GHG Accounting | Climate Disclosure & Scenario Planning | ESG Data & Risk Analysis | GSI Environmental
Senior Sustainability Engineer at GSI Environmental and GHG Lead Verifier, supporting clients on GHG accounting, assurance readiness, and the technical backbone required for credible disclosure and decision-grade climate strategy.
2025 seemed like a rigged year where the deck stacked against sustainability. COP30 felt like a cop-out, the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement and slashed climate funding, and California’s SB 261 got dragged into a legal wrestling match with the first amendment. It sometimes felt like we lost all progress. Picking out good news in 2025 feels like an exercise in finding exceptions to the rule… yet I can’t help but think that’s the intent these days.
Call it greenhushing, less talking more doing, or just PR budgets getting cut – behind the curtains, the sustainability professionals are still hard at work. Call it business resilience, competitive advantage, or just operational efficiency – the back of house kept cooking up real, tangible GHG emissions reductions. Businesses with mature sustainability programs are reaping long-term benefits from the investments they committed years ago (you know, the magical negative bars in those MAC Curves). Moreover, we’re seeing this play out in industry average GHG emission factors. According to Watershed, “USEEIO… and CEDA show a median 2% decrease in corporate emissions per dollar spent in the last year, reflecting global economic and energy changes and further signaling that business growth and emissions growth can be decoupled.” Whatever you want to call it, whichever way you want to slice it, even in silence, it is progress.
That’s not to say there weren’t any positive headlines. In fact, I’d say the lack of certain tailwinds makes this one all the more impressive: “Solar and wind outpaced demand growth in the first half of 2025, as renewables overtook coal’s share in the global electricity mix.” from Ember Energy Research CIC. Solar generation alone met 83% of the global rise in demand and coal generation fell by 0.6% percent in H1 2025. Forward momentum in the economics, production, technology, and demand for solar make it the de facto best financial choice in a lot of circumstances. Despite the US government’s antagonism towards it, renewable energy is inevitable – it is progress.
Finally, I must give a special shout-out to Patagonia’s first ever Work in Progress Report. Frame it and put it in the Louvre! It’s unabashedly honest, transparent, funny, insightful, and beautifully crafted. When I lose a bit of hope as a sustainability professional, I read a bit of this to inspire me again – not because they make it look easy, but because it’s hard even for them too. On that note, I’ll end my reflection on 2025 with a quote from Ryan Gellert, CEO of Patagonia, “Sometimes it is messy. Sometimes it is painful. But in the end, it is progress.”
Return to 2025: Working Through the Mess and the Shift that Defined the Year
