The Soft Sustainability Era Is Over
The inevitable rise of “hard” sustainability in the wake of the Third Gulf War
On 28 February 2026, the soft sustainability era ended without most people noticing. It had been ailing for a while—anyone with eyes could see the symptoms—but it took a war to confirm the rupture.
The Third Gulf War is not, primarily, an interruption to the sustainability agenda, of course. Instead, it is the moment at which a generation’s worth of comforting assumptions about how geopolitics and the energy—and wider natural resource—transition would unfold are colliding with emerging realities.
This column has argued for a while now that markets, as currently configured, will not deliver the outcomes we need from them. Rewilding them—rebuilding the rules, the incentives, the information architecture—was always going to be a political project, not just a technical one. What this latest war has confirmed is that we are moving from the era of soft sustainability one of hard sustainability.
The soft version of sustainability—voluntary, consensual, gradualist, anchored in multilateral norms and corporate goodwill—is largely over. What replaces it will be harder in every dimension: harder constraints, harder politics, harder instruments and, perhaps most challenging of all, harder trade-offs.
That said, as GlobeScan CEO Chris Coulter commented as we discussed this trend recently, in the days when soft and hard power were much debated, people knew that both were needed—even if new balances sometimes had to be struck. We are now at one of those moments for the sustainability agenda, where new balances will be struck.
Energy: from aspiration to security imperative
The energy story has always been central to the sustainability agenda. For at least a quarter of a century, the energy transition has been sold on climate logic and cost curves. Falling solar prices, modest carbon prices, voluntary corporate procurement, a gentle ratchet on policy. It was a story you could tell at Davos without raising your voice.
Then Strait of Hormuz closure, and the fertilizer shock that ripped through Southeast Asia in their wake, rewrote that story in capital letters. Petrol, diesel, aviation fuel, electricity, food—all up, all at once, across an entire region that depends on Middle Eastern hydrocarbons and ammonia for the basic conditions of modern life.
The ISEAS analysis out of Singapore put it plainly: the war is doing severe economic damage precisely because the region had not yet escaped its hydrocarbon dependency. For those who haven’t come across it, ISEAS (ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute) is a research institution operating under the purview of the Ministry of Education in Singapore
The hard versions of the coming transitions in every industry sector are now unavoidable. In terms of energy, renewables, storage, grid hardening, electrification, and alternative nitrogen—these are no longer climate niceties, if they ever were. They will increasingly be viewed in terms of as national security infrastructures.
Through the back half of this decade, expect defense ministries, not just environment ministries, to become critical funders of grid resilience and critical-minerals processing.
We should also expect “energy sovereignty” to displace “energy transition” as the operative phrase in many national capitals. Expect heat pumps and rooftop solar to be sold as protection against geopolitical “extortion”—possibly producing a more durable political coalition than climate concern ever managed. And expect agricultural self-sufficiency to become a top-tier priority in a way it has not been since the 1970s.
This is not a defeat for softer versions of the sustainability transition. Instead, it involves shocks that require the transition to acquire the political muscle it always needed—and so conspicuously lacked.
Critical minerals: the end of the open trading order
Soft sustainability assumed the materials of the transition would flow through liberalized markets, with ESG ratings sanding off the rough edges. Hard sustainability, by contrast, involves watching lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel and the rare earths become instruments of statecraft.
China dominates the processing. Indonesia has nationalised its nickel. The West is now, belatedly, scrambling for friend-shored supply. And Gulf instability is layered over the top of all that.
On current trajectories, the 2030s will not be governed by the WTO on such questions. They will be governed by strategic stockpiles modelled on petroleum reserves, by mandatory traceability rules with teeth, by tariffs and export controls, and by a bifurcated transition economy—a Western-allied bloc and a Chinese-anchored bloc, each with its own standards, financing and supply chains.
Mining is returning to OECD countries under conditions that would have been politically inconceivable five years ago, and it is being contested by Indigenous and local communities in ways that will test every comfortable phrase in the “just transition” vocabulary.
Military emissions: an exclusion that must not hold
For two decades, military emissions sat outside international climate accounting—a carve-out written into 1997’s Kyoto Protocol and never seriously challenged during the Paris COP15 deliberations in 2015. Defense was simply too sovereign to include.
The Third Gulf War’s air campaign, naval deployments and missile exchanges are making that exclusion indefensible. The Foreign Policy Research Institute has noted the unprecedented intensity of the air war in the Gulf and the staggering materiel burn—munitions, fuel, replacement systems—that comes with it.
You cannot rebuild a depleted air force without rebuilding its emissions footprint several times over. You cannot stand up a credible deterrent across Europe, the Gulf and the Indo-Pacific without spending a planet’s worth of steel, aluminium and jet fuel.
Through the 2030s, as a result, expect mandatory military emissions disclosure to become a serious policy demand, resisted at first, soon conceded in part. Also expect a growing literature on the climate cost of deterrence itself.
Will we see defense procurement factoring in lifecycle emissions, not as virtue signalling but because of cold, hard logistics—electrified forward bases are less vulnerable than diesel-dependent ones? And might we expect a sober reckoning with the carbon cost of rearmament across Europe, East Asia and the Gulf, none of which is compatible with any stated net-zero pathway?
Shipping, insurance and the financialization of risk
If you want to know who is pricing the new reality, do not look at the COPs. Look at Lloyd’s and other insurance markets. The Hormuz closures, the Red Sea, the spillover into the Eastern Mediterranean—these have transformed war-risk premiums, rerouting costs and the cascading effects on every global supply chain.
Insurance and reinsurance are now the primary transmission mechanisms for both climate and geopolitical risk, doing the disciplinary work that voluntary disclosure was supposed to do and yet could never quite manage.
