ESG & Climate Assurance Lead | GHG Verification | ESG Data Controls & Audit Readiness | GSI Environmental
Sustainability professional at GSI Environmental who supports ESG data management, traceability, and reporting preparedness. His work incorporates regulations, analytics, and operations to ensure client disclosures are accurate and verified to the proper standard.
Understandably, most people’s takeaways regarding sustainability in 2025 are going to revolve around the major uncertainties and headwinds that are facing sustainability reporting from a regulatory perspective. That focus is reasonable considering the curtailing of regulations such as the CSRD Omnibus changes, court challenges to California SB261 reporting, and US environmental standards being repealed.
The challenges have seeped into voluntary reporting as well throughout 2025. With the year being filled with tariff uncertainties, rising costs, and deglobalization, companies are focusing more than ever on cost savings and ensuring that their sustainability departments are delivering quality, actionable data that provides clear, tangible benefits to the company.
It is this increased demand for sustainability to produce actionable results that is pushing the industry forward. For some, sustainability in the past had been associated more with marketing than analytics, risk assessment, or resource management. To be blunt, many did not take sustainability seriously in its infancy. It was often relegated to HR and marketing departments to appease a subset of stakeholders. Many had forgotten that sustainability includes economic sustainability, not just environmental sustainability. The challenges of 2025 have changed this mindset for the better.
Pressure makes diamonds. And the sustainability world has certainly risen to the pressure from stakeholders for sustainability to justify its existence. The conversation around sustainability is shifting to working with clear and actionable data. As a result, our team at GSI has focused on developing a strong risk assessment and climate scenario analysis procedure that not only protects the environment but also provides clear cost benefits and efficiencies to the client’s business.
Sustainability is the perfect antidote to uncertain supply chains as a result of tariffs. Product lifecycle assessments (LCA), for example, produce clear results that show dependencies within the supply chain and key risks that need to be mitigated to efficiently run a business.
I’m excited to see what innovations these pressures bring to 2026. Already, we are seeing amazing progress being made through the GHG Protocol updates to Scope 2 and 3 to ensure that the methodology being used to collect data is truly accurate. At GSI, our team is working every day to sophisticate our models and provide a clear product for management groups to ensure the economic sustainability of their business.
Milton Friedman had a very impactful quote that I think about often: “When a crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” While currently there are significant political headwinds with regard to mandatory sustainability reporting, it is our job to continue the development of methodologies and structures for when the impossible becomes inevitable.
Return to 2025: Working Through the Mess and the Shift that Defined the Year
