Net Zero’s Next Challenge Is Execution: What Industry Leaders Say Must Change
- harshas2883
- 2 days ago
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For years, the sustainability conversation has focused on awareness, commitments, disclosures and ambitious Net Zero targets. But as businesses move deeper into the climate transition, a different challenge is becoming increasingly visible: implementation.
At the IICSR–NAB CSO Roundtable 2026 in Bengaluru, sustainability leaders, corporate representatives, technology companies, climate-tech entrepreneurs, consultants, NGOs, educators and members of the IICSR community came together to examine a fundamental question:
How can sustainability become commercially viable, institutionally embedded and operationally executable?
The dialogue, convened by the International Institute of Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility (IICSR) in association with the National Association for the Blind (NAB), brought together perspectives from sectors and organisations associated with SAP, IBM, HSBC, Brigade Group, technology and AI companies, environmental engineering, sustainable construction, CSR, social-impact organisations and climate-tech ventures.
Sustainability Has an Execution Problem
One of the clearest conclusions from the roundtable was that sustainability can no longer remain the responsibility of a small ESG department.
The people who actually influence energy use, purchasing, materials, travel, waste, infrastructure and operational practices are spread throughout an organisation—in procurement, facilities, finance, HR, IT, operations, supply chains and leadership.
Abhishek Ranjan highlighted the importance of organisational culture, arguing that companies cannot expect a relatively small sustainability team to transform the behaviour of thousands of employees.
This leads to a much larger shift in thinking:
Sustainability ownership must move from the ESG department to the entire organisation.
The discussion identified three major forces driving corporate sustainability today:
Compliance and regulation
Business strategy and measurable value
Purpose, organisational culture and leadership consciousness
The conclusion was that none of these works effectively in isolation. Regulation can initiate action. Commercial value can make action sustainable. Culture determines whether the change survives beyond individual projects.
Sustainability Must Make Business Sense
Another recurring theme was the need to translate sustainability into the language of business.
Companies are more likely to scale sustainability initiatives when they can clearly see value through:
cost reduction, brand value, investor confidence or business-risk reduction.
Renewable energy illustrates this well. Its attractiveness is not limited to emissions reduction; lower energy costs can create a direct economic rationale for adoption.
Similarly, water recycling can become commercially important for industrial facilities where sourcing or transporting water is already expensive.
This distinction may determine whether an innovation becomes a pilot or a mainstream business solution.
A sustainability initiative disconnected from financial or operational outcomes may struggle for internal support. A solution that simultaneously reduces emissions, saves money, manages risk or improves customer value has a much stronger chance of scaling.
Procurement May Be the Biggest Gateway to Green Innovation
Perhaps one of the most important operational findings from the roundtable concerned procurement.
A climate-tech entrepreneur developing cement-free construction materials explained that sustainable innovations frequently move successfully through sustainability and technical teams—only to encounter resistance when they reach procurement.
The reason is straightforward.
Procurement teams are traditionally assessed on metrics such as:
cost;
quality;
supply reliability;
contractual terms;
quantity;
and approved vendor structures.
If sustainability is absent from these KPIs, procurement teams are effectively incentivised to continue choosing conventional suppliers.
The roundtable therefore proposed that sustainability should be formally incorporated into vendor-evaluation systems.
For example, organisations could consider permitting a defined green premium—potentially in the range of 3–5% in appropriate situations—where a more sustainable solution provides credible environmental benefits.
The precise threshold would vary between companies, but the principle is more important:
Sustainability needs to be written into procurement systems, rather than left to individual discretion.
Sustainable Products Cannot Remain “Hobby Projects”
Climate innovation will ultimately be judged not only by how sustainable a technology is, but by whether customers are willing and able to use it at scale.
The roundtable challenged the assumption that green products can indefinitely command significantly higher prices simply because they are sustainable.
To reach mainstream markets, climate-tech solutions increasingly need to compete on:
quality;
performance;
reliability;
scalability;
ease of integration;
and price.
