Climate Week 2026 recap: Key takeaways from the conversations happening on the ground

September 25, 2026  

Climate Week NYC 2026 has come to a close. Here’s a look back at the conversations that mattered.   

PwC hosted two dozen panels throughout the week. In conversations with sustainability leaders from companies across industries, two themes surfaced. The first: Sustainability is a growth strategy, one that is increasingly being used as a lever for resilience, sharper decision-making, and long-term returns. The second: Leading companies, investors, owners, and developers are scaling capacity and finding value across the full infrastructure lifecycle.  
 
Throughout the week, company leaders and participants spoke candidly about what is creating value, what is not, and how they are preparing for what comes next. Whether the focus was AI, infrastructure, tax, data, decarbonization, or reporting, the strongest discussions stayed grounded in one question: How is sustainability generating durable business value? 

Explore the recaps for insights on topics including unlocking tax value from infrastructure investments, how AI is reshaping business through sustainability, changing global reporting requirements, value chain transformation amid rising physical climate risks, and extracting value from energy, supply chain, and product efforts.  

Visit PwC’s Sustainability News Brief site for additional insights on key sustainability topics.

Corporate approaches to climate and sustainability topics are becoming more pragmatic. Several years ago, much of the focus was on setting targets and signaling ambitions. Now, companies are paying more attention to the resources, economics, and operational changes needed to deliver. In this panel, business leaders explored what this shift means in practice, sharing ways that they’re improving financial performance by treating sustainability as a value driver. 

Key takeaways include: 

• Regulation is being handled as a strategic business issue, not just a compliance matter. That is because legal and policy mandates influence whether companies can operate in certain markets, obtain capital, and serve customers. Consider how production can be delayed—at significant cost—if a shipment of parts gets held up at customs due to a regulatory violation. One participant estimated that the cost to a company from a single noncompliance event can be three times the annual cost of compliance.   

• Extreme weather can cause near-term management challenges unless business leaders identify the specific, tangible ways that weather perils disrupt operations. Heat stress, for one, affects workforce safety and productivity at some businesses. To avoid undue costs, leaders are grappling with concrete questions: when is it unsafe for employees to work, what does downtime cost, and what investments could reduce the impact? A harder task is connecting weather-risk assessments with long-term business decisions—for instance, whether cooling equipment that’s due for replacement now should be upgraded for heat levels that might arrive in several years’ time.  

• Tax credits and incentives can generate funds and financial leverage that help companies gain an edge. Participants pointed to opportunities to use existing tax operations to support sustainability reporting, secure capital to pay for projects, avoid punitive taxes, and reflect changes in asset valuations. These approaches can both alleviate the cost of sustainability investments and enhance a company’s ability to compete on price. 

Regulations covering sustainability topics such as deforestation, forced labor, green claims, and product responsibility increasingly shape how companies function, not just what they disclose. Depending on where a company is headquartered, where it produces its offerings, and where it sells them, legal requirements can have a bearing on activities across the entire product lifecycle, from design and manufacturing through marketing, distribution, and even disposal. That creates opportunities to use regulatory change as a catalyst for performance improvement. 

In this panel, business leaders explored ways of integrating regulatory considerations with critical processes and decisions. Key takeaways included: 

• Local accountability and global capability go hand in hand: One useful principle emerging from the discussion was for multinational firms to centralize capabilities such as governance, regulatory tracking, data architecture, and internal controls, while keeping jurisdiction-specific interpretation and implementation close to each market. A hub-and-spoke approach gives local managers the consistent, efficient backbone systems that let them focus on the nuances of national or municipal requirements.  

• A common data architecture helps companies fulfill their myriad requirements: Across jurisdictions, regulations call for companies to implement similar but varying approaches to the way they manage and report on products, supply chains, carbon emissions, climate risk, and other matters. Building separate systems to house data and support processes related to individual regulations can create duplicate work and, worse, diverging priorities. Participants emphasized the value of shared data systems that support multiple regulatory frameworks.  

