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This Action Theme will prove the investment case for sustainability. Investor recognition for corporate strategy and transition planning hinge on how sustainability is - or is not - disclosed and valued in financial terms.

Realize the Value of Sustainability Action Theme helps close the gap on how risks and opportunities relating to climate, nature and people are not yet systemically integrated into corporate disclosures and company valuations. It gives members a platform to show how sustainability is material to corporate performance and enterprise value. Moreover, it enables engagement directly with market participants and regulators on what good looks like to make it investable by 2030.

The Action Theme also serves as the translation and validation layer across WBCSD’s broader offer. Other Action Themes help companies build evidence, deploy solutions and embed sustainability in decision making. This one integrates and elevates that progress into credible strategies and market-facing information that boards, CFOs and capital providers can rely upon.

WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT THIS OFFER?

WBCSD brings together the actors who shape how sustainability performance is recognized and valued: leading companies, investors and asset owners, lenders, standard setters, policymakers and valuation experts. By connecting corporate reporting, credible transition planning and financial valuation in one offer, members mobilize multi-disciplinary teams and executives to engage with confidence on information boards and capital markets can understand, compare and use.

ACTION THEME AT A GLANCE Purpose: To make sustainability a visible, enduring and credible driver of enterprise value by helping members turn credible performance into stronger board confidence, investor conviction, capital allocation and market recognition by 2030.

Best for: Pioneers who want to help design and develop the work, and Scalers who want to learn from it, apply it and share what works.

Target Group: CFOs, CSOs, General Counsels and CLOs, boards and the teams supporting them on market engagement, including investor relations, treasury, corporate affairs and legal.

Timeline: 2027 - 2030

Deliverables/Outputs: Roadmap for Investability by 2030 featuring Future of Corporate Reporting; Enabling Credible Transition Plans; Valuation of Sustainability.

Advisory Group: Board of the Future comprising executive champions representing different areas of expertise from members across diverse regions and sectors.

How to get involved: Realize the Value of Sustainability

This Action Theme convenes leaders from corporates, financial institutions and policymaking organizations and includes executive-level dialogue and hands-on practitioner work. Members can contribute evidence, test approaches with capital-market actors and help shape the tools and practices that will influence how sustainability performance is understood and valued.

There are three ways to participate:

1. Engage executive leaders as Executive Champions on Board of the Future

C-Suite leaders are invited to join an expanded Board of the Future as pioneers of the investability agenda across WBCSD's membership. This involves serving in a leadership role at WBCSD and partner events, with two virtual and two in-person meetings around WBCSD flagship events.

2. Convene with executive peers and engage in high-level dialogue

Join in-person regional executive roundtable discussions to shape the investability roadmap and inform the vision for future of corporate reporting. The goal is to promote investability in corporate performance and foster an understanding of credible transition plans with policy makers and capital allocators.

3. Build and test valuation methods

Work with peers and global valuation experts to develop methods for translating sustainability risks, opportunities and outcomes into financial terms. CFO and FP&A practitioners can test assumptions, assurance considerations and practical application before publication.

Engagement ranges from a few executive hours each year to deeper practitioner involvement in reporting and methodology development for pioneering companies. Members can choose the depth that fits their ambition while gaining earlier insight into the expectations shaping boards, capital allocation and financial markets.

Embed Sustainability in decision making

Shape the standards and conventions that embed sustainability into decision-making and business value.

Sustainability is increasingly shaping the conditions for business success - innovation, resilience, and stakeholder trust. Companies have access to more sustainability data than ever. The questions are: What can I do with it? And how can I build on it as the focus shifts to credible, consistent and comparable decision-useful information.

This Action Theme helps ensure sustainability data is decision-useful for the decisions that determine how a company competes and creates value. Members can help shape the standards and frameworks they use, through engagement with standard setters in the Standards Connectivity Forum and build practical approaches for bringing sustainability into strategy, finance, governance and risk decisions, and connect those considerations to product and portfolio choices.

