As the reality of this summer’s extreme temperatures is officially recognised, corporations are deprioritising sustainability as an executive level responsibility. Swings and roundabouts?
So it’s official. July and August 2026 were the hottest months on record in the UK. According to the UK's official weather watchers at the Met Office the average temperature was 0.4C higher than has been seen before. Surface sea temperatures have hit record highs, and Europe has wilted under a series of scorching droughts and heatwaves.
In a statement from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said that August was a remarkable month, combining record global sea surface temperatures and the highest ever summer temperatures for Western Europe; these observations show how climate change is driving extremes across both the atmosphere and the oceans.
Despite this also being a period of geopolitical turmoil, with wars in Europe and the Middle East affecting global energy and the supply of goods, the effects of the intense heat have continued to headline news reporting throughout the summer, with the dramatic and disturbing outcomes impacting communities, services, economies and ecosystems across the world. Media footage has often focused on the devastating wildfires which have raged across Europe, often burning for days and decimating swathes of countryside and the plant and animal life they support.
And yet, while these shockingly clear outcomes of a heating world are impossible to avoid, the corporate reaction is at best counter intuitive. Global corporations with planet-sized carbon footprints have been getting rid of their Chief Sustainability Officers – high profile examples include Unilever and Apple, while HSBC has downgraded its CSO from the executive committee. In the consumer leisure sector – specifically fast food and coffee – there are some pertinent examples to consider. Let’s take Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee shop business employing nearly 400,000 people, which eliminated its Chief Sustainability Officer role this year. In the same period, the company’s emissions rose by 3%. How do we interpret that? Are they saying sustainability doesn’t matter? Climate change is irrelevant to us? McDonald’s has also reassigned its global CSO, with the fast-food chain’s executive lead for diversity, equity and inclusion picking up the portfolio. Subway had a head of sustainability for the EMEA region but does not appear to have one now.
Clearly, budget pressures are a major driver, with financial constraints affecting companies across the board. The official rationale is that sustainability should be “embedded” across the business, rather than owned by a single executive. In theory, that is defensible: environmental performance cuts across procurement, logistics and product design, and no CSO can fully control all of these functions.
But when the dedicated sustainability role disappears at precisely the point when performance is deteriorating, it is difficult to see this as smarter organisational design. It looks more like an attempt to remove ownership without removing the targets. And this is happening against an external backdrop that could hardly be more stark: the accelerating impacts of a warming climate are making the physical and economic risks of climate change increasingly difficult to ignore.
And the timing matters. Just as businesses are retreating from dedicated sustainability leadership, the consequences of climate change are more visible, disruptive and costly. “Net zero” may have become politically and commercially unfashionable but abandoning the language does not make the challenge disappear; it needs governance at board-level. ESG - another unfashionable term - still needs accountability. Circularity requires long-term investment. And every target needs a named owner.
Without these, responsibility becomes diluted and targets that supposedly belong to everyone can quickly become nobody’s responsibility, precisely when strong, bold leadership is most needed.
It’s a fair point to argue that this is exactly the shift sustainability practitioners have advocated for years: moving sustainability from the margins into the core of the business. But that argument becomes harder to sustain when companies simultaneously remove sustainability leadership from the top table. Calling this “integration” can sound less like transformation and more like a convenient way to downgrade accountability without admitting it. The test is simple: if sustainability is genuinely embedded in the business, who is accountable when it collides with cost, margins and growth? Without clear leadership and ownership, integration risks becoming responsibility without authority. Accountability without an accountable person.
The cyclical approach to climate change and its related risks, from supply chains and logistics to talent, ethics and reputation, is nothing new. What goes around comes around, but for this carousel the stakes are now surely too high for fairground tricks?
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