• Consistency across disclosures is becoming more important as regulators connect the dots: In some companies, work on disclosures is assigned on a department-by-department basis, with tax, finance, sustainability, and other teams each preparing their own reports. Such a decentralized approach can result in inconsistent data or narratives, which regulators, investors, and other stakeholders are apt to uncover and challenge. Group-wide reporting frameworks can help promote consistency, provided that the frameworks allow for entity-level accountability and approvals.

Although many regulators are working to achieve interoperability, regulations will continue to differ for the foreseeable future. For companies operating internationally, that means regulatory strategy may need the same sort of flexible enterprise-wide architecture as finance, tax, or supply-chain management.  
 
Companies that create systems for reusing data, maintaining a consistent story, and adjusting their operating models should be better prepared to adapt to regulatory change without rebuilding their approach time and again. 

Just because AI is everywhere today doesn’t mean everyone is using the technology’s capabilities effectively. It can feel daunting to move beyond the chatbot function. But for sustainability teams, facing an ever-widening ocean of data and portfolio of responsibilities, understanding how smart technology can help is increasingly important. A PwC Climate Week session aimed to explain how AI agents, available through every major AI platform, can aid sustainability teams in particular—provided users configure their prompts thoughtfully, with clear objectives and guardrails.

Looking internally, an AI agent can scan and analyze an organization’s knowledge base across regions, looking for conflicting language and unsupported or outdated claims, without forcing users to manually re-review every document. Properly designed, an agent can identify where alignment may be breaking down, route priority issues to the relevant owners, and track resolution progress.

An AI agent can also search public-facing work. Organizations’ stated targets, commitments, and research may be scattered across websites, reports, and press releases, covering years of changing terminology and information. The inevitable conflicts and outdated material may cause embarrassment or, worse, legal or regulatory risk. An agent can review public sustainability claims across sources and flag misalignments and material that needs updating.

And as the PwC session made clear, the full spectrum of stakeholders is beginning to use AI agents as well, meaning that sustainability reporting—crafted for human readers, of course—is often read by AI first. Published materials need to take into account the eventuality of AI summaries/analyses and how those will be read. Agents can automatically create such summaries for the team to review. As with the internal and external scanning and alignment, humans make the ultimate decisions on what goes out into the world. 

After months of delays, revisions, and shifting expectations, one message came through clearly in this discussion: the reporting landscape may not be simple, but it is starting to stabilize. For sustainability and finance function leaders tasked with overseeing sustainability reporting requirements, that comes as a sigh of relief. Now, the compliance challenge moves to interpretation and implementation.

During this reporting panel, the conversation focused on what recent developments in the European Union and California, and with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol may mean as reporting deadlines near. While uncertainty remains, especially around technical guidance, the broader takeaway was that companies should not confuse stabilization with simplicity. The path forward may be clearer, but it still demands rigorous analysis, cross-functional coordination, and decisions that will shape reporting for years to come.  

Some takeaways from the discussion include:

• CSRD: The panel touched on the European Commission’s adoption and publication of the final revised ESRS, along with guidance on voluntary reporting. Streamlining has made the standards simpler, more flexible, and easier to use than many initially thought. At the same time, companies still face significant work in applying judgment, designing processes, and determining what is required at the global versus entity-specific reporting level. Panelists also discussed article 40a, revenue thresholds, and one notable surprise in the updates: relief for asset managers.

• California: Discussion centered on ongoing uncertainty around California’s climate-related reporting laws, especially in light of recent CARB announcements. Panelists highlighted open questions around how the rules may differ from the GHG Protocol, particularly for Scope 3 categories, as well as how companies should think about triggers for recalculating a base year, revenue thresholds tied to “doing business” in the state, and filing fees.

• GHG Protocol: There was significant discussion about upcoming revisions, alignment with ISO, expected timelines, and how protocol changes could flow through to reporting obligations more broadly. The Land Sector and Removals Standard also surfaced as an important topic. For companies that have built reporting programs around current assumptions, even targeted changes to the protocol may have broader implications for inventories, comparability, and compliance strategies.

For a deeper understanding of these reporting topics, read PwC’s Sustainability Reporting Guide. It has specific chapters on California, the EU taxonomy and technical topics such as boundaries, materiality and governance. 

