The 2026 Bear-Market for Green Jobs: Why You Need to Be Anti-Fragile

Transcript

SAIF: Welcome to another episode of the State of Sustainability. I'm your host Saif Hameed. In this episode, we're going to talk about green jobs in 2026 — where to go, what to look for, how to think. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

There are a few reasons why I thought this would be an interesting topic. Honestly, I think this will frequently be a topic to return to. I've been easing it into my conversations and my events over the course of last year because I noticed that more and more sustainability functions are seeing attrition, job losses, reductions, downsizing, restructures — whatever you want to call it. There are a million names that people use when they talk about people being let go. Unfortunately, I first started observing this happening in a meaningful way two years ago. I saw it accelerate steadily over last year, and I'm seeing it continue into this year as well. I've been having coffee conversations with people who were impacted by this, and very often they say they'd love to get my thoughts on the job market — on where to look, which companies might be interesting, which sectors might be interesting for new opportunities. So I thought, rather than keeping this in the realm of one-to-one conversations in cafes around London and elsewhere, let's just do a podcast episode on it.

I wanted to cover a few bases in this episode: where I think the sustainability function is heading, how you navigate that, and where to look. So let's start with where the sustainability function is heading.

I had this really bizarre, eye-opening moment a few months ago. We were hosting the State of Sustainability Summit — which, for those of you who've attended our summits, is our flagship event where we bring together companies from our network, typically food and beverage but now expanding into other consumer sectors, around 50 to 60 sustainability professionals. It's very exclusive — just sustainability professionals in operating businesses, no vendors or consultants. We do this in London, Chicago, and this year also in Amsterdam. We'll put the details in the show notes for anyone who wants to join. At this event, I typically do a keynote where I talk about the state of sustainability over the coming year. And I asked the audience — bear in mind this is a room of the largest food and beverage companies you could think of — how many of you think the sustainability function is going to be around in five years time? Out of a room of about 60, I had four or five hands go up. That means roughly 90% of the room — sustainability professionals themselves — are saying they don't think their function is going to be around in five years.

Now, for those of you who have been longtime listeners, you'll remember that we've been talking for a while about how sustainability is a transformation function. It is not a long-term thing — if it's a long-term thing, we've all failed. Every corporation has failed. This is a function that is spun up to navigate a moment of transition. By "a moment" I don't mean a minute — I mean maybe five years, maybe ten years, however long it takes. It's similar in many ways to the digital transformation that happened several years ago, the data transformation, and now the AI transformation — where businesses spin up these functions because they're faced with a new challenge and want to move from where they are to where they're going. So actually, the fact that most of these teams now recognise that this function is doing important work, but that work may not sit within this function in five years — I see that as quite consistent with how I was seeing the world a few years ago. But I was still surprised by the magnitude of that percentage. And what surprised me most was that they recognised it themselves, because we all tend to assume that what we're doing is not only valuable but has longevity. You don't just innately assume your function is going to cease to exist — and then everyone assumes the same thing at the same time. That's a bit weird.

When we dug in a little deeper, the consensus seems to be that this function is going to be partitioned. We're going to see more and more sustainability roles and responsibilities move into procurement and supply chain — we've been talking about that on this podcast, it's not news to many of our listeners, and it's already happening at pretty large scale. Unilever was one of the early companies to basically say they're moving almost all of the actual work in sustainability under procurement and supply chain. And around the time they started doing that, a couple of years ago, most other businesses were doing the same. There's probably a piece of sustainability — the reporting side — that will most likely move towards finance, and that's already been happening for a couple of years.

Which all goes to say: if you're a professional in that function, what does that mean for you? If your function is going to be absorbed somewhere else, where do you go?

I think the best way to think about this involves Nassim Nicholas Taleb — a thinker on the subject of probability. You may well have come across his expression of the "black swan." A black swan event, per Taleb, has three features: it has a big impact, it's very difficult to predict because it sits at the extreme tail of the bell curve, and once it happens, it's very easily explainable in hindsight. Good examples include the subprime mortgage crisis and many major market crashes.

