Patagonia’s prime sustainability strategist is a supplies scientist. Colgate-Palmolive’s chief sustainability officer experiences to the expansion and technique group, and PepsiCo’s CSO has managed profit-and-loss statements for billion-dollar industrial companies.
The 13 leaders I interviewed in 2025 for the Local weather Pioneers collection come from various industries and backgrounds however share a typical precedence: a mission to create new enterprise worth with their sustainability agendas — within the type of higher merchandise, new income alternatives, improved operations, stronger company cultures and extra.
They’re exemplars of an accelerating shift within the occupation, one centered on quiet execution and sensible outcomes. “The brand new period we’re getting into into for sustainability is basically doubling down now on the enterprise case, on the worth creation facet,” Colgate-Palmolive Ann Tracy instructed me in Might.
The enterprise worth theme is explored in a collection of interviews I performed throughout Trellis Impression 25 with sustainability leaders from Atlassian, Cox, Workday and extra. It’ll additionally permeate forthcoming full-length Local weather Pioneers episodes, together with my interview developing Jan. 8 with Hawaiian Airways’ new CEO, Diana Birkett Rakow, who additionally leads local weather technique and low-carbon know-how investments for mother or father firm Alaska Air Group. Join Trellis Briefing to be among the many first to observe that dialog.
In the meantime, I encourage you to revisit how eight of this 12 months’s Local weather Pioneers are redefining company sustainability.
Matt Dwyer, vp of worldwide product footprint, beforehand led supplies innovation and growth.
Yum!’s sustainability chief Jon Hixson meets with the board each quarter, which helps maintain his technique entrance of thoughts.
Jim Andrew’s expertise managing company budgets is an enormous cause he was tapped for the position in August 2020.
The corporate’s sustainability lead is dreaming up methods to make use of the know-how to assist corporations, cities and people reduce emissions by no less than 1 gigaton a 12 months by 2030.
Ann Tracy, in her sixth 12 months on the job, experiences into the expansion and technique group of the buyer merchandise big.
Former Danone sustainability veteran Deanna Bratter is driving the footwear firm towards net-zero standing by rethinking plastics.
Marissa McGowan leaves few features of the cosmetics big’s enterprise unexamined on the way in which to eco-designing one hundred pc of its merchandise by 2030.
Microsoft’s first environmental strategist, Rob Bernard, brings a buyer’s perspective to CBRE’s emissions discount technique within the newly created C-suite position.
[You can mingle with past Climate Pioneers — including Bratter, McGowan and Dwyer — during GreenBiz 26, the premier event for sustainability professionals happening Feb. 17-19, 2026, in Phoenix.]