PepsiCo’s pep+ strategy puts sustainability at the center of how the company operates, grows, and creates value. Given the breadth of PepsiCo’s business, that means addressing a wide set of issues, including water use, packaging, nutrition, and regenerative agriculture. 

During Climate Week 2026, Jim Andrew, PepsiCo’s EVP and Chief Sustainability Officer, joined PwC for a lunchtime discussion on how AI is beginning to reshape both sustainability execution and business decision-making across the company. 

The conversation focused on how AI is already creating value in practical ways. 

Two examples stood out: 

• Earlier risk identification in agriculture. In 2025, PepsiCo expanded regenerative, restorative, and protective practices to 4.7 million acres globally across agriculture, including potatoes, a key crop for the company’s food business. AI tools now allow farmers to photograph an issue in the field and quickly identify whether it reflects disease, water stress, or another concern. What previously may have taken days or weeks to diagnose can now inform decisions in minutes.

• More dynamic fleet routing. PepsiCo operates one of the world’s largest trucking fleets. In Latin America, AI tools are helping optimize delivery routes, reducing both fuel use and mileage. The value is not only in finding the shortest route, but in helping fleets avoid congestion, traffic disruptions, and event-related delays. 

The discussion also addressed some of the challenges that come with adopting AI at scale. Mr. Andrew noted that the technology is evolving quickly, making it difficult for organizations to keep pace with changing capabilities and use cases. He also emphasized that people remain central to effective adoption, particularly because AI outputs can still be inaccurate and require judgment and oversight.

Looking ahead, the conversation pointed to a broader shift: AI and sustainability are becoming more embedded in integrated business planning, strategy, and decision-making. Mr. Andrew also discussed how AI is helping PepsiCo respond to changing consumer preferences and how the company is adapting its data and reporting so its products are more visible in AI-enabled and agentic search environments.

For sustainability leaders, ESG controllers, and corporate governance teams, the takeaway was clear: at PepsiCo, sustainability is not being managed separately from the business. Through pep+, it is increasingly embedded in how the company operates—and AI is beginning to accelerate that integration in tangible ways.

One of sustainability executives’ biggest challenges: getting decision-makers across the organization to sign on to share data and join the effort. Too often, people look at sustainability as a nice-to-have campaign that’s focused on recycling, environmentalism, and compliance. But as forward-thinking executives know, it can be perfectly in sync with the core business, to the point where people throughout the organization may be doing sustainability work and not even realize it. Initiatives are happening, under all kinds of names, and the sustainability team isn’t necessarily capturing the information even when the goals are aligned.

The key question in driving cross-functional alignment: How to get everyone rowing in the same direction, especially when people don’t report to you? Sustainability leaders need to determine what moves the needle internally and externally; it’s different for each company, each with a unique culture, structure, set of customers, and competitive landscape. At a PwC Climate Week panel, discussing what some companies are doing to turn sustainability into business value, leaders explained how using language to speak to people’s particular interests—how a sustainability campaign can help mitigate risk, retain employees, reduce waste, etc.—can help create champions across the organization. After all, in many ways, continuous improvement is sustainability.

Some takeaways from the discussion included:

• One problem that sustainability efforts face is self-created: Advocates often argue about nuanced issues rather than looking to make issues understandable to others. It doesn’t help that the field continually changes terminology—from SRI and ESG to sustainability and beyond—as well as evolving US and EU regulations. Smoother integration into routine business processes would help make the effort feel more integrated and integral. 

• Calling for sacrifice for the benefit of decarbonization doesn’t win over many people. Advocates need to argue convincingly that sustainability efforts offer benefits. Armed with examples, leaders can approach people across the organization with fresh ideas, showing how sustainability can help bring about transformational change. Sustainability isn’t about making tradeoffs—it’s about upgrading.

It’s inarguable that today’s geopolitical landscape is more volatile than it has been in decades—and therefore an unusually challenging international stage on which to conduct business. As a PwC specialist noted based on conversations with global executives, resentment and bitterness are endemic today, driven largely by US government decisions over the last half dozen years. While the American private sector’s vitality and creativity is keeping the nation’s economy strong, the business environment will remain fraught for the foreseeable future.

