By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
As 2025 ends, I find myself doing what I urge my students—and the organizations I work with—to do: pause long enough to reflect on where we are and where we need to go. I am a creature of the 20th century, now long past, and, like everyone else, am trying to navigate this 21st century. For me, the 21st century began on a crisp, blue, late summer morning in September 2001 when the twin towers fell, and we lost thousands of precious lives to terror. We came back from that horror, particularly here in New York, with the inspired leadership of Mike Bloomberg and his talented team. Sadly, 2025 has been the worst year since 2001. It has been a disruptive and terrifying year. America is governed by a national administration characterized by cruelty, racism, xenophobia, and the constant shattering of norms and traditional American morality and values. Donald Trump has engaged in a ceaseless effort to dominate the news and occupy our brains. I will acknowledge his presence, try to understand the perspective of his supporters, and move on to the more important facts of life as 2025 becomes 2026.
We are now a quarter-century into the 21st century. In environmental policy terms, that’s a long time—and also no time at all. In that time, environmental protection has moved from the periphery to the center of our policy agenda. In the year 2000, environmental protection was still widely treated as a specialized concern—important, but separate. The “environment” was something you regulated, litigated, or advocated for. In many companies, it lived in a small compliance office; in many governments, it was housed in a dedicated agency that was too often treated as unimportant. Over the past 25 years, that separation has steadily collapsed. Not because everyone suddenly became enlightened, but because the operational reality of managing modern organizations on a crowded and more globally interconnected planet changed how goods and services are made, transported, and consumed.
Three trends drove this shift.
First, it is now clear that environmental sustainability requires additional technological development. What we’ve developed must be implemented, but enhanced technology is required if we are to develop the high-throughput, low-impact economy we require for a politically stable, sustainable economy. Renewable energy, battery storage, grid modernization, enhanced building performance, electric vehicles, sensors, data systems, global communications, artificial intelligence, and industrial process innovation are now practical tools—not science fiction. The energy transition didn’t start because it was fashionable; it started because it was technically feasible and increasingly cost-effective and was required on a more crowded, resource-strained planet.
Second, environmental risk became central to economic life and measurable. Once you can measure something, management can define success and begin working toward it. When you can quantify energy use, emissions, water risk, waste streams, supply chain exposure, and climate vulnerability, those issues stop being ideological talking points and start becoming operational risks and cost centers to manage.
Third, sustainability and a deeper understanding of diversity became part of the labor market and culture. Younger professionals expect organizations to pay attention to workplace fairness, environmental impacts, and community impacts. They are not all activists. They are not all “woke.” They understand reality and have grown up watching extreme weather, infrastructure failure, and public health disasters, particularly COVID-19. They know that biodiversity loss and climate change are real and must be addressed. They do not see gay and transgender rights as a theory since they either are LGBTQ or know and love people who are. Moreover, the renewed effort to assert White Power cannot survive the growing number of global interracial and interethnic relationships and friendships. The overreach of racial quotas has now been more than exceeded by the overreach of ICE and America-only policies.
Despite the resurgence of extreme conservative forces of intolerance, racism, antisemitism, and islamophobia, our culture has become more tolerant. “S” (social) and “G” (governance) were added to “E” (environment), because protecting the environment could not be divorced from protecting the rights and dignity of humans and their communities. We learned that racism and other forms of bias fell victim to the reality of actual human interaction. Travel has made many young people more cosmopolitan and sophisticated about the way people can simultaneously be distinct and similar.
Over the past quarter-century, the economic necessity of protecting the environment has become clear. The old cliché that we must choose between the economy and the environment was never fully true. We draw our wealth from the planet’s ecosystems. The economic benefits of pollution are dwarfed by its economic costs. Cities are in a global competition for people and business. If a city is not environmentally sustainable and is dirty, crime-ridden, and polluted, highly mobile people and businesses will settle elsewhere.
That does not mean progress is smooth. It isn’t. We have also seen, repeatedly, that politics can attack and sometimes destroy technical competence. But even that hard truth has clarified something important: the sustainability movement cannot depend on any single administration, any single policy, or any single narrative. It has to be embedded—operationally—in organizations that intend to survive and thrive.Sustainability is an integral element of competent management.