One of the things Taleb talks about that I find really interesting is the concept of anti-fragility. We tend to think about fragile versus robust — if a vase is fragile, it breaks easily; if it doesn't break when dropped, it's robust. But actually, the opposite of fragile isn't robust — it's antifragile, meaning it gets better under pressure. It doesn't just survive tension; it actually improves under it. And so — anyone who's been listening to me for a while knows I take a long time to get to the point — the point is: I think sustainability professionals should be looking to be not just resilient or robust, but antifragile.

The reason I say this is that the world is getting much more complicated, much more risky, and much less certain. If you just look at the number of things facing businesses that could cause significant disruption, the list keeps growing. And as sustainability professionals, we are in the business of trying to make businesses resilient and robust. If we can harness skills that mean whenever a crisis comes, we're able to lean in, help navigate it, and actually thrive in those environments — then we're more than just robust. We're antifragile.

My advice to all sustainability professionals — and I'll make this more actionable, don't worry — is to think about what skills are not just transferable, but really valuable in a crisis. You want someone who can navigate complex data landscapes. It's not just that you've been doing emissions reporting and carbon inventories — you actually know how to generate insights from data, how to clean data, how to ignore data when data needs to be ignored, how to structure systems and make observations. If you did this well in supply chains two years ago for climate purposes, then you could have done this equally well for tariffs when the Trump tariffs came out. In fact, many sustainability teams I saw were charged with figuring out tariff implications for their business, because they were the team people thought of when thinking about risk in supply chains. The more you can make these skills hard — meaning there are tangible outcomes linked to your performance, things you can point to that you've delivered operationally — the more you'll find you always have a place even in a tough job market. Because everyone needs a good set of hands in a crisis.

[Sponsor break – Altruistiq]

I've been thinking about this for a few years because people have been asking me for a few years. And I tend to think in three buckets of green jobs.

The first is corporates — large businesses making things, selling things, buying things. The second is vendors — people like me, working in software, consulting, offset sales, satellite imagery sales — people trying to sell you something. And the third is nonprofits — the connective tissue between all these different organisations, trying to bring everyone together and move in sync towards action. Most people I know working in sustainability work in one of these three spaces.

On the corporate side, a general rule of thumb if you're looking for longevity in your next green job: follow the margin. Look for a business that makes good margins. I actually think this is probably more important than looking for a business purely based on how compelling its sustainability strategy seems. If the business has good margins, a few things will be true. It will have good brand equity — there are very few businesses with great margins that don't have high brand equity — which means they have something to lose from getting sustainability wrong from an optics perspective. One of the reasons Oatly puts so much effort into sustainability is actually the same reason Coca-Cola does: there's massive brand value at stake. If you're a commodity player with low margins, you don't have that same brand equity at stake. I look at companies like Givaudan, Symrise, DSM-Firmenich — companies in the fragrance, flavours, and colourants space — and I think there's a lot of R&D there, a complex supply chain, typically high margins, and therefore a lot of value at stake. Sustainability needs to be right, otherwise some of that value goes off the table. And perhaps most importantly, high-margin companies will most likely have free cash flow and budgets to actually drive sustainability forward. So if I had to look for one thing, I'd find a business with good robust margins — it's most likely to be committed to sustainability for the longer term.

In terms of sectors: I hear a lot of momentum in pharma. Pharmaceuticals is a business that takes problems seriously, addresses them robustly, and thinks long term. For various reasons, the pharmaceutical sector has really owned the sustainability challenge. I think it has great legs for those looking for their next green job. Personal care is another sector where I hear a lot of momentum, for similar reasons. When we speak with companies generating product carbon footprints and sharing them with customers, they often tell us the biggest pull is coming from pharma and personal care — a nice leading signal for anyone looking for roles. Food and beverage is still a sector with sustainability momentum, but it doesn't seem to be in the upswing of that momentum right now. It feels more like consolidation — doing the existing work better, more efficiently, at bigger scale — rather than launching new initiatives.