In such an unpredictable environment, it’s reasonable for leaders to hesitate to make big strategic moves. But conditions may never settle down; clarity may never arrive. The vast majority of companies are stuck in wait-and-see mode, and leaders need to look to a more unsettled future. The situation will simply not snap back to “normal.” 

For sustainability efforts, one problem is that large-scale progress requires nations to not only cooperate but partner; right now, with a serious trust deficit among leaders, they are far from being able to work together. Another issue is the federal government’s on-and-off support of decarbonization efforts through tax incentives and other programs.

Indeed, politics itself is a serious hindrance as polarization grows, making any sustainability-related move seem aligned with one partisan side. Corporate leaders are coming to realize the extent to which looking to Washington, D.C., to set the direction of sustainability efforts is problematic—and that it might benefit both companies and the decarbonization cause to move beyond politics and divorce sustainability from the federal government. 

Key takeaways from this discussion included:

• Sustainability programs depend on infrastructure-dependent services—services that are prime targets for threat actors, such as space-based systems and undersea cables, and cloud services. Everyone, and every system, relies on these systems and takes them for granted, but their fragility will become only more evident in coming years. Multinational leaders must understand strategic risks and vulnerabilities, especially in light of shifting geopolitical relationships; stuff happens, and organizations need to be prepared.

• After World War II, the West set the rules for the global order; the better part of a century later, the nations that haven’t benefited are fed up. Leaders in the Global South are “furious” at the United States in particular. What that means for corporate and government leaders is that strategies for sustainability need to appeal to interests and opinions in the Global South; if you’re looking for cooperation from government and corporate leaders in non-Western countries, you need to know their thoughts. Having global diversity in the room is increasingly key to effective decision-making.

If your company were starting from a blank slate today, would it design the same sustainability strategy it is currently running?

That question anchored our Decarbonization Roundtable discussion and surfaced a growing reality for many companies: sustainability strategies set several years ago may no longer reflect today’s business conditions. Since many targets were established, companies have navigated a global pandemic, geopolitical disruption, supply chain and energy market shocks, and now rapidly rising power demand driven by AI, electrification, and advanced manufacturing. Many have also grown, divested assets, or acquired peers and those corporate actions change emissions profiles, operating models, and capital allocation priorities along the way.

The panel began with recognition that this has been a demanding period for sustainability leaders. Evolving global disclosure regulations, heightened stakeholder scrutiny, uncertainty around tax incentives, and intensifying operational and supply chain risks have made the path forward more complex. While headlines may suggest some companies are pulling back, our latest research points to a more nuanced picture.

PwC specialists shared findings from our Third Annual State of Decarbonization Report, which analyzed millions of data points across thousands of corporate disclosures. The data suggests that many companies are changing how they talk about sustainability but not abandoning the work itself. Among the findings:

• 82% of companies held steady or accelerated the timeline for achieving their ambitions

• More companies increased ambitions (23%) than decreased them (18%)

• Progress held, with more organizations on track to meet targets than in prior years

The panel also outlined one of the clearest differences between companies that are on track and those that are not: whether companies are simply running a program or using it as a lever to improve the business and create value.

That distinction shaped much of the discussion. Many sustainability programs were built in a different business environment. Since then, companies have faced major shifts in markets, operations, and regulation. In some cases, the sustainability strategy has not kept pace with the business. This comes as companies are being asked to be more transparent about how sustainability issues are embedded into broader strategy.

Our panel focused on what a sustainability reset can look like in practice. For many organizations, resetting does not mean stepping back from ambition. It means reassessing where sustainability can most directly support resilience, growth, and returns in the current environment.

The discussion highlighted four areas where companies may need to reset their approach:

• Energy resilience: strengthening access to reliable, affordable, lower-carbon energy amid rising demand

• Supply chain strategy: addressing risk, data gaps, and Scope 3 performance in more durable ways

• Product sustainability: aligning product portfolios and innovation strategies with customer and market expectations

• Capital allocation: prioritizing investments that support both decarbonization progress and business value

Participants also discussed the role AI can play in a role in freeing up capacity, improving data quality, and enabling teams to focus more on strategic action.

