In 2022, a third of Pakistan was underwater.
I watched it happen as someone whose roots are in that land: its plains and rivers, its farmers and cities, its people. More than 1,700 people died. Around two million homes were damaged or destroyed. Some 33 million people were affected, and millions were driven from their homes within weeks.
Pakistan produces less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The people who lost everything did not cause the climate change that pushed the monsoon rains beyond anything the land could absorb. They were not the authors of the crisis. They were its victims.
The gap I could not stop thinking about
In that year and the years after, I kept thinking about a gap. Not the gap between the problem and the science, which is clear. Not the gap between the countries that caused the crisis and the countries that bear it, which has been written about at length. The gap I could not stop thinking about was the one between the polished corporate sustainability reports I was reading for work and the devastation unfolding in the land where I had family.
Over a decade working where financial governance meets sustainability standards, I reviewed hundreds of sustainability reports. The language was confident and the commitments were ambitious. Nearly every report had a net zero target. Nearly every one described a comprehensive climate strategy. Nearly every one had photographs of solar panels, wind farms and employees planting trees.
Yet when I looked carefully at the data behind the claims, at the capital allocation decisions, the governance structures, the operating plans and the measurable progress, I kept finding the same gap.
It was rarely dishonesty. Most of the people producing these reports were doing their best within systems that had never asked for more. Two decades of voluntary reporting produced exactly this outcome: huge amounts of sustainability content, with little accountability, little comparability and few consequences for the distance between what was claimed and what was real.
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the floods came.
The link between weak corporate sustainability governance and the suffering of communities like the ones I watched lose everything is not simple or direct. But it is real.
Why governance quality still matters
I am not arguing that corporate sustainability reports caused Pakistan’s floods. They did not. Climate change is the product of two centuries of accumulated emissions, and attributing any single flood involves complex atmospheric science that no company report could shift.
But the quality of corporate sustainability governance matters. It decides whether net zero targets are met or missed. It decides whether capital flows into real transition investment or into reassuring messages about transition. And it decides whether the next decade delivers the structural shift that physical reality now demands, or another cycle of ever more sophisticated reporting about a transition that never quite arrives.
I wrote Sustainability Leadership: The Global Outlook to help close that gap. Not by making the challenge look smaller than it is, but by making it easier to navigate.
The book is for the professionals who want to close the gap between sustainability ambition and sustainability performance: the finance director learning that climate risk is now a mandatory disclosure, the procurement manager whose buyers want proof of a sustainable supply chain, the board member reading about the CSRD and wondering how much of it will reach the organisations they oversee. And the student in Lahore, Lagos or Melbourne who chose a career in sustainability because it is where their skills can do the most good.
Where the transition will be decided
If you work inside the systems that shape corporate sustainability, in finance, on the audit committee, in investor relations, compliance or the sustainability office, your role matters more than the public conversation tends to recognise. Think of the accountant who refuses to sign off disclosures that cannot be backed up. The CFO who insists that sustainability targets are tied to capital allocation. The board member who asks for the honest assessment instead of the polished story. The internal auditor who holds sustainability data to the same standard as financial data.
These are the people who will decide whether the transition produces real change or just better communication about change.
The communities in Bangladesh building floating gardens as the land disappears under rising water. The Himalayan glaciers retreating while a billion people depend on the rivers they feed. The people of the Sahel watching their rainfall patterns collapse. The farmers in Pakistan whose fields went underwater and have still not fully recovered.
They are reason enough.
Drawn from the preface and opening of my book, Sustainability Leadership: The Global Outlook (2026).