The same principle holds in the B2B space. Look for companies with a commanding position in the supply chain that are used to partnering with customers on strategic challenges, rather than simply providing goods for offtake. The distinction: a company providing stationery to a food business is a commodity vendor — easily switched. A packaging supplier or sugar supplier for Coca-Cola is a strategic partner — one whose long-term success the customer actually depends on. In those strategic B2B partnerships, sustainability becomes another lever to differentiate and expand margin further. The general rule of thumb for B2B: try to move from lower to higher margin, and that progression is often about new positioning and strategy, not just new products.

On the consultancy side: consultancies were a very reliable place to go for sustainability roles three or four years ago. I remember hearing — not from Deloitte directly — that Deloitte was offering people I knew at corporates considerable sums to leave and join them, so they could farm them out back to corporates. Other consultancies followed suit. And then the music seemed to stop, in a roughly hierarchical order. McKinsey had a massive sustainability practice — until it didn't. Bain and BCG quietly toned things down. The Big Four followed. And then it hit a lot of the boutiques — Carbon Trust, Systemiq, ERM, and others. Part of that is because several boutiques were bought up by private equity on the pitch that sustainability was a massive growing wave, and just as many of those acquisitions were completed, the wave slowed. I've been noticing through studying the public accounts of some of these consultancies that a lot of retrenchment started to happen. The consulting opportunity space has gotten a lot smaller. Clients are self-serving using generative AI tools, a lot of knowledge acquisition is now self-serve, and software is automating a lot of what consultancies used to do. That space has just gotten a lot more competitive.

On the software side: there is still good and growing demand — we see more RFPs every year and do more business every year. But the market isn't growing as fast as the supply side thought it would four or five years ago. Of those roughly 75 remaining companies in the space, I'd expect most people looking for green jobs wouldn't easily know which ones are likely to be around in a few years and which aren't. The nature space is interesting, supply chain traceability is interesting, CSRD compliance support is obviously growing. But there's still a lot of noise, and it'll likely take a couple of years for the market to consolidate to a healthy equilibrium. 75 companies is probably far too many for this space. I'd wait until the market settles a bit before making bets there.

On the nonprofit side: I'd call these the unsung heroes of the sustainability space. We've thrown a lot of criticism at them over the last few years — SBTi, CDP, and most of the big nonprofits have had some kind of crisis of faith from their communities. Many ran consortia that have become redundant because software took over the data work, or they were US-based and lost funders. Interestingly — and perhaps controversially — I think the nonprofit side is going to settle down now. The worst period was probably the last two years. The new US administration, everything that happened to USAID and the ripple effects throughout the philanthropic space — those ripples hit a very large share of the global nonprofit community. But I think a lot of that is settling. Nonprofits have adjusted to the new normal, found new funding sources, downsized, and are settling into new mandates. I think there could be an interesting place to go if you find a good role. The need for honest brokers — who can bridge between corporations, stakeholder groups, and governments — is an evergreen need. There will be good roles in that space in a way that there perhaps wouldn't have been over the last couple of years.

A final note on politics: we are still in the sustainability bear market, and right now most corporations are prioritising political risk over climate risk. Who can blame them? If you've been following everything out of Davos, Venezuela, Greenland, and wherever next — it's a turbulent time. It's hard to stay focused on an inherently long-term challenge when there's so much uncertainty over even the next six months. Four or five years ago, if you'd asked me where sustainability sits on the CEO agenda, I'd have said for most good CEOs it was probably in the top three to five priorities. Right now, that three-to-five space is just very competitive. There are so many wild cards. Someone on the sidelines is just chucking more balls at you. But this will quiet down. Sustainability is a cyclical topic — we talked about this in our episode with John Elkington — though the current cycle may not end on a timeline that works for everyone. We may be here until the US midterms. We may be here until 2030.

So if you're looking to build a career that touches the sustainability space — whether that's the core nature of your role or something adjacent — focus on becoming antifragile. Build great transferable hard skills that are good in a crisis. Build depth of knowledge on your business, your sector, what makes it tick. That's going to be useful in a crisis. And the one thing we can always be sure of is there will be another crisis.

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