In breakout sessions, participants exchanged where they are making progress, where they continue to face challenges, and what leading practice may look like as they discussed three questions:

• Where is your company relative to its targets today?

• How are you thinking about Scope 3 emissions going forward?

• Which of these four reset areas presents the greatest challenge for your business?

For CFOs, ESG controllers, and sustainability leaders, the takeaway was clear: in a changed operating environment, revisiting sustainability strategy may be less about pulling back from commitments and more about making sure those commitments are still built for the business you have now.

Energy credits are no longer just an energy sector issue. One of the more notable shifts in the energy tax market is who is now participating in it. Companies outside the energy sector are increasingly purchasing energy tax credits, bringing a new set of corporate buyers into the market and expanding the group of stakeholders with an interest in energy tax policy.

That shift was a central theme of our panel on unlocking tax value in infrastructure and sustainability investments. As investment capital continues to flow into energy and infrastructure projects, tax incentives are playing a larger role in whether projects pencil out and in how investors think about risk, timing, and returns. 

The discussion took place against a backdrop of significant change, including tax policy ambiguity, rising power demand from AI and data centers, and scrutiny around foreign ownership, control, and supply-chain involvement. That business environment is unfolding as companies look to access federal energy tax credits such as the production tax credit for advanced manufacturing (section 45X) and the clean electricity production and investment tax credits (section 45Y and 48E). 

Takeaways included:

• The credit market is broadening. What was once centered largely on wind and solar now extends to the production of biofuels; the manufacturing of solar, wind, battery storage, and critical minerals; carbon capture and sequestration; and other energy tax credits. The suite of available energy tax credits is giving a wider range of energy and infrastructure projects new avenues to improve after-tax returns.

• Transferability is changing the market. The ability to transfer federal energy tax credits has made it easier for investors and owners to turn tax incentives into project capital. Panelists noted that buyers now include a meaningful share of large corporates with the volume of transferred energy tax credits growing exponentially. 

• Execution matters as much as eligibility. It is not enough for a project to qualify in theory. Contracts, construction documentation, procurement decisions, and supplier diligence all need to support the energy credit being claimed. The practical challenges of project management, including long equipment lead times, varying tariff rates, and supply-chain complexity contribute to the risk that projects may not be developed.

• The market is applying its own discipline. Participants discussed how buyer diligence and transfer market scrutiny are helping surface aggressive positions early, including around issues that may draw IRS attention. 

A broader message from the panel was that tax should be in the room from the start. In a market shaped by policy uncertainty, geopolitical disruption, AI-driven power demand, and sustainability priorities, tax can influence where capital goes, how projects are financed, which incentives are accessible, and whether the economics hold over the life of the investment. 

For a deeper dive on the issues discussed during our panel, visit PwC’s Tax Research and Insights page. 

During Climate Week, PwC and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) brought together leaders from across the utility, energy, real estate, chemicals and financial sectors to discuss EPRI’s SMARTargets, a new methodology for setting ambitious and actionable corporate climate targets. 

The discussion outlined EPRI's thinking behind the approach: existing sectoral benchmark approaches fall short of providing scientifically reliable, company-level guidance. SMARTargets fills that gap through a rigorous, science-aligned framework developed via extensive stakeholder engagement, independent scientific review, and public comment.  

At the core of the methodology is a two-target concept aligned with the Paris Agreement: Global Pathway Targets (GPTs), which are prescribed targets based on 1.5°C global emissions pathways, and Qualified Targets (QTs), which represent the greatest reductions a specific company can achieve after accounting for multi-priorities, risks, and enabling conditions identified through company-specific transition analysis. Standardized reporting templates for validation, summary, and verification ensure transparency, credibility, and comparability across companies.  
 
Panel discussions focused on both the opportunity and the practical application of the framework. One discussion explored how SMARTargets could strengthen corporate target-setting and planning. Another examined how the methodology could be tailored for sectors such as commercial real estate and chemicals, where emissions profiles and abatement pathways differ meaningfully.  