The environmental impact of an innovation remains limited if it is implemented only in pilot programmes and demonstration projects.
The objective must therefore move from creating sustainable products to creating competitive sustainable products.
Brigade Group: What Net Zero Looks Like in Practice
Dr. Pradeep Kumar Rao of Brigade Group offered one of the strongest implementation perspectives during the discussion. His presentation demonstrated why Net Zero cannot be reduced to installing solar panels or buying renewable energy.
It requires integration across the entire lifecycle of a development—including design, embodied carbon, steel, glass, façades, construction practices, renewable energy, water, sewage treatment, waste, supply chains, operations, customer behaviour and lifecycle measurement.
An especially revealing example came from the economics of a Net Zero residential development. The additional cost of incorporating Net Zero specifications was estimated at approximately ₹200 per square foot.
This immediately created a customer question:
“What is in it for me?”
The organisation therefore had to connect sustainability with consumer benefits such as lower operating costs, reduced air-conditioning requirements, improved water management and more efficient common infrastructure.
Dr. Rao also referred to Brigade Citrine as a Net Zero community and discussed efforts to reduce embodied emissions through material choices including recycled-content steel. The roundtable report records a measured figure of approximately 348 kg CO₂e per square metre, compared with a referenced benchmark of approximately 700 kg CO₂e per square metre.
The broader lesson is important: Net Zero must create an understandable value proposition for the customer.
Net Zero Does Not End When a Building Is Handed Over
The real-estate discussion also raised a fundamental problem with the way Net Zero is often measured.
A building may be designed efficiently, but what happens once people begin using it?
How is energy consumed?
How is water managed?
What happens to waste?
How are common facilities operated?
What behaviours do residents adopt?
This demonstrates why sustainability needs lifecycle thinking.
Construction-stage sustainability is important, but long-term environmental performance depends equally on operations and behaviour.
Regulation Can Move Markets Faster Than Voluntary Action
The roundtable recognised the importance of voluntary corporate leadership, but participants also questioned whether voluntary action alone can create change at the scale required.
The European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism was discussed as an example of how regulation can transform emissions from a sustainability issue into a material business and market-access issue.
For exporters in carbon-intensive sectors such as steel and cement, carbon performance increasingly influences competitiveness.
The discussion also raised the concept of total product cost.
Traditional pricing captures manufacturing, packaging, labour and distribution costs, but environmental and social externalities are often not included.
If only one organisation voluntarily internalises these costs, it may become commercially disadvantaged compared with competitors. Regulation therefore plays an important role in creating a more level playing field.
But India’s Transition Must Also Be Just
The conversation also recognised the development challenge faced by emerging economies.
India continues to build infrastructure, manufacturing capacity and economic opportunity while simultaneously attempting to decarbonise.
Sectors such as steel and cement cannot simply stop growing.
The transition therefore requires more than emissions targets.
Industry will also need access to:
affordable renewable energy, transition finance, infrastructure, technologies and supportive policy.
Climate responsibility and development equity must therefore progress together.
The “Missing Middle” of Indian Sustainability
Jyotika Kamat, a practising company secretary, highlighted another critical challenge.
Large listed organisations are increasingly developing ESG capabilities because regulatory requirements, BRSR disclosures and investor scrutiny demand it.
The larger implementation gap may increasingly exist among:
Tier 2 and Tier 3 companies;
mid-sized businesses;
suppliers;
OEM manufacturers;
and businesses connected to international value chains.
These organisations may not yet possess the financial resources, sustainability teams or regulatory motivation required to develop robust ESG systems.
Gradually extending sustainability preparedness deeper into the supplier ecosystem could have another major benefit: improving the quality of Scope 3 emissions data available to larger corporations.
Sustainability Skills Could Become a Major Business Constraint
The sustainability profession itself is also changing.
Companies no longer need professionals who understand reporting alone.
Future sustainability leaders increasingly need the ability to work across:
carbon accounting, business strategy, environmental regulation, finance, technology, climate risk, supply chains, stakeholder engagement, data and implementation.
