“When you talk about luxury firms, they're doing better because they can afford to make important investments, as consumers are paying an important luxury premium,” Mediluce says, “They can afford to be the cleanest of the cleanest.” But sustainability doesn’t always have to come with a more expensive price tag, especially as the price for wind, solar, and batteries become cheaper than fossil fuels. “We're moving to a place where being sustainable can be economically beneficial to the company, because they can reduce their costs, potentially increase their sales, without necessarily increasing the price,” she says. Sherry Madera, CEO of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which tracks corporate emissions, says that there are still plenty of incentives for big multinational companies with global supply chains to care about corporate sustainability. “Businesses that are multinational, they're also part of someone else's supply chain, so they're protecting their top line by disclosing their emissions, their water usage, their risks,” she says. “All of these data points are now actually making sure that they stay in the universe for procurement. That's protecting their revenue.” CDP’s examination of market capitalization and climate scores reveals that in over half of the sectors, climate leaders are showing higher or similar market growth compared to those at the lowest performance level. In the past few years, there’s been an increase in demand for water use disclosure data on CDP’s platform, mainly in the U.S., because it’s no longer just an element of biodiversity but an economic output—it impacts industries from food and beverage, to manufacturing, to textiles, to data centers and AI. And with the conflicts in Ukraine and around the Strait of Hormuz, energy security is a top concern in the boardroom, Madera says, which means data about companies’ energy mixes is starting to be of interest. “That's a huge wealth of information for companies to determine not only their own but also their supply chains' resilience to energy,” she says. And with the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism—a tariff on carbon-intensive goods which came into effect at the start of 2026—more global companies are interested in CDP’s disclosure data because they want to understand how the tax will affect their economics and the health of their business.
World's Most Sustainable Companies of 2026
See the top ranked corporate sustainability leaders.