The Standards Connectivity Forum will provide a north star for standards development while a new Standards Practitioners' Forum anchors this work. It gives members a multidisciplinary space to expand their collective understanding and capabilities. They will build maturity by testing and refining emerging voluntary approaches early, tightening practices as frameworks solidify, and ultimately arriving ahead of the curve - actively managing new expectations when today's voluntary commitments become tomorrow's mandatory requirements.

Together, the work creates a connected path from credible information to better decisions to portfolio transformation - helping companies move beyond compliance and build the capabilities to compete and thrive as business conditions change.

WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT THIS OFFER?

WBCSD convenes the key standard setters shaping sustainability-related reporting requirements and connects them with the practitioners who need them to drive resilience and business value. As adopters of the standards, members engage directly with standard setters, experts, users and peers while shaping and testing practical approaches through practitioner groups, pilots and initiatives such as the Product Portfolio Resilience & Innovation Accelerator (PPRIA), Nature measurement, Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD) and the Global Circularity Protocol for Business. By bringing credible standards, integrated decision-making and product portfolio transformation into one offer, WBCSD helps companies turn fragmented requirements and sustainability data into choices that strengthen resilience, innovation and long-term value.

ACTION THEME AT A GLANCE Purpose: To promote the evolution and alignment of the standards, frameworks and conventions that enable the integration of sustainability into strategy, finance, governance, risk management and product portfolio decisions. To embed credible, consistent sustainability-related information into better business decisions that enable resilience and long-term value creation. To connect with innovation-related action themes (including Scale Circularity and Resource Security” and “Scale Climate Solutions at Pace”), as well as the “Realize the Value of Sustainability” Action Theme.

Best for: Pioneers who want to help design and develop the work, and Scalers who want to learn from it, apply it and share what works.

Target Group: Sustainability and reporting practitioners, as well as finance, risk, legal, procurement and business teams, with visibility to CFOs, General Counsels/CLOs and boards.

Timeline: 2027 - 2030

Deliverables/Outputs: Standards and Frameworks for Credible Action; Embedding Sustainability into Corporate Decision-Making; Embedding Sustainability into Product Portfolios.

How to get involved: Embed Sustainability in decision making

This Action Theme offers ways to stay close to the rules as they evolve and to test how sustainability can work inside real business decisions. Members can engage lightly through learning and peer exchange or go deeper by engaging on standards development, shaping frameworks, testing implementation approaches and piloting PPRIA.

Scalers can use peer learning, guidance and training to strengthen implementation. Pioneers can go deeper through standard-setting engagement, practitioner-led development and pilots. In both cases, the aim is practical: less fragmentation, better decisions and stronger links between sustainability, resilience and growth.

There are three ways to participate:

1. Navigate and shape the standards

Bring implementation challenges to the Standards Connectivity Forum, targeted consultations, peer exchange and working groups. Engage directly with standard setters and market actors to help improve interoperability and make emerging requirements more workable for business.

2. Put sustainability into everyday decisions

Join the new Standards Practitioner Forum to take part in peer-learning networks and pilots focused on how to interpret, iterate and adopt standards to integrate and translate sustainability information into corporate decisions.

3. Transform product portfolios and build capability

Use diagnostics and learning modules to explore how sustainability risks and opportunities affect products and services. Pilot PPRIA 1.0, test portfolio-management approaches and share implementation experience that can strengthen the methodology and future market practice.

Put AI to Work, Responsibly

Put AI to work responsibly, in service of people and human dignity.

AI is rapidly changing how businesses operate, compete and grow. But as its use expands, so do the questions leaders need to answer: Where should we use it? How should we govern it? And what safeguards do we need to protect people, meaningful work, resource scarcity, energy usage and create trust.

WBCSD brings a distinctive sustainability lens that goes beyond compliance and oversight. It helps leaders consider not only what AI can do, but when it should be used, under what conditions and with what safeguards. With this Action Theme, executives will better understand and govern the wider implications of AI for business, people and the environment holistically. And through WBCSD's partnership with the Borgo Laudato Si', the theme creates a unique space for business leaders to explore critical topics such as human dignity, meaningful work, truth, freedom, the common good and care for our common home.