If I had to summarize my blogs this year in one sentence, it would be this:
Sustainability is becoming routine management—even as politics tries to turn it into a culture war. Much of what I wrote in 2025 was about the shift in America’s social and work culture. Specifically, I observed that:
1) Operational sustainability beats symbolic sustainability
Early in the year, I returned to a point I’ve made many times: there is a difference between sustainability as a symbol and sustainability as actual, on-the-ground operational change. The symbolic version is fragile and may make environmentalists feel good for a while, but like an aspirational climate goal, it seems righteous but is merely ridiculous. The operational version is durable because it is tied to reality, real work, cost, risk, and performance. Real sustainability management acknowledges reality—sometimes environmental goals must temporarily give way to other goals. That distinction matters because 2025 has been an object lesson in how quickly symbolic commitments can be attacked, mocked, or reversed—and how stubbornly operational realities persist anyway. In Washington, D.C., the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has now become the Environmental Destruction Agency (EDA). It’s disheartening and sad, but in the long run, the EDA is the right wing’s symbolic cotton candy. The incompetent ideologues running the place will not last. If environmental protection is reduced, the public will fight back. People like to breathe and don’t like being poisoned. At the state and local level and in well-managed public and private organizations all over the United States, environmental protection persists. Deregulating pollution that harms human health undermines the very idea of deregulation. Defunding the EPA is as bad an idea as defunding the NYPD.
2) “Disruption” is not a governing philosophy—it’s a management failure
This year, I wrote about what happens when disruption becomes the point rather than the tool. Organizations sometimes need reform. Governments sometimes need restructuring. But the governing strategy in our federal government over the past year has been performative chaos—undermining agency capacity, attacking expertise, and treating complex systems as if they don’t matter. It’s clear that this is an ideological attack on the idea of an active federal government. I understand the impulse, but the technique has been to cut without thought and without legal authority. There are many incompetent administrators and an even greater number of poorly thought-through federal programs. These laws were not a conspiracy created by a deep state but by compromises in legislation due to honest differences in policy preferences. Sometimes the dysfunction is in federal management rather than federal policy. But the method of reform should not be by chainsaw, but by scalpel, as practiced by Al Gore when, as Vice President, he led a wide-scale and successful effort to reinvent government management. Instead of thoughtful management, we were treated this year to a horrible reality TV show, augmented by constant social media lies.
The negative outcome of all this disruption has been massive. Millions of people have been harmed by the casual destruction of USAID by DOGE. Over 40 million people experienced food insecurity due to Trump’s SNAP benefits freeze. The reductions in Medicaid and health insurance subsidies will kill Americans. ICE raids are terrifying good people and harming America’s communities, economy, and global image. The effort to disrupt the federal government in 2025 was pure destruction.
3) The attack on science and immigrants is an attack on America’s prosperity and power.
I also wrote bluntly about the relationship between American prosperity and America’s scientific research capacity. The modern economy is built on scientific and technical knowledge, and universities are a critical part of that system. When public research funding and earth observation capacity are weakened, you are not “saving money.” You are discarding the information infrastructure that makes competent and imaginative management and product development possible—whether we’re talking about public health, climate risk, agriculture, or disaster response. When you refuse to let international students come to America and stay here to work, you are reducing the brainpower required to compete in the global economy. America’s great strength has long been built on the brainpower, work ethic, and perspective of immigrants.
4) The “green economy” is real—and it needs well-trained people
Despite political noise, I spent much of 2025 emphasizing that sustainability management is a growing profession. Organizations still need staff who can do greenhouse gas accounting, supply chain management, energy planning, building decarbonization, resilience planning, and sustainability analytics. The labor market isn’t waiting for Washington to get its act together. This is why education matters. I wrote about my students—because they are the strongest reason I remain stubbornly optimistic. You do not see cynicism when you watch smart people commit to hard work despite the pushback from ideological zealots.
5) Metrics matter—especially when politics tries to turn ESG into a punchline
I spent a great deal of time on measurement and disclosure for a simple reason: it is where ideology meets reality. A well-run organization measures what matters. When sustainability metrics are honest and embedded in key performance indicators, they improve decision-making. When they become a moral media performance or a marketing campaign, they deserve critique—and they invite backlash.
This year’s debate over ESG and disclosure has too often been framed as if corporations reporting risk are “woke” and reporting requirements are “intrusive.” In reality, investors want comparable risk information, and large organizations operating across jurisdictions will have to comply with multiple standards, whether the U.S. federal government likes it or not. Moreover, the operational risk from climate-induced extreme weather events, heat, and sea level rise is real. Mindful managers know they need contingency plans to address the impact of climate change on their businesses.
6) Decarbonization is underway, but the hard parts are quiet and behind the scenes
I also returned repeatedly to the idea that decarbonization is not a slogan—it is a set of engineering, finance, permitting, and operational challenges. The transition is real. It is moving faster in some places than others. And it is frequently slowed by bottlenecks: grid capacity, siting, NIMBY, interconnection queues, supply chain constraints, and the political weaponization of infrastructure.
