Companies from Burberry to Starbucks are cutting sustainability managers and pushing back climate targets as newsrooms gut their climate desks. Can the planet survive the retreat?
It’s a strange moment to be the person inside a company who answers for the planet. Sustainability has never been more visible in the way brands sell themselves — it’s on the hangtag, in the campaign, the mission statement. The people whose actual job is to make any of it true are another story. Across industries, they’re being laid off, reassigned, and absorbed into other departments.
Everlane’s recent capsizing underscores the retreat. When the brand agreed to sell a majority stake to Shein last month in a deal valued at about $100 million, its head of sustainability, Katina Boutis, found out the way the rest of us did, by reading about it. This was the company that made radical transparency its whole personality: the true cost of a T-shirt, the factories named, the markup printed right there on the page. Now it belonged to the fast-fashion giant the sustainable fashion world had spent a decade holding up as the enemy.
Boutis was “just as surprised” as anyone, she told Sourcing Journal, and a separation agreement kept her from saying more. She has plenty of company, and not only in fashion. “The risk isn’t just smaller teams,” Kaushik Sridhar, who runs the sustainability consultancy Orka, told Eco-Business. “It’s that sustainability becomes compliance-led rather than strategy-led if capability is hollowed out.”
The receding baseline
The brands that taught a generation to shop with a conscience are among the quickest to step back. Allbirds — once a $4 billion company built almost entirely on its green credentials — sold off its footwear business this spring, took the name Smartbird, and reinvented itself as a supplier of computing power for AI. Business of Fashion called the retreat of sustainable fashion one of the defining stories of 2025, and at the UN climate summit in Belém last November, the industry barely turned up.
To the people who do this work, the picture is far more than a simple surrender. The companies that meant it are still at it, and the ones that treated sustainability as branding are the ones bailing, says Darian McBain, former chief sustainability officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore and of Thai Union. The froth of the 2021 ESG boom is gone, she told Eco-Business, and the firms that hired a sustainability chief for show have either dropped their pledges or retreated into what she called a “compliance-only mindset.”
The receipts back her up. H&M Group and Kering have each cut emissions by more than a third, outpacing most competitors, and plenty of companies are building sustainability into the core business rather than scrapping it. But most of fashion’s biggest names are running behind the targets they set at the start of the decade, when half the industry promised to roughly halve supply-chain emissions by 2030.
Luxury has a more polite way of retreating: it simply moves the deadline. Burberry used its 2025-26 annual report to push its net-zero target back a full decade, from 2040 to 2050, calling it a “pragmatic response to external factors” and promising to resubmit the new timeline to the Science Based Targets initiative. Ralph Lauren did much the same in its 2025 report, dropping its 2040 net-zero goal for rolling five-year targets while keeping a 2030 promise to cut emissions 30 percent. There’s a word for the maneuver now — greenrinsing —the habit of revising a climate goal you aren’t going to hit.
It’s a tightrope, and the people walking it know it. “If you stretch too far, you lose credibility,” John Haffner, deputy chief sustainability officer at the Hong Kong developer Hang Lung Properties, told Eco-Business. “On the other hand, if you don’t stretch enough, we are not going to address the crisis in front of us.”
A few houses have cut these once-critical roles entirely. Chloé — the Richemont label that became the first major European name to go B Corp — lost its sustainability chief, Aude Vergne, last September after nearly ten years, and didn’t replace her. Depop dropped its head of sustainability and DEI and split the work elsewhere. But the biggest groups are holding firm, and there are more of them than there are quitters. LVMH actually strengthened its targets in 2025 and has already beaten its 2026 goal of halving direct emissions. Chanel is sticking to a 2040 net-zero plan. And Kering has kept Marie-Claire Daveu in its top sustainability seat since 2012, through an almost total turnover of everyone above her.
Nike is the plot twist. In 2024, ProPublica and The Oregonian reported that the company had laid off about a fifth of the staff working primarily on sustainability, with more lost to transfers and resignations — a “sustainability bloodbath,” one former employee called it. Half the team planning Nike’s carbon targets was gone, right when the company was already missing them. It had promised to cut supply-chain emissions 30 percent by 2030, and its own emissions have edged up since 2015. ProPublica also found its corporate-jet emissions climbing even as it talked about shrinking its footprint.