ACTION THEME AT A GLANCE Purpose: To help WBCSD members put AI to work in ways that strengthen business performance and sustainability decisions, while protecting people, trust and the systems businesses depend on.

Best for: Pioneers who want to help design and develop the work, and Scalers who want to learn from it, apply it and share what works.

Target Group: Board members and C-suite leaders; General Counsels; Sustainability, Finance, IT and Digital, and HR.

Timeline: 2027

Deliverables/Outputs: Responsible AI Leadership Dialogue in collaboration with the Borgo Laudato Si'; Responsible AI Board and Executive Briefing Pack; Responsible AI Impact Assessment Tool.

How to get involved: Put AI to Work, Responsibly

Responsible AI is not a technology issue alone. It is a business, people and sustainability issue. This Action Theme is designed to bring together the changemakers from across the organization who are responsible for making, overseeing or acting upon decisions about AI deployment.

There are three ways to participate:

Participation can be as light or as deep as your organization chooses: access the outputs, test the tools or help shape the work from the start. Whatever the level of involvement, the goal is the same; to make responsible AI part of how your organization protects trust, improves decisions and creates value.

1. Shape and lead

Join focused working sessions or, for senior leaders, the Responsible AI Leadership Dialogue. Bring the questions your organization is confronting and help identify what boards and executive teams most need to understand about responsible AI. The leadership dialogue will involve board members, CEOs and other C-suite and senior functional leaders.

2. Apply and test

Put draft materials to work against real or representative AI use cases. Members can test the briefing pack, assessment criteria and proposed safeguards without sharing commercially sensitive information - and provide practical feedback on what is clear, useful or missing.

3. Access and embed

All WBCSD members will be able to access the final briefing pack and impact assessment tool. Use them within existing board discussions, governance processes and AI deployment decisions - and draw on the guidance to strengthen processes and governance mechanisms where needed.

Adapt to Rising Physical Risks

Understand where your business is exposed and how to adapt.

Extreme heat, flooding, water stress, wildfires and other hazards are increasingly disrupting assets, workers, infrastructure, logistics, sourcing and communities. However, to mobilize the solutions and investments that will build resilience and adaptability to these impacts, we urgently need decision-useful insights and a clear business case. This is all complicated by the fact that some of the most material exposures sit beyond a company’s own operations - in the shared systems and value chains on which business performance depends.

This Action Theme helps members get ahead of those risks. Companies can improve how they measure exposure, diagnose critical vulnerabilities and identify where resilience and adaptation investments can make the greatest difference. The work connects better risk assessment with practical action, helping teams see where risk sits, how it could affect performance and which responses deserve priority.

Together, members will develop more consistent approaches for quantifying value at risk, understanding critical dependencies and comparing solutions. They will turn physical risk from a broad external threat into information they can use in operating, sourcing and investment decisions.

WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT THIS OFFER?

Physical risk crosses company boundaries. WBCSD brings together the cross-sector expertise, relationships and trusted convening platform needed to understand how vulnerabilities move through shared infrastructure, supply chains and natural systems and how to measure and quantify the value at risk. That allows members to diagnose interdependencies together, turn complexity into practical tools, share insights, and incentivize collaborative pathways for action.

ACTION THEME AT A GLANCE Purpose: To help members turn physical-risk exposure into decision-useful insight, compare resilience options, and build the business case for solutions and investments that protect value chains, continuity and long-term business performance.

Best for: Pioneers who want to help design and develop the work, and Scalers who want to learn from it, apply it and share what works.

Target Group: Risk, finance, operations, procurement, strategy, sustainability and innovation teams; CFOs and other business leaders responsible for operational and financial resilience.

Timeline: 2027

Deliverables/Outputs: Connect, Incentivize and Scale Resilience and Adaptation Solutions; Physical Risk Vulnerability Diagnostic: Critical Infrastructure; Physical Risk Vulnerability.

Solutions: Agriculture, Food and Land Use.

Advisory Group: Comprising leaders from across system communities and regions working together with risk, insurance and valuation experts.

