How to become a business-critical Chief Sustainability Officer: 3 must-wins for 2025

The importance of the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) is increasing, partly due to externalities such as regulation and customer pressure. But as a CSO, you can further propel the importance of what you and your team do by putting more scrutiny and stamina into three key areas.

Based on our ongoing collaborations with CSOs across sectors, we have collected some key findings on what the CSO should have on the agenda in 2025 to really become business-critical. Read on to get the insights.

The CSO’s three must-win battles for 2025

One of the most common discussions we have with CSOs across sectors is on where to prioritise their efforts to succeed in the ever-increasing expectations of the role. This is an important discussion and depends on the maturity of the organisation and the level of buy-in from management. We zoom in on the three must-win battles for the CSOs that we typically engage with – they are ambitious, competent, and heavily underfunded – this is a tough job.

Today’s CSO can be categorised as the archetype of “The Transformational CSO,” and we will zoom in on three must-win battles in 2025 from that perspective. You can read more about our view on the evolution of the CSO function from being a storyteller to being business-critical further down in this article.

We think the three must-win battles should be prioritised to deliver against the many expectations of stakeholders and to establish the CSO as a critical business partner for future success. The three must-win battles focus on what is fundamental to navigating successfully and building trust in any organisation, empowering the CSO to focus on longer-term efforts (including the associated budgets) and consolidate the sustainability function. The three must-win battles for 2025 are:

1. Manage the compliance wave successfully

Be a proactive partner to the organisation and C-level on the impacts of sustainability regulation on the business. Provide transparency and educate the organisation on the external regulatory demands, share timelines on what directives will come into force, and share your plans on how to handle the different requirements in a meaningful manner.

Make sure to develop realistic estimates regarding the expected cost and resource implications to be compliant with the regulatory requirements, but also communicate clearly that this is manageable with specific efforts. Insist on involving the right stakeholders in your step-by-step plan(s) to manage the impact successfully and ensure that you have the decision mandate to continuously prioritise where to apply resources to maximise value add of increased transparency on sustainability performance.

If you succeed in implementing the various sustainability regulations in a meaningful manner and without overburdening the organisation, you will build trust and undoubtedly be recognised by the executive management. Once this is achieved, you have completed the first must-win battle on the larger sustainability transformation journey required to deliver on the second must-win battle: Deliver on at least one of the CEO’s bold sustainability targets.

2. Deliver on at least one of the CEO’s bold sustainability targets

Your CEO has a problem! Most likely, he/she has publicly confirmed several bold targets spanning e. g., climate change mitigation, workforce diversity, and circular economy. Nevertheless, progress on reaching the targets has not had the required pace to realise the target in due time.

The magnitude of the required corporate transformation was not realised before setting the bold target. Therefore, on top of cracking regulatory compliance requirements, you now have an opportunity to support on a strategic priority and solve a real commercial problem for the CEO. We recommend that you choose one bold target, which is intrinsically linked to the business model, and go all-in on realising the target (e.g., CO2e reduction in line with the Paris Agreement). This entails developing the baseline, analysing reduction levers, estimating investments required, choosing levers to go for, and developing an action plan that will reduce emissions in line with the target.

Ongoing involvement of key functions is central to getting the required support, enabling the CEO and executive management to sign off on the action plan. The action plan might be high-quality and approved, but the larger implementation and transformation of the company to reach the target require that you build an organisation that enables you to deliver. This is the third must-win battle.

3. Build the organisation from the ground up

To both manage the compliance wave and deliver on a bold sustainability target, we recommend that you ensure that the organisation has the relevant capabilities to do the job – the foundation needs to be in place.

Given the wide range of tasks that need to be executed, and due to the typically scarce resources in the CSO area, one solution for The Transformational CSO is to set up a programme management office (PMO). This allows you to operate a highly agile and skilled sustainability team of limited size, which, in collaboration with the rest of the organisation, can deliver on the required tasks. It is important that the sustainability team has the right experience and, with you, can mature the overall corporate understanding of what needs to be done and act as ambassadors for the sustainability effort in general.

Furthermore, the PMO will benefit from being anchored at the C-level to ensure focus and dedication to the chosen priorities and a strong governance set-up that can foster cross-functional ownership. As part of the effort, we would also recommend emphasising getting solid data and reporting in place and facilitating a fact-based dialogue regarding all priorities. In essence, use the resource constraint to your advantage and remember that the resource situation will change down the line as sustainability increases in business criticality.