“Resilience” is displacing “efficiency” as the dominant logic in supply chain design—with shorter chains, more inventory, and more redundancy. This may be carbon-intensive in the short term, but it could reduce systemic fragility in the medium term, which is a trade-off we are now making whether we admit it or not.
The Lloyd’s market, the reinsurers and the catastrophe-bond market are emerging as quietly powerful sustainability actors, pricing in risks that most politicians cannot bring themselves to contemplate. Business leaders who insist on sticking with the old order risk find themselves operating in ever-widening insurance deserts.
The fragmenting multilateral architecture
Across Southeast Asia, America’s Operation Epic Fury was read—accurately—as another sign that the post-war rules-based order is being upended by major powers reaching for coercion, unilateralism and transactionalism. The convening power that underwrote the COPs, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the High Seas Treaty and the plastics negotiations is weakening.
The hard version of our future will include COPs continuing as conferences but losing centrality as decision-making venues. Climate finance flowing through development banks, sovereign-to-sovereign arrangements and security-coded packages rather than just through UNFCCC mechanisms. Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms proliferating—with the EU’s pioneering platform joined by British, Japanese, and Canadian versions, and with China also wading in.
Each one of these initiatives will shape trade flows much more powerfully than any climate treaty. Even so, by the early 2030s, expect a serious argument about whether the 1.5°C and even 2°C ceilings can survive politically in their current forms. And expect, too, a seismic shift involving issues associated with climate adaptation, and climate-related loss and damage.
China’s ambiguous centrality
Paradoxically, the country least integrated into the previous soft-era sustainability consensus has been the country that is now most essential to its physical delivery. This is likely to be a central characteristic of the hard era, and short of a major international conflict, that is on a scale larger than the current Gulf War.
Beijing enters this new phase under genuine domestic economic pressure, aiming to project restrained neutrality—preserving ties, reducing exposure, avoiding direct confrontation with Washington—while continuing to dominate the manufacturing base of the entire transition. The commanding heights of tomorrow’s greener economy.
As a result, expect the next decade to see a deepening bifurcation between the politics of sustainability, which has been largely Western-led and is increasingly on the defensive, and the industrial substrate of sustainability, which increasingly is Chinese-led and expanding.
Narrow technical cooperation on climate may survive even as the broader relationship deteriorates. Indeed, it may prove to be one of the last redoubts of soft-era multilateralism.
The waning of corporate voluntarism
Soft sustainability rested on the premise that companies would voluntarily decarbonize, disclose and align with the 1.5°C ceiling.
Now the uncertainty triggered by this latest war has accelerated something that was already underway: the dismantling of net-zero coalitions, the retreat of US financial institutions from climate alliances, the quiet softening of corporate targets. Voluntary action cannot survive sustained geopolitical pressure without binding scaffolding underneath it, and in many instances the necessary scaffolding was never built.
The hard version of all this will involve mandatory disclosures with liability doing the work that voluntary frameworks could not. It will see litigation emerging as the primary enforcement mechanism—with climate cases against states, against majors, against directors personally—replacing the soft pressure of shareholder resolutions and ESG ratings.
And, as all this cranks through, the change agenda’s focus will shift from the long-standing focus on businesses to a growing interest in markets and how adapt them to the new priorities.
The generational question
A generation already facing housing costs, debt, and climate anxiety is now also facing conscription debates in parts of Europe, with defence spending crowding out social investment, energy price shocks, and a growing sense that the institutions they were told to believe in are not coming to save them.
As a result, softer climate ambitions could end up being positioned as a luxury good in a hard era, with serious consequences for the relevant political coalitions. The opportunity is a reordering of the agenda around security, sovereignty and national dignity rather than the planetary frame alone—something closer to a 1940s sensibility than a 1990s one.
Defense and climate could come to be understood as a single political package. That coalition would be harder to build than the one we lost but might be more durable once built.
What this requires of practitioners
To get a better sense of how we have managed previous transitions, I just bought James Holland’s new book, Visionaries. This tells the story of those (including the likes of American presidents FDR and Truman) who built the new order in the chaos in the wake of the chaos of WWII.
The question today is whether we have it in us to do it again. Trump? No. European leaders? No, not on current evidence. Xi? Almost certainly if he can keep China’s economy on track.
Hard though it may be for those of us brought up in the old post-WWII order, we must stop expecting (or at least relying on) global consensus. We must stop relying on voluntary corporate action. We must stop treating defense and security as adjacent to sustainability rather than central to it. We must stop assuming that the energy transition will run on climate logic alone. And we must stop planning as if 2050 targets shape near-term behaviour. They never did—and now, it seems, probably never will.
Meanwhile, the latest war continues to unfold. Uncertainty compounds. The obvious options include containment, wider conflict, or a Riyadh peace conference in the autumn. But there is nothing obvious about what happens next, aside from further turmoil.
That said, the hard-sustainability frame does not depend on any one resolution of the Third Gulf War. Rather, it demands that we wake up to the fact that even a successful resolution would leave many soft-era assumptions in history’s dustbin.
None of this means that we shouldn’t try to be more responsible, more resilient and more regenerative. But the ground is shifting all around us—and the game will go to those who play by the best of the new rules, not to those who cling to the old.
At last hard sustainability explained with clarity thank you.
Agree. The era of a sustainability-focused idealpolitik is being overshadowed by the rising era of sustainability-focused realpolitik. We all knew this was coming. We’ve been discussing it since the 1970s, if not earlier. There are physical limits to material growth (separate from economic growth). The discussions I remember most from the “Limits to Growth” era always included statements like “let’s do this voluntarily, collaboratively and strategically before circumstances force us to do it reactively.” My takeaway from John’s essay is that we’ve reached the reactive era that Dana Meadows et al predicted.