But the direction is clear. Fossil fuels are not a “future strategy.” They are a legacy system that will persist for a time and then be replaced, largely because alternative technologies keep improving.
7) Cities are where sustainability becomes real—and where tradeoffs live
I wrote a lot about New York City, not because it is unique, but because it is a vivid laboratory of urban sustainability and is my home. In a dense city, you can see the core sustainability challenge: how to deliver mobility, energy, housing, sanitation, and economic opportunity while reducing pollution and risk. You can also see how easy it is for environmental goals to collide with affordability if policy is designed without attention to distributional impacts.
Whether we are talking about Local Law 97 implementation in New York City, climate resilience, heat risk, organic waste recycling, lead in drinking water service lines, or the politics of congestion pricing, the underlying story is the same: the sustainability transition is now deeply urban—and it will succeed or fail based on operations, not rhetoric.
8) The circular economy is necessary—but it is not clean or simple
Finally, I wrote about a point that frustrates people who want a simple morality play: nearly everything humans do has environmental impacts. Recycling has impacts. Manufacturing solar panels has impacts. Building battery plants has impacts. “Clean” does not mean impact-free.
The task of sustainability management is not to fantasize about a pristine world. It is to measure impacts, reduce them, and manage the tradeoffs in ways that protect public health and ecological function while keeping society functioning.
The sustainability issues that I believe will dominate 2026:
Predictions are always risky, but as 2025 fades into 2026, this is what I expect to shape my work—and the work of sustainability managers—next year.
1) Fragmented reporting will force a breakthrough in corporate data systems
Whether or not one nation leads, organizations operating globally will face continued pressure for consistent, comparable reporting on emissions, energy use, and environmental risk. If standards remain fragmented, that won’t end reporting—it will increase the cost of reporting and force companies to build stronger internal measurement systems to reconcile multiple frameworks. The winners will be the organizations that treat sustainability metrics like financial metrics: board-governed, auditable, and integrated into decision-making.
2) Resilience and disaster response capacity will move from “policy” to “operations”
Extreme weather is not theoretical. Resilience planning is no longer a glossy document; it is an operational program requiring procurement, capital planning, capital finance, engineering, maintenance, mutual aid agreements, and logistics. If federal emergency management capacity continues to weaken, state and local governments—and large institutions—will have to build more self-reliance, and they will do it unevenly. That unevenness will create inequality in who is protected and who is left exposed.
3) The energy transition’s bottlenecks will be the story—not the technology
By now, most serious people understand that renewables and electrification are central to the future. The question is speed and reliability. In 2026, the most important debates will be about infrastructure: transmission, interconnection, siting, storage, and building electrification at scale. Politics will keep trying to make this cultural. But the grid does not run on ideology, and the emerging AI industry will require massive amounts of energy until it figures out how to compute more efficiently.
4) Affordability will become the decisive constraint on climate policy
In 2026, climate policy that ignores affordability will fail—even when the science is correct. You cannot decarbonize a city by driving working people into homelessness or pricing basic services out of reach. You must sequence policy, design incentives, and build capacity so the transition is both real and livable. This is not an argument for delay but simply acknowledges the reality of multiple goals.
5) Environmental health will regain ground as part of the sustainability agenda
This year, I tried to keep climate change in perspective—not to diminish it, but to insist that environmental sustainability is broader than carbon. Air pollution, toxics, heat risk, water infrastructure, lead exposure, and ecological degradation are immediate threats to human well-being. In 2026, I expect the best sustainability strategies to explicitly link climate, health, and equity—because that is where public support can be built and sustained.
6) Talent, immigration, and workforce development will be central to competitiveness
We are in a global competition for skills. Sustainability management is no exception. If the United States makes it harder for talented people to study and work here, we will not stop the energy transition. We will simply watch other nations build it—and then sell it back to us at a high price.
Ending 2025 without despair—and without complacency
The last 25 years have taught me that environmental progress is real, but it is rarely linear. Technology advances. Culture shifts. Markets evolve. Institutions adapt. And then politics sometimes drags it in the wrong direction.
My optimism at the end of 2025 is not based on the belief that everything will work out. It is based on something more practical: I have watched sustainability move from the margins to the core of management and policy. That shift is happening because the world is changing, because risk is visible, and because competent organizations do not ignore reality for long.
In 2026, the work will be less about slogans and more about operating systems: measurement, infrastructure, resilience, and the day-to-day practice of building a cleaner economy without destroying the only planet we are able to live on.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
