Sustainability Goal Setting: A New Chapter hero image

Sustainability Goal Setting: A New Chapter

January 2025 Edition

What Business Leaders Need to Know

As we enter 2025, sustainability is reaching a new phase in business maturity. Between rapid changes in the macropolitical and economic landscape; evolving investor, employee, and consumer expectations; and the first round of reports under new EU regulations; Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) and other business leaders are questioning the role, relevance, and ambition of corporate sustainability goals—especially as many key targets are missed or expire.

While business leaders are understandably nervous about being too aspirational or public at all, there is still value in communicating a quantifiable, long-term vision to steer the company and its wider value chain players. Companies should be more clear-eyed around the purpose (and limits) of public goals, learning from the experience of earlier goals and integrating those learnings into a new round of goal setting.

Goals must have a clear purpose that not only benchmark progress and signal priorities, but also enable internal accountability systems and shifts in mindset within the organization. Furthermore, goals show a public commitment to all internal and external stakeholders that the company is willing to be held accountable to deliver and that it understands the role it plays in the wider impact ecosystem.

Key questions CSOs and company leaders are considering as they embed sustainability into all company activities and functions, both internally and across their broader value chains, include:  

  • Do companies need new or updated sustainability goals above and beyond current regulatory disclosure standards?
  • Should these goals be made public?
  • Do the potential benefits of setting public sustainability goals outweigh the perceived heightened risks?
  •  What makes a good sustainability goal in today's uncertain world of heightened scrutiny?
  • How can companies balance ambitious goals with pragmatism, and how do goals catalyze action inside companies?

In this edition of Insights+, we answer top-of-mind questions for business leaders around goal setting, examine the shifting context and the lessons learned since 2020, and provide tangible guidance on how leaders can set ambitious yet achievable sustainability goals for 2025 and beyond.

Sustainability Goal: A higher-level articulation of the long-term impact that the organization is trying to achieve. The statement should be specific, timebound, and ideally measurable, though qualitative statements are generally accepted.


Sustainability Target: A specific objective an organization is aiming to achieve, where several targets are often combined to reach an overarching goal. These should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timebound.

Authors
  • Christine Diamente

    Managing Director, Transformation, BSR

  • Laura Gitman

    Chief Impact Officer, BSR

  • Aron Cramer

    President and CEO, BSR

  • Margot Brent

    Associate Director, Transformation, BSR


Topics

What Has Changed Since 2020?

Many global companies set ambitious sustainability goals and targets in 2020 as they entered what is often called the decisive decade. These goals played a key role in setting the pace for companies internally. Externally, they served as a way to signal a company’s voluntary commitment to investors and other stakeholders, while also providing a measurable means to hold these companies accountable for those commitments.

Yet since then, the external context in which companies are setting goals has radically changed. In the last two years alone, public and private companies have endured an exponential growth in ambitious regulatory disclosure requirements. This has caused companies to refocus on identifying and understanding their material impacts on society and environment, the relationship to their business model and value chain, as well as internal governance structures to oversee progress.

We have also seen an increased interest in and scrutiny of company sustainability activities, especially around public goals. On the one hand, there has been growing skepticism about the ability of companies to meet them, with loud accusations of corporate “greenwashing.” At the same time, the rise in scrutiny has led to an increase in “greenhushing,” with companies hesitant to communicate anything for fear of litigation, negative public criticism, or activism. This is juxtaposed against a backdrop of political uncertainty on the very organizations setting the goals themselves, as we saw last year with the public battle over the direction of the Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi).

As a result, we see a different tone today compared to 2020, when companies were more open to setting ambitious goals with long-term milestones. Some goals may have been set without full appreciation of the complexities in achieving them—something that the new regulatory frameworks have brought to light with requirements on company operations as well as the wider value chain.

Additionally, goals may have been set without the ability to accurately forecast with certainty unforeseen changes that later impacted their achievability in the first place. These may include factors such as changing business circumstances, external conditions linked to climate change, the emergence of new technologies such as AI or overreliance on technologies that have yet to fully scale, or even social upheaval impacting ecosystems that were critical to goal achievement. Many companies also did not fully anticipate how to balance goals with growth and significant changes in business model, as seen by many large tech companies experiencing dramatic shifts in their emissions due to AI.

As a result, leading companies have missed or revised their goals. This does not mean that the whole concept is flawed. Rather, there are important lessons gained from this experience.

Lessons Learned: What This Means for Just and Sustainable Business

Sustainability goals are critical to catalyze action within the company, signal priorities to external stakeholders, establish accountability mechanisms, enable stakeholders to assess performance, and foster an internal culture of continuous improvement.

As business leaders consider their sustainability goals in 2025, they can draw valuable insights from the past five years. Key lessons from BSR’s work with member companies include:

Ambitious, public goals still have value. While companies are understandably nervous about being too aspirational or public at all, there is still value in communicating a quantifiable, long-term vision to steer the company and its wider value chain players. This helps drive innovation, co-creation, and disruption. These should be complemented with a series of internal or external targets to signpost progress over a goal timeline and provide more actionable direction for internal stakeholders.

Eliminating public goals does not eliminate internal and external accountability. There are new disclosure regulations that hold companies accountable (e.g., leadership duty of care), and scrutiny on sustainability performance will continue with or without goals. Instead, public goals show a public commitment to all stakeholders that the company is willing to be held accountable to deliver and that they understand the role they play in the wider impact ecosystem.

