CIRCULAR ECONOMY
The world spent 2025 quitting net zero. In October the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, once the proudest club in climate finance, voted to shut itself down. It was the formal end of an exodus that began a year earlier, when JPMorgan, Goldman and the rest of Wall Street filed for the exit. The walkout carried on through the summer, as HSBC, UBS and Barclays let their memberships lapse.
A South Pole survey found 58 % of companies had taken to“ greenhushing”, keeping their climate goals to themselves as the political weather turned against them.
When even BlackRock’ s Larry Fink, who made ESG the boardroom’ s favourite three letters, stopped saying them out loud, the direction of travel was hard to miss.
But the exodus told only half the story. Behind the walkouts, the appetite for net zero never actually left; it changed departments. In the same year the alliances emptied, the Science Based Targets initiative, the body that vets corporate climate goals, counted more than 10,000 companies with independently validated targets, up 40 % on the year before.
US $ 28bn
size of the carbon accounting software market in 2026, growing more than 20 % a year
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