How to get involved: Adapt to Rising Physical Risks

This Action Theme offers simple ways to learn from the work and deeper ways to shape it. Members can use new methodologies, bring real business challenges into diagnostic development, share solutions and learn directly from peers confronting similar risks.

Members can engage as scalers by referencing published resources or joining workstreams in an observer role, or take on a pioneering role by contributing evidence, testing diagnostics and helping shape future work. Either way, the goal is practical: clearer risk insight, stronger investment decisions and greater resilience across operations and value chains.

There are four ways to participate:

1. Learn and observe

Follow emerging approaches, learn from other companies and bring relevant insight back into your own organization. Access methodology papers and other resources from the Open Sesame initiative of the Federation of European Risk Management Associations (FERMA) and join ongoing workstreams as an observer.

2. Co-develop and test

Help shape the Critical Infrastructure Diagnostic and Food and Land Use Solutions by bringing real dependencies and operating challenges into their development. Test and apply the frameworks directly so the resulting tools work in real business settings.

3. Contribute what works

Bring forward resilience and adaptation solutions for the curated portfolio. Share case studies, data or experience that can help peers understand how risks are being managed, where solutions are working, what makes them effective and how they might be applied elsewhere.

4. Connect across sectors

Join roundtables, peer exchanges and collaborative workstreams around risks no company can address alone. Companies that own or operate critical assets bring one perspective; companies that depend on those systems downstream bring another. The value comes from connecting them.

Scale Climate Solutions at Pace

Turn climate commitments into faster emissions cuts and stronger business value.

Many companies have set ambitious climate targets. The harder challenge is delivering them across complex value chains while staying cost competitive and showing boards, investors, customers and policymakers progress, including how to credibly navigate potential shortfalls and target resets. As capital markets shift their focus from targets to credible transition plans when assessing companies, it is important to establish solutions that are material and can be scaled.

This Action Theme helps members across both industrial sectors and forest, land and agriculture (FLAG) sectors to accelerate climate action where success depends on collaboration across value chains. It equips CSOs, procurement and value chain leaders, and sustainability teams with the insights, tools and network to reduce emissions across operations and Scope 3 while creating measurable business value.

Members will accelerate value chain decarbonization by combining diagnostics, evidence, corporate and product carbon data, supplier insights and value chain collaboration, as well as through the design and deployment of market instruments. Member Communities can identify selected sprints to follow the Emissions Reduction Accelerator (ERA) methodology: assess progress and barriers, identify unlocks and translate insights into scalable business action across value chains. Building on WBCSD’s People Action work and BCTI recommendations, a just transition dimension will also be integrated.

The Action Theme will engage members from across energy, heavy industry, built environment, transport and logistics, and FLAG sectors to drive climate innovations broadly and quickly across their value chains. This work will also include examining the potential of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) to cut emissions at source, nature-based and engineered Carbon Dioxide Removals (CDR), the role of Carbon Markets, and other technology and AI solutions available from leading innovators. With an unpredictable international context as the backdrop for this Action Theme, electrification and grid optimization run through the work program as a critical thread, including work with WBCSD’s Policy & Insights function on a policy sprint. This reflects the pivotal role of electrification and grid optimization in helping companies and countries improve their core competitiveness and energy security, as well as their climate performance.

ACTION THEME AT A GLANCE Purpose: To help members turn the challenge of meeting near-term climate targets into drivers for wider market and value chain innovation, unlocking collective climate action solutions and stronger business performance through 2030.

Best for: Pioneers who want to help design and develop the work, and Scalers who want to learn from it, apply it and share what works.

Target Group: CSOs; sustainability executives and specialists (drawing in, where relevant, peers from operations, procurement and supply chains); key business units/product groups; key regional operations; sales and marketing; and innovation and R&D.

Timeline: 2027 - 2030

Deliverables/Outputs: Baseline Progress and Unlock Additional Impact Potential; Strengthen and Harmonize Climate Accounting Solutions; Accelerate Emissions Reduction Across Value Chains.

How to get involved: Scale Climate Solutions at Pace

Members can enter Scale Climate Solutions at Pace at different depths and can scale their participation over time. They can choose the entry point that matches their 2027 climate priorities, from access to co-shaping and leading.