Lastly, make sure that you have the organisational support required and top management buy-in needed. If not you run a substantial risk that the sustainability function will not succeed and mature your own role to become “The Business Critical CSO.”

The evolution of the CSO function

We have defined three CSO archetypes based on how the role has been evolving since the 2000s; “The Storytelling CSO,” “The Transformational CSO,” and “The Business Critical CSO.” From our experience – also working internationally – we assess that most CSOs today are of the transformational type.

“The Storytelling CSO”

The Storytelling CSO is an archetype that, in our view, was predominant until the 2020s. The main objective was to build the sustainability narrative of the company by focusing on selected efforts relating to the company’s own operations and communities surrounding such operations. There was no or very little focus on full value chain sustainability impacts, but rather a focus on positive outcomes of selected activities (e.g., corporate donations, sponsorships, SDG alignment, etc.), which were not necessarily central to the business model.

To showcase corporate desire for change, the CSO took part in formulating very long-term sustainability targets with a target date decades into the future. These very long-term and often unrealistic targets were required by executive management to respond to societal pressure without having a clear idea of the transformation journey and investment levels needed to succeed and reach these ambitious targets. The main job of the CSO was to produce the annual report focused on positive case story writing and participate in public advocacy initiatives.

“The Transformational CSO”

The CSO’s role is in these years changing to become more transformational, in the sense that the strategic relevance is increasing and the need for high-quality and timely execution is crucial. The key objective of The Transformational CSO is to respond successfully to the myriads of regulations requiring companies to transparently disclose and act on their negative and positive sustainability impacts, financial risks, and opportunities across their value chain. Moreover, the urgency to realise sustainability targets and the bold statements (e.g., net-zero by 2035) made by executive management is high, which, in combination with constrained resources, is challenging for The Transformational CSO to deliver upon.

As if this were not challenging enough, there is a need to build capabilities in the organisation, get supporting technologies in place, and integrate data into corporate decision-making around sustainability initiatives. These enablers allow executive management and the CSO to prioritise investments where they reduce negative impacts the most while leveraging opportunities (here, climate change mitigation marginal cost abatement curves are often applied).

In essence, The Transformational CSO has many important tasks on the table and is often underfunded – this is a tough job.

“The Business Critical CSO”

Today, only a few organisations have ambitions in the sustainability field, which have allowed the CSO to move from being an extended communications and compliance function to, in fact, becoming truly business-critical. Corporate ambitions in the sustainability field, i.e., trying to leverage sustainability as a competitive advantage, is a necessity for the CSO to deliver future business impact.

The Business Critical CSO applies high-quality sustainability data through technology solutions to provide key business functions with information that can be used in sales, procurement, strategy and risk management, etc. This entails the development of a sustainable finance operating model that runs as smoothly as a traditional finance department with adequate data input and controls, enabling a solid foundation for decision-making for executive management.

In essence, sustainability is an enabler of commercial growth, and appropriate resources are used to deliver the needed results. Sustainability reporting is still a priority, but it is not the main responsibility of The Business Critical CSO. Instead, implementing action plans to achieve bold targets and collaborating with main business partners is the essence.

Succeed on the must-win battles and become business-critical

We bet that if you manage to succeed with these must-win battles in 2025, you will have the organisational platform, executive management buy-in, and budget to realise your own goals and aspirations for the CSO role. For most CSOs, this entails being business critical and hence an integral part of the corporate strategic planning process and investment decisions, which now can rely on sustainability analytics and appropriate due diligence.

Please reach out to any of the authors in case you need sparring or hands-on support to become more business-critical as a Chief Sustainability Officer.

About the authors

Mads Østerby: Mads is leading Ramboll Management Consulting’s service line within Sustainable Finance, targeted corporate implementation of the EU Taxonomy, SFDR, CSRD and the CSDDD. When providing advisory, Mads builds on his vast experience with sustainability, transformation, finance performance management and operational excellence.

Karsten Wind Meyhoff: Karsten is leading Ramboll Management Consulting’s supply chain sustainability service line, where his emphasis is hands-on implementation of initiatives to reach ambitious, and sometime unrealistic, targets across the value chain. To support his work, Karsten has extensive experience with developing fact-based material for large strategic management decisions in public and private organisations.

Jens Riis: Jens work as a project leader in Ramboll Management Consulting where he supports organisations on strategy development and reaching ambitious sustainability targets through tangible action plans. In addition, he provides advisory on the implementation of EU’s Sustainable Finance Regulations (SFDR, Taxonomy, CSRD, CSDDD).