Goals may change and should be set with an understanding that conditions may change during their term. Uncertainties and dependencies are real, and should be assumed, even if they cannot be predicted. Business models evolve, technology leapfrogs, companies merge, good efforts fail, and changes to goals and targets are inevitable. The process has value—a transparent narrative enables all stakeholders to learn from the process and work together to drive progress. In reality, so much change is happening at once, and in non-linear ways, that predicting with absolute certainty in the short term, and beyond five years, is extremely challenging. Key constituencies’ (governments, investors, standard setters, customers, employees) priorities can change, sometimes significantly, over a five-year period.

Public goals are not the only way to drive long-term change. Internal goals, or integrating goals into company management agendas, may be a viable alternative as many companies focus on disclosure activities in the short term and work to operationalize them across the business. By setting goals as part of a management agenda and process, this also gives clear focus to new or refreshed governance structures up to the board who are overseeing progress. Companies already have lots of internal management objectives that are intentionally used for allocating resources and driving internal accountability but are not made public because they convey important business strategy.

Actions for Business: How Can Leaders Set Goals in a Changed Context?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to how companies should set goals in this new context, and there are several considerations that companies need to balance in deciding exactly what to do. That said, BSR has some overall guidance for companies as they think about setting goals in 2025 and beyond:

  • Focus on a few key goals, rather than trying to address every issue. The disclosure requirements shift the landscape so that companies do not need to set goals on every material issue: much is already defined, and companies will report on progress every year. This frees companies up to establish a long-term vision that is needed to motivate innovation, collaboration and ambition, or to signal significant differentiated leadership.
  • Set public goals when necessary for collaboration and value chain engagement. Making a sustainability goal public brings a unique value in this new context and is particularly important when the company will need to work with others to achieve that goal. Use public goals to engage your wider value chain or when external collaborations need to align in order to access their objectives.
  • Foster collaborative initiatives as a complement or alternative to setting individual company goals, particularly on new emerging topics such as nature or plastics. These initiatives serve as a “coalition of the willing” and signal ambition on potential risks and opportunities at an individual and collective level, especially across wider ecosystems, enabling company and community resilience. 
  • Acknowledge the uncertainties and dependencies associated with goal setting. It’s important that companies keep some ambition balanced with a healthy (and explicit) dose of humility. Companies must explicitly recognize that they do not control enough to guarantee delivery against goals. They should provide a clear explanation of how they are addressing dependencies and uncertainties, such as the level of investment in systems-based approaches.
  • Focus more on delivery, oversight, and upskilling. Historically, companies spent a lot of time and money setting a large number of “perfect” goals and targets, only to end up abandoning or changing them anyway. Shift some of that energy toward implementation and governance as well as continuous upskilling at all levels so that there is better awareness and understanding of the different variables impacting the achievement of the goals, and company leaders and experts alike are better able to partner on how to get there.
  • Use internal targets for management purposes. Annual targets and KPIs should still be set internally to allocate resources and drive performance accountability. These should be developed as part of a roadmap to achieving the goal that also describes how resources and responsibility will be allocated for implementation. Sustainability metrics should be used along with other business metrics to set direction and measure progress, but they should be part of general management operations and reporting as well as performance metrics as sustainability becomes integrated into “business as usual.” 

What Defines a "Good" Goal?

In an era of rapid technological advancements and evolving societal expectations, "good" sustainability goals must be:

  • Ambitious yet achievable: Setting overly ambitious goals can lead to disappointment and disillusionment, while overly conservative goals fail to drive meaningful change.
  • Align with science-based targets: Aligning targets with scientific evidence and established frameworks ensures credibility and rigor.
  • Materiality-focused: Prioritizing goals that address the most significant environmental and social impacts of the organization and help navigating uncertainty.


The current geopolitical and economic climate presents unprecedented challenges. Companies must develop adaptive strategies that can withstand volatility and incorporate emerging risks and opportunities. Scenarios play a critical role in this regard.

How BSR Can Help

BSR is working with its member companies to help them address sustainability-related business risks and opportunities and make essential progress on their goals in a changed context. Related services include:

  • Board and Executive Engagement: Provide briefings, trainings, and workshops to update corporate leaders on new developments and emerging issues—and to engage them in solutions.
  • Strategy Review: Update strategic sustainability priorities, risks, and opportunities; benchmark performance; set or review sustainability goals and targets; and support the road mapping process, potentially including through scenarios testing, persona-based reviews, and identifying more focused priorities.
  • Futures and Foresight: Partner with BSR’s Sustainable Futures Lab to identify emerging issues, conduct contingency planning, and reframe the time horizon to consider long-term impacts, risks, and opportunities.
  • Stakeholder Engagement and Advisory Councils: Ensure representation of a range of voices, expectations, and expertise through strategic engagement with stakeholders, including extending beyond voices currently engaged. External advisory councils may be newly valuable.

Convenings with BSR Member Companies: Upcoming sessions include Centering Health Equity within Climate Action and Sustainable Business Trends Shaping 2025.

BSR’s Member Portal: Explore best practices for setting ambitious, achievable goals, as well as a full library of other sustainable business resources exclusive to BSR members.

Our Experts

Our team consists of global experts across multiple focus areas and industries, bringing a depth of experience in developing sustainable business strategies and solutions.

Margot Brent portrait

Margot Brent

Associate Director, Transformation

London

Aron Cramer portrait

Aron Cramer

President and CEO

San Francisco

Christine Diamente portrait

Christine Diamente

Managing Director, Transformation

London

Laura Gitman portrait

Laura Gitman

Chief Impact Officer

New York