There are four ways to participate:

1. Shape the standards

Join the practitioner cohort that stress-tests draft revisions of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) through 2027 and contribute company evidence to WBCSD’s consultation submissions.

2. Contribute cases and data

Submit case studies to the diagnostic and to the Avoided Emissions and market-based accounting use case libraries. Selected cases will anchor peer learning, standard-setter submissions and Climate Catalyst Program peer sessions.

3. Join a pilot

Work in a demonstration sprint to test and apply a relevant market-based instrument.

4. Access supplier decarbonization support

Use the WBCSD supplier tool suite, join the cohort on procurement integration and deep-tier financing, and test the ERA Investment Accelerator (subject to additional funding).

Scale Regenerative Landscapes and Bio-based Innovation

Protect supply, secure project finance and build resilient markets across regenerative land systems and bio-based products.

Regenerative land systems - including natural ecosystems, agriculture and forests - and the bio-based industries built on them face growing pressure from nature and climate risks, degraded landscapes, tightening regulation, rising reporting demands and rapid innovation in bio-based materials. Left unaddressed, these pressures can affect supply security, costs, product choices, access to project finance and long-term competitiveness across value chains that depend on land and nature.

This Action Theme is especially relevant to company teams working to connect environmental performance with market growth and business resilience as pressure on land and nature increases, regulatory risk grows, and the window to shape credible, investable approaches narrows.

Scale Regenerative Landscapes and Bio-based Innovation helps members respond through three connected areas: linking market signals and resolving cross-sector land-use tradeoffs; building the metrics and policy environment needed to direct project finance and demand toward regenerative and bio-based value chains; and mobilizing collective solutions and project finance tested regionally and ready for broader adoption.

How this Action Theme Relates to other House Elements

This Action Theme’s three deliverables draw on evidence and expertise from across WBCSD and feed insights back into related work, in particular: the Business Breakthrough Barometer and advocacy led by Policy & Insights; company decision-making, investor relationships and risk assessments led by the Action Themes “Realize the Value of Sustainability,” “Embed Sustainability in Decision-Making” and “Adapt to Rising Physical Risks;” and carbon accounting and market-based instruments led by the Action Theme “Scale Climate Solutions at Pace.”

ACTION THEME AT A GLANCE Purpose: To help members protect supply, secure project finance and build resilient markets across regenerative land systems (nature, agriculture, forests) and bio-based products, while managing rising land-use and regulatory risk.

Best for: Pioneers who want to help design and develop the work, and Scalers who want to learn from it, apply it and share what works.

Target Group: CSOs and sustainability practitioners; supply chain and procurement leaders; finance and innovation teams; policy and public-affairs teams; investment and partnership leads.

Timeline: 2027 - 2029

Deliverables/Outputs: Cross-Sector Market & Land-Use Alignment; Enabling Environment: Metrics & Policy Alignment; Mobilization: Scale Collective Solutions & Project Finance.

How to get involved: Scale Regenerative Landscapes and Bio-based Innovation

WBCSD continues to lead in this agenda because its members span land-based sectors such as agrifood and forestry as well as nature-dependent sectors such as materials, the built environment, chemicals and energy. That cross-sector reach helps connect market signals and address land-use tradeoffs that no single-sector community can resolve alone. WBCSD’s CEO-led membership and access to business insights also help translate fragmented standards and policy signals into decision-useful guidance. And by linking Solution Accelerators (Carbon Market Accelerator, OP2B, LAB, SCF and ILA) with international institutions such as GEF, GCF and FAO, WBCSD can help move promising approaches to scale project finance.

Members can engage across each deliverable at a level suited to their capacity and priorities - from early Pioneer-style co-shaping and testing to Scaler-style adoption.

There are three ways to participate:

1. Contribute experience and use cases

Contribute Companies that want to engage more actively can contribute experience, data and use cases - for example, by piloting market-based instruments for Cross-Sector Market & Land-Use Alignment or sharing progress on nature, regenerative agriculture, sustainable forests or bioeconomy metrics for an enabling environment.