The event underscored that SMARTargets is designed to be more than a substitute for existing target-setting frameworks and aims to facilitate cross-sector dialogue, enhance corporate planning and risk management, and address greenwashing concerns by transparently presenting both what is needed and what is currently possible. The panel discussions and presentations illustrated how the methodology's scientific foundations, conceptual design, and standardized structure are transferable to any sector, while its emissions categories, abatement options, and scenario modeling can be tailored to sector-specific realities.  

For a deeper dive on sustainability reporting topics, visit PwC’s Sustainability News Brief. 

PwC estimates that new global infrastructure spending through 2050 will exceed US$150 trillion. Where will all that money come from? An ever-widening investor pool seeks to engage, and finance and tax advisors are working to create appropriate, effective funding mechanisms. The challenge is large and growing, with fresh complexities popping up daily. 

First: What is an infrastructure investment? The answer used to be obvious and basic, but infrastructure now includes not only traditional roads and bridges but construction making possible health care, energy resiliency, renewables, wildfire management, and far more. Plus, of course, data centers.

Today’s investor class is more diverse than ever, with retail investors, sovereign wealth funds, private equity, real estate funds, and non-US investors joining and/or competing with US institutional investors for opportunities to contribute to—and seek returns from—the great infrastructure build-out. As our panel on infrastructure fund design suggested, fund managers are responding to different needs and goals by creating an unprecedented variety of funds, including continuation funds to extend older funds’ asset life.

With a seemingly infinite number of ways to structure investments, funds, and assets, finance and tax advisors face nearly as many questions, each answer influencing what the eventual product will look like. Closed-end drawdown equity funds—investing in partnerships and other complex entities—are familiar with and understand tax and reporting issues, while wealth and retail investors tend to look for simplicity and predictability. Investors may be looking to put money in real estate investment trusts or greenfield investments, or to set up total return swaps. 

For advisors, structuring a fund is more complex than ever, demanding thoughtfulness about the economics and tax considerations, allowing for accommodation of different needs and avoiding commingling types of investors. Foreign investors will have a whole different set of regulatory and tax concerns about asset classes and flexibility in future sale options, and it’s key to selecting the most appropriate blocker model to prevent pass-through tax liabilities from reaching tax-exempt or foreign investors. But regardless of how advisors set up funds, early alignment between investors and other stakeholders on tax aspects can prevent downstream conflicts.

PwC estimates that approximately $33 trillion in infrastructure investment will be needed over the next 25 years to modernize the backbone of the global economy. For infrastructure investors and owners alike, that scale brings a common challenge: how to deploy capital in a more complex environment while making sure projects deliver returns across their full lifecycle. 

Our panel on infrastructure ROI focused on where value is created—and lost—from construction through delivery and ultimately exit. A central theme of the discussion was that strong investment theses are no longer enough on their own. In a market defined by tighter scrutiny, delivery constraints, and rising complexity, returns depend on how well tax, financing, execution, and risk management are connected from the outset.

Three areas stood out:

• Tax strategy can reshape project economics: Incentives, credits, transaction structure, and timing decisions can all materially affect returns. Bringing tax into structuring decisions early can help capture value that may otherwise be missed.

• Capital strategy should evolve with project risk: Aligning financing sources with each stage of risk can unlock more efficient capital over time and better position projects for exit. Structured cash flows and a clear enterprise value story also matter more as buyer scrutiny increases.

• Execution discipline helps protect ROI: Investment cases need to hold up through delivery. That requires rigorous modeling across costs, benefits, risks, and time horizons, supported by strong governance and operational discipline.

Panelists emphasized that underwriting infrastructure projects today means looking beyond traditional financial assumptions. Risks such as customer concentration, technology performance, and residual value can all affect long-term returns. In some cases, even a 100-basis-point difference can determine whether a project clears the investment threshold.

The discussion also highlighted several areas where companies commonly leave value on the table: going to market before a project is ready, addressing transfer taxes and exit structures too late, or allowing project governance to weaken as timelines compress and delivery conditions change.

Broader operating constraints are also becoming harder to ignore. Labor availability, temporary housing, community impact, and pressure on public works systems are increasingly part of the project equation. And with grid capacity under strain in some markets, power availability is emerging as a gating issue, leading some projects to consider “bring your own power” until utility connections can be secured.