But specialist sustainability professionals are only part of the answer.
The roundtable emphasised the need to build sustainability literacy among ordinary business functions and frontline workers.
The question for every employee should increasingly become:
“What does sustainability mean within my role?”
IICSR's role as an accredited sustainability training institution was discussed in this context, particularly the opportunity to connect trained sustainability professionals with organisations requiring implementation capabilities.
From Sustainability Skills to Leadership Consciousness
Dr. Sangeetha Mansoor offered another dimension to the discussion by describing three stages or drivers of corporate sustainability:
Compliance → Strategy → Purpose
An organisation may begin by acting because it must comply with regulations.
It can then progress towards sustainability because it improves business strategy.
Eventually, sustainability can become part of organisational identity and purpose.
But the future leadership challenge goes even further.
As AI, Industry 5.0 and increasingly complex human-technology systems reshape organisations, sustainability leadership will require not only technical knowledge but also systems thinking, integration, adaptability and what Dr. Mansoor described as leadership consciousness. The transition required is from silos to integration and from fragmented thinking to systems synergy.
Sustainability Must Move Beyond Carbon
One of the most important interventions at the roundtable challenged the growing tendency to make sustainability synonymous with carbon.
Net Zero matters enormously, but environmental responsibility extends much further.
Future sustainability strategies must also address:
biodiversity, water security, food security, ecological restoration and nature-positive development.
A company can reduce carbon emissions while simultaneously degrading ecosystems or consuming water unsustainably.
Net Zero must therefore remain one component of a broader sustainability strategy rather than becoming a substitute for it.
NGOs Need Implementation Partners, Not Just Advice
Rajesh Desai, CEO of NAB, introduced another perspective often missing from corporate sustainability discussions.
NGOs may understand environmental challenges but lack the technical expertise, financing, sustainability teams and implementation partners required to solve them.
His examples also demonstrated why climate innovation must be inclusive.
Because NAB works with visually impaired individuals, conventional water-saving solutions may not always work as expected.
Visually impaired users may rely more heavily on touch and repeated washing to determine cleanliness. A device that reduces water flow could therefore unintentionally increase the time required for a task.
The larger lesson is powerful:
A sustainable technology cannot be considered successful if it does not work for the people expected to use it.
Climate innovation therefore needs to integrate accessibility and inclusion from the design stage.
AI Is Both a Sustainability Risk and an Innovation Opportunity
Artificial intelligence also entered the climate conversation.
Participants discussed the growing energy consumption associated with AI systems and data centres.
One technology organisation described work on token optimisation to reduce unnecessary AI computation arising from inefficient prompting and repeated attempts to generate desired outputs.
This creates an emerging sustainability opportunity around:
efficient AI;
green coding;
token and compute optimisation;
sustainable data centres;
carbon-aware computing;
and employee training on efficient AI usage.
As AI adoption expands, digital efficiency may increasingly become part of corporate environmental performance.
Green Hydrogen Could Transform Hard-to-Abate Industries
A representative from HSBC raised the strategic potential of green hydrogen, particularly in sectors such as steel.
However, the conversation revealed a classic transition dilemma.
Should companies invest before infrastructure and costs improve?
Or should governments first create the infrastructure and incentives that make adoption commercially feasible?
Green hydrogen therefore emerged as an important area requiring coordination between industry, government, finance and technology providers.
Carbon Markets Must Demonstrate Additionality
Carbon credits were another area where participants called for greater scrutiny.
The key concern was additionality.
If an existing forest or sustainable asset is simply acquired and subsequently used to support a carbon claim, what new environmental benefit was actually created?
High-integrity carbon markets therefore require stronger methodologies, credible additionality, transparent measurement and robust digital MRV systems.
The Missing Infrastructure: A Green Business Ecosystem
Across these discussions, another problem repeatedly surfaced: organisations often cannot find the sustainability solutions they need.
Companies struggle to determine:
Which vendors are credible?
