicals, and fossil fuels—while underestimating the longer-term impact of the breakthrough sectors now reshaping the market landscape?
Whatever your answer, and whether we are talking about AI, robotics, batteries and electric vehicles, solar and wind power, synthetic biology, or precision fermentation, all are driven by new scientific trajectories.
And that is where we turn next.
1. TRANSFORMING SCIENCE
Science informs all the other domains covered below: business, markets and politics. But, unfortunately for those who rest their case on “the science,” and too often on yesterday’s science, this is an area where change is a constant—and increasingly exponential.
Time and again, I have heard businesspeople insist, “the science shows our product/technology is not the problem,” only to find that new science upends both their assumptions and defensive positions.
So, science sits at the heart of my theory of change—something that would not have required explanation for most previous U.S. presidents, but is clearly lost on President Trump. As New Scientist put it, 2025 was “A Year when US science was on the chopping block.”
His proposed U.S. federal budgets would slash or eliminate climate and weather research at agencies such as NOAA and NASA, including deep cuts to NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research that could end core climate programs. Climate research grants have been frozen or canceled, leaving many scientists unable to continue ongoing work.
Given this context, it is perhaps worth explaining why science is key.
First, science helps us define the problem space with precision. Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and resource depletion are complex, non-linear processes. Science helps by uncovering causal mechanisms, feedback loops, thresholds, and tipping points that our intuition alone cannot grasp.
Second, science expands sustainability from ethics to engineering. Moral intent does not build infrastructure—physics, chemistry, and biology do. Energy transitions depend on things like materials science, thermodynamics, and grid physics. Circular economy models rely on chemistry, systems engineering, and industrial ecology. Nature-based solutions require ecology, hydrology, and climate science.
Third, properly funded science enables speed and scale. Sustainability challenges are generally time bounded. Helpfully, science compresses timelines from decades to years—or even months. Evidence-based iteration replaces slower trial-and-error. Modeling and simulation, including “digital twins,” allow solutions to be tested before deployment, while AI-driven science accelerates discovery in materials, catalysts, crops, and batteries.
Finally, most sustainability failures stem from siloed thinking. Sustainability is fundamentally a systems problem, and science is our most powerful systems language. Used well, systems science enables coherent transformations rather than fragmented fixes.
At its best, peer-reviewed science provides shared reference points in polarized debates. In this way it helps policymakers who need defensible evidence, investors who need quantified risk and return, and citizens who need transparency and accountability.
The crucial role of biology
One area where I hope to focus more attention in 2026 is biology, now rapidly becoming a core technology across multiple sustainability-linked transitions. Key areas include precision fermentation for food, chemicals, and materials; engineered microbes for waste, pollution, and nutrient cycles; and bio-based construction materials and textiles.
What was once a loosely scattered set of environmentally oriented research projects is evolving into a sustained upgrade of our civilizational operating system. And such things take not just years, but decades, even generations.
With that in mind, let’s now turn to three domains where this story will play out most clearly: again, they are business, markets, and politics.
2. TRANSFORMING BUSINESS
Business has been central to my work for decades—and has also been at the heart of CSR, shared value, ESG, and the wider sustainability agenda. It must remain there: beeping business in sharp focus—and under intense pressure—remains essential.
But by the mid-to-late 2030s, I also expect the world to have experienced disruptions that are hard to imagine and foresee today. Partly as a result, sustainability will no longer be simply debated; instead, key environmental and social constraints will be priced directly into markets.
Firms that fail to adapt will face rising capital costs—or be pushed to exit key markets altogether. The winners will be those that internalize these constraints early, innovating across systems rather than silos and delivering credible long-term value to multiple stakeholders.
As Ioannis Ioannou, associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School, puts it:
The ESG consensus has collapsed. But framing this as a simple “backlash” misses the point entirely. Over the past year, I wrote 12 op-eds trying to make sense of what’s happening—and what comes next. The picture that emerged is more structural than political.
The real problem was never ESG itself. It’s a financial system that rewards the externalization of costs and operates under the illusion of infinite growth on a finite planet. We built sophisticated technical infrastructure—standards, metrics, taxonomies—but failed to build the narrative infrastructure to explain why any of it matters.
We mistook elite consensus for societal consensus. When the political winds shifted, the foundations cracked. The diagnosis goes deeper. What we’re witnessing is adaptive resistance—systems learning to protect themselves from transformation through diffusion, dilution, and distraction.
