What Happened to Sustainability? It's Hiding in Plain Sight.

In short: sustainability hasn't disappeared from companies, it's been renamed and quietly decentralized between Finance's numbers and HR's culture work, and reconnecting the two is what makes it stick.

Ask Finance about sustainability and you'll get a spreadsheet. Ask HR and you'll get a shrug, then the word "resilience."

It Was Never a Caring Problem

Here's what hasn't changed: the planet doesn't care what we call it. Planetary boundaries are still being crossed. Extreme weather isn't a distant risk anymore, most of us have felt it directly this year. The transformation is more urgent than it was five years ago, not less.

And here's what I keep noticing when I talk to leaders, in finance, in HR, in the C-suite: almost everyone cares. Genuinely. Most people I meet want to leave things better than they found them.

So if the will is there, why does the progress lag behind it? KPMG's 2026 global survey of 2,024 C-suite and senior executives across 19 countries found that 72% understand their company's sustainability strategy in detail. Only 19% actually measure what it does to the bottom line.

Here's the deeper issue: caring is where it starts, not where it ends. A belief has to travel through an entire organization, what gets talked about, what gets rewarded, who gets promoted, before it becomes something real. And then reality talks back. Do that well enough, often enough, and it becomes the way things are done here. Do it badly, and the belief quietly dies, no matter how sincere it was on day one.

There's a word for that loop. Culture.

Culture Isn't the Poster on the Wall

Not the posters. Not the values statement in the lobby. The actual definition, the one from organizational psychologist Edgar Schein, is far more useful and a lot less fluffy: culture is what a group learns while solving two problems. One is external, staying relevant to the world outside. The other is internal, working as one coherent company rather than a collection of departments quietly pulling in different directions.

Sustainability sits inside both.

• Externally: what are we here to do, and does the world outside still want it from us.

• Internally: what actually gets rewarded here, and what gets quietly overlooked.

That second question is where most sustainability efforts go to die. A company can have a beautiful external answer, we care about the planet, we want to leave things better, and still fail internally, because nobody adjusted what gets rewarded, who gets promoted, or how decisions get made when a target and a quarterly number disagree.

Finance and HR Are Solving the Same Problem From Opposite Ends

This is where Finance and HR turn out to be solving the same culture problem from opposite ends.

Finance owns the external half more than it realizes, the numbers that show whether the sustainability work is actually creating value, not just good intentions. That's precisely why sustainability reporting keeps getting pulled closer to financial accounting: same rigor, same discipline, same expectation that a claim can be backed by a number.

That internal half is HR's territory. Vision. Communication. And the part that actually matters most: what gets rewarded. Bonus structures. Promotion criteria. What a manager notices and praises day to day. That's the actual wiring of the culture. If the wiring doesn't connect to the belief, the belief was never going to survive contact with the org chart.

Which is why "resilience" versus "sustainability" is a symptom, not the disease. You can rename the belief all day. It won't matter if the wiring underneath it still only rewards the profit line.

Sustainability Didn't Fade. It Was Renamed.

Rewind to 2022 and sustainability was everywhere. Green HRM was a real discipline. Companies were racing to set science-based targets, tie bonuses to ESG metrics, hire Chief Sustainability Officers. It wasn't quiet at all.

Then came the backlash. ESG became a political target, and mentioning it started to carry real risk, lawsuits, activist investors, public pile-ons. So companies did what companies do under pressure: they kept the work and dropped the label. "Carbon reduction" became "energy savings." "ESG" became "responsible business," "long-term value creation," or, the word that stuck hardest, "resilience."

By the time HR picked "resilience" back up, most of the room had already forgotten it used to mean sustainability.

Resilience Was Never Just About AI

Ask an HR leader what "resilience" means today and you'll mostly hear about AI, adapting the workforce to it, retraining for it, managing the anxiety around it. Sustainability rarely comes up in the same breath anymore.

But look at what resilience actually measures. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report, based on over 260,000 respondents across 140+ countries, tracks organizational resilience through indicators like employee engagement, trust in leadership, and managers' capacity to hold teams together under pressure. In SHRM's 2026 survey of 129 CHROs, nearly half, 46%, named leadership and manager development, not AI tools, as their top priority for building organizational resilience. That's not a coincidence. It's the same muscle. An organization that can't wire a sustainability commitment into how it actually operates is the same organization that won't wire AI into how it actually operates, or absorb the next disruption after that. Resilience was never really about any one crisis. It's the capacity to take a belief and make it real, again and again, whatever the belief is. HR just started practicing it on AI instead of on sustainability, without noticing it's the same skill.

Two Companies, Same Idea, Opposite Results

Here's what that wiring looks like in practice. Two companies, same rough idea, opposite results.

The first sends a recent graduate onto the shop floor to tell machine operators to power down equipment between shifts. Good idea, real savings, real emissions cut. He delivers the message, more messenger than owner, no real backup from above if things get difficult. The operators push back, restart takes too long, the numbers don't work for them. To them, it's just one of these ideas from the ivory tower. Nobody above him steps in to explain further or hold the line. The initiative dies within a week.

The second bans having more than one screen per desk. Same setup for backlash, it looks like cost-cutting wearing a green costume. But IT goes first and gives up their own second screens before asking anyone else to. When people push back, the company actually listens, a handful of roles get legitimate exceptions. Elsewhere, people get shown how to work well with one screen, and told plainly why it matters, less energy, less eye strain. Six months later, it's standard across a thousand employees, and it stuck.

Same belief in both cases. Different wiring. One company sent a message and hoped. The other modeled it, listened to the pushback, and adjusted the artifacts around it, exceptions, explanations, who goes first, until the behavior held.

That's the whole difference between a target and a culture.

One Question Worth Asking This Week

Here's one question worth asking this week: how do Finance and HR actually work together on sustainability at your company?

If the honest answer is "they don't," that's not a failure. That's just where most companies still are. It's also exactly where to start.