Which technologies have actually worked?
What do they cost?
Can they scale?
Are they available locally?
What environmental performance have they demonstrated?
At the same time, climate-tech companies struggle to access corporate customers, procurement systems, pilots and decision-makers.
This gap formed the basis of one of the roundtable's most important outcomes: the proposed Green Business Corridor.
From Green Business Corridor to Implementation Corridor
IICSR proposed developing a structured Green Business Corridor capable of connecting sustainability demand with sustainability solutions, including opportunities for collaboration between India and California.
Its proposed functions include:
Solution Discovery – creating a curated database of green and climate-tech solutions.
Corporate Problem Statements – enabling companies to identify specific sustainability challenges.
Pilot Facilitation – connecting innovators with businesses willing to test solutions.
Sustainable Procurement – developing credible supplier-rating and evaluation frameworks.
Market Access – supporting climate-tech MSMEs seeking customers in India and internationally.
International Collaboration – connecting Indian innovators with California and other global ecosystems.
Finance – engaging investors, banks, foundations and sustainability funds.
Training – building capabilities across leadership, procurement, operations, finance and frontline teams.
Inclusive Innovation – supporting solutions designed for NGOs, persons with disabilities and underserved communities.
Knowledge Exchange – continuing sector-specific dialogues, working groups and case-study documentation.
The opportunity is not to create another sustainability networking platform.
It is to create an implementation corridor.
Twelve Bottlenecks That Industry Must Solve
The Bengaluru dialogue ultimately identified 12 major barriers preventing sustainability from scaling:
Sustainability remains siloed.
Many green solutions lack a clearly demonstrated business case.
Procurement continues to prioritise conventional criteria.
Green products can carry significant price premiums.
Credible sustainable suppliers remain difficult to discover.
Regional green supply chains remain underdeveloped.
Regulatory coverage is uneven across the business ecosystem.
Sustainability skills remain scarce.
Infrastructure for technologies such as renewable energy and green hydrogen remains inconsistent.
NGOs and smaller organisations lack implementation capabilities.
Climate conversations remain excessively carbon-centric.
The sustainability ecosystem itself remains fragmented.
These are no longer merely ESG problems.
They are business-system problems.
The Road to the International Net Zero Summit 2027
The roundtable proposed turning the discussion into a measurable implementation programme over the coming 12 months.
Among the proposed priorities are establishing a Green Business Corridor working group, collecting corporate sustainability problem statements, developing a Green Vendor Directory, identifying climate-tech solutions for pilots, building sustainable procurement guidelines, conducting sector-specific dialogues and expanding India–California climate-tech engagement.
The next major milestone will be the International Net Zero Summit 2027, where participating companies and innovators can potentially return with measurable implementation outcomes.
The summit could provide a platform for Green Business Corridor showcases, climate-tech demonstrations, corporate problem statements, research publications, case studies, awards, investor meetings, workshops and policy dialogues.
The Real Measure of Climate Leadership
The most important conclusion from the Bengaluru roundtable may be that sustainability no longer suffers primarily from a lack of awareness.
The knowledge exists.
Technologies increasingly exist.
Corporate commitments exist.
The missing link is the system that converts these commitments into implementation.
Companies need commercially viable solutions.
Climate-tech companies need customers.
Procurement teams need frameworks for selecting green alternatives.
Leadership teams need sustainability connected with business priorities.
Employees need role-specific sustainability capabilities.
NGOs need implementation partners.
Consumers need understandable value.
Governments need to create enabling policies and infrastructure.
And the sustainability ecosystem needs mechanisms that connect all these actors.
The success of the transition should therefore not be measured by the number of Net Zero declarations made or sustainability conferences conducted.
It should be measured by solutions implemented, partnerships created, professionals trained, climate-tech enterprises scaled and measurable environmental outcomes generated.
The Bengaluru roundtable was therefore not simply the conclusion of a conversation.
It was the beginning of the more difficult—and ultimately more important—phase of sustainability: execution.
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