Op-ed by Rajiv Jalim, global director of sustainability solutions, Novisto.
Mentions of ‘ESG’ on S&P 500 earnings calls have dropped by more than half since peaking in late 2021, according to FactSet transcript data.
Sustainability report titles are following the same pattern, with the share of S&P 100 companies using the term falling from 40% in 2023 to 25% in 2024. At first glance, this could suggest companies are stepping back from sustainability work altogether.
That reading misses what is actually happening. The issues that sat under the ESG label, things like emissions, supplier risk, resource use and regulatory compliance, have not gone away. If anything, they matter more than they did a few years ago. What has changed is who inside a company is dealing with them and how that work gets described.
The work is spreading out
For many companies, sustainability issues have traditionally sat with a dedicated team, often reporting up through a chief sustainability officer or a corporate affairs function. That team owned the strategy, ran the reporting cycle and answered most of the questions when a regulator or investor asked about climate risk.
That model is changing because the underlying issues touch too many parts of the business to stay in one place. A finance team weighing capital investment now has to account for climate exposure at a facility level.
A procurement team has to ask suppliers for emissions or labour data as part of routine vendor management, not as a special project. An operations team tracking energy and water use is really managing cost and continuity, even if nobody calls it sustainability reporting. Risk functions are folding climate scenarios into the same models they use for other forms of business risk.
None of these teams think of themselves as doing ESG work. They are doing their own jobs, and increasingly, their own jobs require sustainability-related information.
Ownership gets harder as more teams get involved
This shift creates a real management problem. When one team owned sustainability information, it was reasonably clear who was responsible for collecting it, checking it and deciding how it should be used. When four or five functions are all touching pieces of that same information, ownership can get murky fast.
Questions that used to have obvious answers start to need real coordination. Who is accountable if a supplier’s emissions figure is wrong? Who decides whether a climate risk assessment should change a capital plan? Who makes sure the number finance uses for a sustainability-linked loan covenant matches the number that goes into a regulatory filing?
Managing this requires clearer ownership and coordination. Companies need clear owners for specific categories of sustainability data, rather than leaving it as a shared responsibility that nobody quite owns. They need structured points of collaboration between sustainability, finance, procurement and operations, rather than relying on ad hoc emails when a question comes up. And disagreements about data or methodology need to be resolved early, before the numbers go into a board presentation or a public filing.
Data has to work harder than it used to
Underneath all of this is a data problem. Information that was collected once a year for a sustainability report now needs to hold up under much more frequent and varied use. A supplier emissions figure might feed a disclosure this quarter and a sourcing decision next quarter. A facility’s climate risk score might inform an insurance renewal and a five-year capital plan in the same year.
That kind of reuse only works if the underlying data is reliable and traceable. Teams need to know where a number came from, how it was calculated and whether it has been updated since the last time someone used it.
Without that, cross-functional collaboration tends to break down into arguments about whose numbers are right, which slows everything down and erodes trust in the data itself.
The retreat from ESG as a label is real, but it is not the story that matters most. The more important shift is that sustainability-related risk and performance are becoming everyday considerations for finance, procurement, operations and risk teams, not a separate track of work.
Responding to that shift requires clearer ownership and reliable, shared data across the business. Simply changing the language does not change the underlying issues companies still need to manage.
About the author: Rajiv Jalim is the global director of sustainability solutions at Novisto, where he works at the intersection of sustainability and technology to help companies turn sustainability goals into practical strategies, stronger data practices and measurable action.