For CFOs, investors, and infrastructure leaders, the takeaway was straightforward: infrastructure ROI is shaped by decisions made well before construction begins and well after capital is committed.

With geopolitical uncertainty breaking supply chains and unsettling markets, how can investors maximize financial and environmental impact? In an increasingly complex investment landscape, developing solid strategies is a challenge. Notwithstanding growing political pushback against data centers, AI technologies’ power and infrastructure demands will stay at the center of planning: PwC estimates that building and maintaining global digital infrastructure through 2050 will require cumulative investment of US$7.4 trillion. 

Still, as our Climate Week session on smart capital deployment illustrated, AI-based projects aren’t necessarily no-brainer investments with predictable valuations: The technology may boost value—or erode it. AI’s rapid scaling is changing both portfolio opportunity and exposure, and as smart tech becomes easier to purchase and test, the barriers to scaling value are shifting toward integration and ownership inside the operating model. Too often, organizations get stuck, with AI implementation in only select functions and correspondingly limited benefits. 

As the tussle over sustainability continues—with institutional investors and limited partners calling for more aggressive targets in the face of political headwinds—AI can help organizations move forward by offering private equity firms and portfolio companies new ways to manage climate and sustainability issues. The business case for decarbonization remains strong, and smart technologies can enable the work, from planning and diligence to portfolio monitoring and reporting, even as they create exposures that need managing: power, water, supply chains, workforce, and governance. 

Our discussion highlighted several observations and analyses aimed at helping investors and other leaders through a tricky stretch.

• Geopolitical volatility, driven largely by US trade and policy unpredictability as well as energy market shocks, has created a long-term state of instability that many companies are unprepared to negotiate. And when it comes to sustainability pledges and moves, building trust can present real challenges for investors as well as corporate and government leaders, since making climate progress utterly depends on cooperation. Leaders need to move beyond a wait-and-see posture and rethink their operations and supply chains to account for ongoing uncertainty.

• AI can be a catalyst for decarbonization, though thus far comparatively few companies are effectively leveraging smart technologies to fix the ongoing problems of fragmented emissions data, limited visibility, and onerous annual reporting processes. It’s a major near-term opportunity that more leaders could seize, since across sectors, AI is delivering the greatest value where companies have direct operational control and rich streams of real-time data.

• Tax should be treated as a structuring enabler from the outset, not merely as a post-deal optimization tool. In a market shaped by geopolitical disruption, AI-driven infrastructure demands, and sustainability priorities, tax can materially influence where and how capital gets deployed, affecting jurisdiction and asset-class choices, fund and capital structures, access to incentives, and the economics of ownership and operations. Investors that embed tax early in investment strategy can better mitigate risk, sharpen conviction, and unlock value creation across the life of the deal.

As sustainability disclosure requirements expand across jurisdictions, CFOs, ESG Controllers, and sustainability leaders are navigating a more complex reporting landscape of overlapping regulations, differing scopes, and unique compliance timelines. For many companies, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) remains one of the most significant near-term reporting challenges and deadlines for compliance are quickly approaching. 

Our Sustainability Reporting Immersion session, part of an ongoing series, focused on practical steps companies can take as they move into their first year of CSRD compliance. Discussion centered on four core areas: technology and AI, process and controls, double materiality assessments, and the EU Taxonomy. The group also touched on recent developments related to California’s climate disclosure laws. 

Through breakout discussions and open dialogue, participants shared where they are making progress, where they continue to face challenges, and what leading practice may look like as implementation advances. 

Technology and AI: Participants discussed the technologies they are using to support CSRD implementation, where they are making new investments, and how AI may fit into their broader reporting strategy, from report drafting to investor responses, and disclosure committee and board communications.

Much of the discussion, though, focused on the data running through technology systems. A recurring theme was that technology is only as effective as the underlying processes and documentation supporting it. PwC outlined expectations for this data, including:

• Data sourcing and collection processes

• Documenting risks and assumptions behind reported metrics

• Maintaining invoice tracking and audit-ready support

• Tracing calculations back to source data and underlying methodologies

This part of the discussion reinforced that confidence in reporting will depend not only on the technology stack, but on the reliability, transparency, and completeness of the data flowing through it.