2. Co-develop tools

Members can also test or co-develop tools directly by applying draft metrics frameworks, trialing project-finance and risk-sharing instruments or scoping new Solution Accelerators and related coalitions.

3. Apply outputs within your organization

Engage more lightly, drawing on WBCSD frameworks, dashboards and business cases as they become available.

Engagement ranges from helping shape the work, for example, from co-designing metrics, instruments or coalition structures to applying finished outputs within their own organizations.

Scale Circularity and Resource Security

Put circularity to work across your operations, products and value chains.

The materials companies rely on to run their operations and make their products are becoming harder to secure and costlier to manage. As a result, how companies source, use and recover them is increasingly important to business performance. Prices can swing, supply chains can tighten and access to critical inputs can no longer be taken for granted. This is where circularity comes in.

Circularity can help companies get more value from materials already in use, reduce dependence on constrained resources and open new routes to innovation and growth. This Action Theme gives members practical ways to act in this arena. Companies can, for example, use the Global Circularity Protocol for Business (GCP) to measure circular performance consistently. They can help create an interoperable data framework that makes recycled-content track across markets. And they can work with peers to strengthen markets for recovered materials.

Together, the activities within this Action Theme move circularity from ambition into everyday business practice, helping members make better sourcing and product decisions, reduce exposure to supply shocks and build stronger business cases for investment. This work also connects with WBCSD’s “Embed Sustainability in Decision-Making” Action Theme Practitioners’ Forum, where members engage across emerging, voluntary and mandatory sustainability standards and feed practical company experience into the evolution of standards and frameworks.

ACTION THEME AT A GLANCE Purpose: To help members use consistent data and metrics to advance circularity, address resource security, reduce exposure to price and supply shocks and create business value.

Best for: Pioneers who want to help design and develop the work, and Scalers who want to learn from it, apply it and share what works.

Target Group: CSOs and sustainability leaders; supply chain and procurement leaders; strategy and risk teams; product and innovation leaders.

Timeline: 2027 - 2029

Deliverables/Outputs: Global Circularity Protocol for Business Adoption and version 2.0 Development; Interoperable Data Standards for Circular Materials; Building Secondary Materials Markets.

How to get involved: Scale Circularity and Resource Security

This Action Theme offers several ways to engage. Members can use the tools and benefit from peer learning and shared insights, help develop solutions to common challenges, or identify priority secondary-material opportunities and barriers for collective action. Participation can also connect members with the “Embed Sustainability in Decision-Making” Action Theme Practitioners’ Forum, creating a bridge between circularity implementation, wider sustainability standards work and the Connectivity Forum.

Scalers can engage lightly in this Action Theme by using published materials and benefiting from peer learning. Pioneers can go deeper by co-designing GCP version 2.0 modules or the recycled-content standard, or helping build the case for a new materials market. Either way, the value is practical: clearer decisions, more dependable supply and stronger business value from circularity.

There are three ways to participate:

1. Put the tools to work

Members use the GCP in their own operations and value chains, leveraging collective member experiences, case studies and insights to identify what works, avoid common pitfalls and maximize business impact.

2. Test and shape

Members help develop GCP version 2.0 and Interoperable Data Standards. Through working groups and roundtables, they help co-develop the methodologies so that the resulting solutions are practical, credible and aligned with business needs.

3. Build new markets together

Members can bring a priority material or sourcing challenge to the secondary-materials roundtables. Additionally, they can help decide which materials and markets WBCSD should explore next and review the case for collective action. If an opportunity proves viable, members can choose to take part in a separately funded Solution Accelerator.

Next page: Policy & Insights

Solution Accelerators

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This is the public version of WBCSD 2027 Action Platform. Antitrust Compliance Notice: All WBCSD programs and services, including but not limited to Action Themes, Solution Accelerators, Academy & Enablement, Convene & Connect, Policy & Insights, and Premium Learning, are designed to support WBCSD's sustainability mission and are conducted in accordance with the WBCSD Antitrust Compliance Policy (the "Policy").

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