The sustainability profession is at a crossroads. Here's what I think happens next.
By Sarah Holden, Founder and Director, Oxygen Consulting
Oxygen Consulting has spent seven years now asking sustainability professionals in Aotearoa how they're doing. Not just what they earn or what frameworks they use, but how they're really doing. Whether they feel equipped. Whether they think we're going to be okay. Whether their organisations actually value what they do.
The data we've gathered across seven years of research tells a story that is, depending on how you look at it, either encouraging or alarming. Often both at once.
And having sat with that data, and with the broader question of what sustainability is actually for, I've formed some views on where the profession is heading. Not where we'd like it to go, but where I think it's actually going, and what that means for the people in it.
We're about to launch the 2026 findings next week, but the trends I want to talk about here have built up over years, not months, and they're worth discussing before the new numbers land.
The profession has grown up, the question is whether organisations have
When we started this research in 2020, sustainability was still finding its feet in most NZ organisations. Roles were often junior, often siloed, often reporting into communications or marketing. The work was real but the strategic weight wasn't always there.
That has shifted. Our data shows sustainability roles increasingly embedded in Strategy and Finance, two functions that actually drive decisions. Management levels have held steady or crept upward. The profession has professionalised.
But here's the tension. Professionals are more visible than ever, and more under-resourced than ever. Resourcing is the number one barrier to career progression in our research, ahead of technical capability, ahead of senior buy-in, ahead of career pathways. The strategic seat at the table is there but the budget to do anything from it often isn't. That's not sustainable, and I mean that in the most literal sense.
The role needs to get more commercial, not less
Here's the view I've held for a long time, and hold more firmly now: sustainability has a communication problem that the profession itself has contributed to.
For too long, the pitch has led with environmental and social outcomes, the things that matter enormously in the long run but are easy to deprioritise when a CFO is under pressure. The result is that sustainability gets treated as a cost centre, or a compliance function, or a nice-to-have that gets cut when conditions tighten.
The professionals who are thriving are the ones who've learnt to speak the language of business risk and commercial resilience. Not because they care less about the environment or people, but because they understand that leading with the commercial logic is how you get the resources to do the work that actually matters.
Sustainability at its core is about an organisation's ability to sustain itself. To manage its dependencies on natural systems, on its people, on the relationships that allow it to operate, on the financial structures that give it runway.
The profession needs more people who can make that case fluently. Who can walk into a board conversation and connect a supply chain risk to a revenue line. Who can frame a workforce wellbeing issue as a productivity and retention story. Who can translate a climate scenario into a capital allocation decision.
The wellbeing data worries me
I'd be doing a disservice to the research if I only told the commercial story.
Every year since 2021, we've asked sustainability professionals whether they think humanity will find a way through our social and environmental challenges. Every year, the answer has got more pessimistic. The environmental situation is perceived to be getting worse, not better. Climate anxiety is real, and it's felt most acutely by younger professionals, the people who've got the most career ahead of them in this space.
At the same time, emotional exhaustion has been edging up year on year. And a persistent pattern in the data: most professionals have been in their current role for only a year or two - a turnover signal that suggests people are moving, burning out, or both. Meanwhile the training and development landscape hasn't kept pace with what the role actually demands.
This is a profession under pressure. And the pressure is compounded by the fact that these people carry a kind of weight that other professionals don't - a real personal investment in the outcomes of their work that goes beyond job performance. When the world looks like it's going backwards, that can feel quite daunting if your job is to help it go forwards.
Organisations need to take that seriously. Not just with wellbeing programmes, but by resourcing roles properly, building real career pathways, and creating the conditions for people to do meaningful work rather than just survive the compliance calendar.
The skills gap is specific and fixable
Last year when we asked professionals what they felt was missing from current training offerings, the top answers weren't technical sustainability skills. They were business case development. Financial sustainability. Influencing and communication.
That tells me the profession knows what it needs. It needs to get better at the commercial conversation, not because the environmental and social case doesn't matter, but because you can't drive change from a position of marginalisation.
The good news is these are learnable skills. The question is whether the education and professional development sector is willing to design programmes that reflect what the role actually requires, rather than what it used to require five years ago.
So where is it heading?
My honest opinion is that the sustainability profession in Aotearoa is heading towards a split.
On one path: professionals who develop commercial and strategic fluency, who sit inside the core of the business rather than adjacent to it, and who use the discipline's analytical depth to drive real decisions.
On the other path: professionals who remain primarily in compliance and reporting functions - important work, but increasingly commoditised and, in some organisations, outsourced. These roles will face more pressure, not less, as reporting obligations scale up and the expectation grows that you can do more with less.
The thing that determines which path a professional takes isn't just capability. It's whether the organisation they're in has made the decision to treat sustainability as a commercial function rather than a compliance one. And that decision sits with leadership, not with the sustainability professional themselves.
Which is why, when people ask me what would most help the profession, my answer is always the same: get sustainability into the room where the business strategy gets made. Not as a reporter, as a contributor. Everything else follows from that.
Next week we launch the 2026 findings - the seventh year of this research, and the only study of its kind in New Zealand. We’ll be sharing what the latest data tells us about remuneration, wellbeing, capability, and the changing shape of the profession, alongside our partners at the Sustainable Business Council, Sustainable Business Network, and AUT.
If any of this resonates, come and see what this year's data reveals. Whether you're already in the profession, thinking about moving into it, or just curious about where it's all heading - there'll be plenty to take from it. Find out more and register here.