Then Nike did something almost nobody else has — it hired the job back. Jaycee Pribulsky, the sustainability chief through the cuts, left last September for the same title at the investment firm Apollo, and this past March, Nike named Cimarron Nix, a nine-year veteran of its sourcing arm, to replace her. The comeback only goes so far, though. Nike now pitches the role around managing sustainability as a financial risk, its Move to Zero program still carries a 2050 net-zero goal with no checkpoints for 2035 or 2040, and its water and waste numbers remain behind. It’s the same bargain sustainability leaders say they’re being handed everywhere. “We’re seeing the role increasingly judged not just against targets and reporting, but against near-term value creation,” Steve Newman, chief sustainability officer of the consultancy Earthcheck, told Eco-Business.
Shrinking roles, expanding footprint
Outside fashion, Starbucks made the cleanest cut of all. In May it eliminated its standalone chief sustainability officer job, laying off CSO Marika McCauley Sine and reusable-packaging lead Chris McFarlane among more than 300 people, and rolling what was left under Kelly Goodejohn, the chief social impact officer. The company framed it as a natural fit. “We’re bringing sustainability and social impact under one leader because — in our coffeehouses and in coffee-growing communities — the work goes hand in hand,” a spokesperson said. The math is less tidy. Starbucks’ carbon footprint grew 3 percent between 2019 and 2024, against a 2020 pledge to halve emissions by 2030, and the company skipped its usual April impact report.
For Katie Herod, laid off after 13 years as a coffee strategist in the same round, it was personal. “Leaders spoke openly about humanity, dignity, sustainability and community — and then actually operationalized those values. … Lately, the philosophy feels different,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “What was once an extraordinary company now risks becoming an ordinary one. Another Fortune 500 company fallen victim to shareholder primacy.” Starbucks has shed roughly 2,300 corporate jobs since CEO Brian Niccol rolled out a turnaround plan in 2024, and the sustainability and ethical-sourcing teams took some of the deepest cuts.
The same thing is happening with less fanfare across the corporate world. Apple carved up the duties of its departing environment chief, Lisa Jackson, between two executives in January and named no direct successor. Unilever folded its global sustainability chief role into a corporate-affairs job after Rebecca Marmot left. The pledges are thinning, too — the Science Based Targets initiative has cut more than 200 companies from its rolls, and around 800 firms, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and Walmart among them, walked away from their long-term net-zero commitments by mid-2025.
What keeps the remaining sustainability bosses up at night is assigning the work to people who never signed up for it. “How do I hand off parts of the business to somebody else to manage and lead, and have the confidence that the business will continue down the right path?” Anita Neville, chief sustainability and communications officer at Golden Agri-Resources, asked on an Eco-Business podcast. A lot of companies aren’t handing it off so much as going silent. South Pole surveyed more than 1,400 firms with sustainability teams and found roughly 70 percent deliberately playing down their climate goals, a move the industry calls greenhushing. “If you’re a CEO who has all the right intentions, you might get sued from both sides — from the left and from the right,” South Pole co-founder Renat Heuberger told the Washington Post. “And that is not good news if you want to convince more CEOs to get active on climate.”
Not everyone sees the vanishing title as a loss. The sustainability chiefs who survive, Sridhar argues, will be the ones who turn into integrators with real budget power, linking climate data to capital decisions instead of running a side desk. By that logic, getting absorbed into finance could be seen as a promotion. The catch is that the companies cutting hardest aren’t usually the ones making the argument.
CBS, the Washington Post, and NPR are gutting their climate desks
The newsrooms that used to check all of this are losing the beat at the same time. CBS News gutted its climate unit last October, cutting desk head Tracy Wholf after the Paramount-Skydance merger put David Ellison in charge and installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief. The move, climate journalist Emily Atkin wrote in her newsletter Heated, “effectively told CBS News it’s no longer responsible for keeping the public informed about climate change.” The Washington Post laid off about 14 climate journalists in February under Jeff Bezos, three years after nearly tripling the desk. And earlier this month, NPR folded its climate team into the National Desk after Congress shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and pulled its funding. “Today, I was laid off by NPR,” climate editor Neela Banerjee wrote on LinkedIn.
Climate coverage fell 14 percent last year and now sits 38 percent below its 2021 peak, according to the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media and Climate Change Observatory, and that drop came while reader interest actually went up and emissions kept breaking records. So both ends of the system are contracting at once: the corporate teams that defined what “responsible” meant, and the reporters who pressure-tested the word. “There is no bigger issue facing the world or America right now than climate change,” Mark Hertsgaard, the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now told Heated. “It’s a five alarm fire, and we should be treating it like that, not retreating from the story.”
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