Process and controls: This part of the session outlined process maps, disclosure and metric ownership and accountability, and the need for a common set of standards at the program, topic, and metric levels. Participants discussed how they are documenting controls for higher-risk metrics, whether approaches differ across in-scope jurisdictions, and whether they are building a sustainability “close” that more closely resembles a financial close.

While many companies are making progress on data collection, fewer are yet operating with a sustainability close that mirrors the rigor of financial reporting

PwC specialists highlighted several elements of a more mature approach, including:

• Clear boundary determination

• A transparent view of how corporate actions, including M&A, may affect baselines and emissions forecasts

• A documented basis for how management gains comfort over the reporting process, even where underlying documentation is still developing

Double materiality assessments: Conducting a robust double materiality assessment (DMA) continues to be a major undertaking for companies preparing for CSRD. This part of the immersion panel outlined a practical DMA process: understanding the business, identifying impacts, risks and opportunities, assessing those issues, and determining materiality topics.

The conversation also touched on considering mitigation ("net” versus “gross”) and the importance of being prepared to explain and support DMA judgment calls if challenged.

Most participants said they are incorporating a top-down approach. Discussion focused on whether recent DMAs have changed since an initial one was conducted, which topics are emerging as most material, and where definitions of materiality may differ across reporting regimes. Some participants said their DMAs haven’t changed much over time, while others noted that moving from SASB to ESRS had an impact.

A key takeaway from the discussion was that materiality judgments must be well supported. PwC specialists emphasized the importance of maintaining documentation around:

• How materiality conclusions were reached

• How the company is considering impacts, risks and opportunities across jurisdictions

• How judgment was applied in areas where requirements or interpretations may differ 

EU Taxonomy: The final portion of the session focused on the EU Taxonomy and the classification framework used to assess whether economic activities are environmentally sustainable. Discussion covered the Taxonomy’s core components: identifying eligible activities, assessing substantial contribution, evaluating do no significant harm criteria, considering minimum safeguards and setting relevant KPIs.

Participants discussed where they are making judgment calls on eligibility and alignment, whether parts of the process can be automated, and how their interpretations may differ from peers. Open dialogue focused in particular on entity-level reporting, thresholds, and KPI-setting. 

The discussion made clear that implementation continues to require significant interpretation, cross-functional coordination, and documentation.

Interested in attending the next immersion reporting session? Register here for upcoming events that are being held in multiple US cities. For more information on the topics addressed above, visit the Sustainability News Brief site, which has insights on CSRD, California, and reporting frameworks and standards. Also, read out insights into the initial reporting trend we are seeing across CSRD and California submissions.

Today, more than ever, the sustainability conversation is about how it can improve the economics of the business by driving value creation and preservation. A sustainable business is one that is poised to deliver persistent value over the long term.

That conversation is happening at a crucial time for global companies, who are entering one of the largest infrastructure investment cycles in decades. Leaders are under pressure to not only drive strong growth and returns on these projects but demonstrate they're building a resilient business that can hold its ground no matter how the world changes.

From a CFO’s perspective, what is becoming increasingly clear is that when sustainability is embedded as a foundational operating layer—not a standalone program—companies can better understand how to reduce uncertainty, improve how capital is deployed and returns are captured, and ultimately make the organization more investable.

Sustainability ROI

Forward-looking companies no longer treat sustainability as simply a reporting obligation. It’s becoming a foundational operating discipline that, when embedded into strategy, can drive competitive advantage. But realizing that advantage isn't easy. Energy volatility, complex supply chain exposures, and outdated governance structures are creating risks the typical CFO model doesn't capture. The companies that will pull ahead are those that integrate sustainability and AI directly into their financial strategy, using them to illuminate hidden risks across the value chain and unlock efficiency, resilience, and long-term enterprise value. 
 
Kevin O’Connell, PwC’s Sustainability Assurance Services Leader, outlines seven reasons why CFOs that integrate AI and sustainability can reinvent their finance functions and build more valuable businesses. 

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