The prognosis is stark. We face a choice between an orderly transition guided by foresight and a disorderly one forced by crisis. The cascade is already visible: climate shocks unsettle insurance, property values adjust, corporate assets reprice, sovereign finances strain. What begins as weather becomes finance.
The prescription requires a different economic logic—”Aligned Capitalism.” A system where ecological impacts are priced into markets, financial statements capture natural and social capital, and regenerative strategies become profitable.
When I shared a late draft of this end-of-year essay with Chris Coulter, CEO of Canada’s GlobeScan, he noted:
Your points regarding business and Professor Ioannou’s views also tell us that SOCIAL science is crucial. Without the societal dimension, we continue to get stuck and fall into polarized debates.
I think of all the transitional components needed to get us closer to truer sustainability—technological, financial, regulatory, societal—it is the societal piece that is has had the least attention paid to it and arguably is the most challenging.
This, I think, is a key aspect of your “markets” concept—without the cultural, political and economic pulls of this, we can never get the demand-side of sustainability really moving. And to get societal buy-in will require not just environmental progress, but also economic and social progress. So, the rising inequality agenda is going to be a vital element of our collective ability to get sufficient public support for sustainability.
ZerROIng in
On the other side of the Atlantic, Daniel Aronson of Valutus has been my go-to inspiration when it comes to the evolving return on investment (ROI) story. His take is as follows:
The decline in public momentum and the dominance of other concerns (particularly affordability for individuals and the state of the economy for businesses) mean a lot of the previous justifications for sustainability investments are weaker—or gone. Plus, there’s new counterpressure in the form of lawsuits against and political targeting of sustainability.
The electoral success of sustainability-skeptical and conservative parties around the world has made it crystal clear that sustainability needs a broader political support base.
The momentum of the return-on-investment (ROI) is in large part because it addresses these two issues head on: ROI is a justification that doesn’t need outside momentum, appeals to skeptical or wary execs, and has support across the political spectrum.
ROI also helps create the conditions for systems change by reducing the opposition of powerful, entrenched interests. I wrote about that, and my personal experience advocating for a failed ballot initiative, here.
ROI is also critical to the #1 indicator of sustainability leadership: Embedding sustainability in the business. Because what gets embedded is what helps the business succeed.
Yet Aronson is quick to warn against oversimplification—particularly any tendency to slot people into either ROI camp or systems change camps. “I agree about the parallel paths—ROI and systems transformation,” he told me, adding: “I went to MIT to study system dynamics with Peter Senge and John Sterman, so I have a deep appreciation for the system-change path.”
My own sense is that we all must straddle these two trajectories—and actively work to converge them—if business is to play a suitably creative and constructive role in the transitions now unfolding across the global economy.
3. TRANSFORMING MARKETS
Markets have long been central to my work, but my focus sharpened considerably after I began this Rewilding Markets series in January 2024.
Looking back, I can see that I had experimented with multiple levers over the decades—from consumer power in the Green Consumer era, to socially responsible and sustainability investing (including service on several advisory boards in the field), and to stock exchanges, most recently through my involvement in the ill-fated Social Stock Exchange and more recent coverage of efforts to green the London Stock Exchange Group.
A further nudge came in autumn 2025, when I visited Imperial Business School’s Leonardo Centre on Business for Society to film an interview with Maurizio Zollo, Professor of Strategy & Sustainability and the Centre’s Scientific Director.
The Centre’s work draws on the GOLDEN sustainability dataset, described as the largest structured dataset of corporate sustainability actions. It includes more than 2.6 million initiatives by 23,000 companies across all sectors and more than 100 countries. It is now high on my list for deeper exploration. Even at headline level, though, the findings are striking.
Using state-of-the-art natural language processing, researchers categorized corporate initiatives by objective (aligned with the 17 UN SDGs, or sustainable development goals) and by behavioral content, grouped into 14 action types. These were then organized into three broad categories:
Advocacy: externally oriented actions such as donations, volunteering, and community engagement.
Preparation: internal efforts including training, incentives, and impact measurement systems.
Transformation: deep organizational and operational change, embedding innovation in products, business models, and value chains.
This taxonomy—grounded in an underlying “impact maturity model”—enables benchmarking across sectors and time, and links sustainability behavior directly to both financial performance and environmental impact.
The conclusion is simple: transformational sustainability actions already outperform. Companies in the highest tier ofTransformation initiatives generated a 2.5% annual alpha—equivalent to a 38.5% cumulative, risk-adjusted abnormal returns over the 13-year study period.
ESG ratings, meanwhile, fail to show any significant impact on risk-adjusted stock returns (alpha). They tend to reward Preparation-stage initiatives: visible, auditable, and risk-focused actions. Yet, importantly, these actions show no positive correlation with improved company performance, whether measured in accounting or financial terms.
For me, this work marks a critical step toward markets that move beyond reliance on ESG-rewarded compliance actions toward new rules of competition based on sustainability-driven innovation and transformational value-chain strategies.
In such markets, capital is repriced for emerging risks, the energy transition is understood as a multi-decade trade, and sustainability becomes the baseline—rather than a reputational differentiator, of strategic innovation.
Take China, where abundant and low-cost renewable energy and biofuels are now being turned to a new use. Specifically, China is now using renewable energy to produce clean fuels, alongside industrial chemicals like ammonia. The ammonia may be more expensive currently than conventionally produced ammonia, but as one expert told the Financial Times: “There is this expectation the scale will allow it to get cheaper—just as solar did from 2010 to now.”
A sixth economic cycle?
All of this is unfolding in a world of de- and re-globalizing markets, shaped by new rules, sanctions, tariffs, and subsidies. Leading jurisdictions will seek to make sustainable choices cheaper, easier and, ultimately, the default setting—while protecting first movers from being undercut by free riders.
Those familiar with my work will know that I have long been interested in long-wave economic cycles. In that context, I was struck by a diagram drawing on recent work by Carlota Perez and RMI, illustrating an emerging “sixth wave” of economic transformation since the late 18th century.
It captures a deep tension: Trump 2.0 doubling down on fossil fuels, while China consolidates control over the commanding heights of the emerging renewable, electrified economy.
This diagram spans more than two centuries. Yet the time horizons guiding governments, markets, and businesses remain painfully short when measured against the 200–400 years needed to navigate the structural transition now unfolding—from a deepening Anthropocene toward what Glenn Albrecht calls the “Symbiocene.”
In this vision, human intelligence and enterprise align with the symbiotic processes of living systems, generating mutual benefit across species and ecosystems through biomimicry and eco-industrial, technological, agricultural, and cultural innovation.
For markets and business to move meaningfully in this direction, however, one final piece must fall into place: politics—local, national, and global.
4. TRANSFORMING POLITICS
Of the four domains spotlighted here, this is the one where I have been least active—by choice. Early on, I concluded that business and markets move faster than government and policy, even though the latter are essential to the journey. My aversion to the public sector was reinforced by seven years served on a Consultative Forum for Sustainable Development within the European Commission in the 1990s.
Throughout, I have tried not to be overtly political, though calls for system change are, by definition, political. Even so, my work repeatedly intersects with governance, governments and policy—most recently when I spoke to some 2,000 people involved in Brazil’s Courts of Accounts.
Brazil’s primary court of accounts is the Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU), or Federal Court of Accounts. One of the world’s oldest institutions dedicated to government accountability, it supports the National Congress by auditing the executive branch, overseeing federal funds, promoting good governance, and acting as a watchdog against corruption and inefficiency.
The event took place in early December and involved my flying to São Paulo, then on to Florianópolis. Beforehand, I was warned that many local voters and businesspeople had backed the populist Jair Bolsonaro, now jailed for his attempted coup.
My keynote was well received, even though I spoke out strongly against bribery, corruption, and populists like Trump and Bolsonaro. Happily, one organizer later wrote: “John touched a very sensitive subject in a delicate and beautiful way. They thought his presentation was brilliant.”
All part of my self-appointed task of speaking tomorrow’s truth to power.
Meanwhile, my concerns about the slow pace of government action were starkly underlined by news from Iceland, which has designated the potential collapse of the Atlantic Ocean current system as a national security threat, spurring planning for worst-case scenarios.
As I explained in early 2024, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) carries warm water north from the tropics, helping to keep Europe’s winters mild. I had been warned as far back as 2003, during a visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, that its failure could give our part of Europe a climate more like Siberia’s.
Alarmingly, the first government to act did so more than twenty years after the alarm was first raised. Such delays will be aggravated by the current rightward swing in politics, with many right-wingers deliberately turning a blind eye to climate science.
Still, even right-wing governments will eventually be forced to respond—albeit using a very different vocabulary, centred on survival, strength, security, and sovereignty.
My own priorities have long included generational politics, spotlighted by the 1987 Brundtland Commission’s coverage of intergenerational equity. If we are to shift from a deepening Anthropocene toward Glenn Albrecht’s Symbiocene—where human systems reinforce the health and resilience of living systems—we will need to reinvent government and governance. My visual take on this is shown below.
Toward a 21st-century political blueprint
One phrase we may hear more of is “strategic hibernation,” highlighted by Christopher Marquis, Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School.
Writing in the November–December issue of Harvard Business Review, he observes that just as brewing companies went quiet or exited the market during US Prohibition, many American firms are now muting their messaging on ESG, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), and climate issues.
Some companies pressing ahead with DEI, for example, have simply rebranded their efforts under labels such as “belonging,” “cultural competency,” or “employee engagement.”
As Marquis concludes, “The firms that will lead in the long run are not those that are loudest in challenging times, but those that navigate such periods with clarity of purpose and control of their exposure.” The smartest strategy, he suggests, “may be to advance steadily—just below the radar.”
The deeper issue, however, is that we are still operating with 20th-century political systems built around GDP growth, cheap energy, and national advantage. A Symbiocene trajectory would instead require constitutions, mandates, and public finance systems that treat a stable climate, biodiversity, and healthy ecosystems as core public goods—on a par with security or the rule of law.
So, what might a blueprint for tomorrow’s politics include? Among other things, it would:
establish legal duties to protect ecological stability;
introduce national “nature and climate” budgets alongside fiscal ones; and
ensure public procurement defaults to low-impact, circular, and nature-positive options.
The future will demand multi-layered governance that treats carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, and toxic pollution as trade-relevant harms; drives race-to-the-top industrial strategies; removes perverse subsidies—especially for fossil fuels and destructive land use; and applies border measures carefully, so harm is not merely exported elsewhere.
At a time of intense backlash, it is worth remembering that resistance grows when transitions feel imposed, unfair, or identity-threatening. To counter this, politics must deliver:
just-transition institutions that smooth incomes, retrain workers for real jobs, and regenerate places alongside nature;
visible household benefits—warmer homes, cheaper mobility, cleaner air, resilient local food systems; and
genuine participation, through citizens’ assemblies, local co-design, and credible pathways to consent.
Will we reach such an endpoint in my lifetime? No. In the lifetime of the youngest among us? Perhaps. Utopia is a guarantee of disappointment. But if we instead aim for what Kevin Kelly calls protopia—a world that grows incrementally better through sustained effort—then success remains within reach.
Throughout, however, we must keep our eyes on the potential for systemic change. While seemingly impossible in “normal” times, it tends to come in reach during periods of profound disruption. We should be careful what we wish for, but with system-level disruption now pretty much guaranteed, we could well surprise everyone—on the upside—in the coming 10-15 years.
My next post in this series, due to appear on January 7th, will focus in on the UAE’s efforts to navigate its way from fossil fuels to clean energy.
As ever, your thoughts on any (or all) of the above points are genuinely welcome.
Meanwhile, I wish all readers a genuinely regenerative New Year
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John Elkington is Founder & Global Ambassador at Volans and Chairman & Chief Pollinator at Countercurrent. His personal website can be accessed here.
His latest book, Tickling Sharks, is available on Amazon and through good bookshops.
John—a wonderful reflection. Your humble guidance and insightful way-finding never fail to amaze me.
IMHO: We can work to change Science, Business, Markets, Politics, etc, but we (our species, our leadership, our influencers) must radically change our values as people, communities, states, countries, citizens, before any of the changes you suggest will take meaningful root.
That’s why in my own little theory of change, I chose to create and teach a course called “Systems Change for a Small Planet”, so perhaps a handful of future leaders, the kinds that will show up in places to influence the sectors you mention in your essay, might bring a changed mindset, consciousness and values to their efforts. As they say, there’s no better way to learn something new than to try to teach it. We have to fundamentally reorient our relationship to the earth and its extraordinary gifts—and this needs to be done physically and spiritually, not just intellectually. We must tend our gardens…..
This past year, I have been most inspired and influenced by Vanessa Andreotti. If you haven’t already her books Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, I strongly encourage you to do so. I recently took an online class with her about Meta-Relational AI, that might reshape a good deal of your current thinking and doing.
This is what I needed to read to give me hope for the future and survive this messy present. Thank you!