Sustainability: How Senior Leaders are Navigating and What This Means for Directors

By: Deloitte Canada

As sustainability priorities continue to shape the corporate landscape, boards and directors are uniquely positioned to guide their organizations from compliance to competitiveness. Drawing on insights from Deloitte’s 2025 Global and Canada C-suite Sustainability Reports, the research reveals how senior leaders are navigating the sustainability journey and what this means for board oversight.

Key Report Findings: Global Moderation and Canadian Pressures

Globally, sustainability remains a top three business priority on par with technology and AI, but actions to deliver on these ambitions have moderated: fewer companies reported undertaking key sustainability actions such as renewable energy purchasing, supplier engagement, or linking executive pay to sustainability performance. Against this global backdrop, Canadian findings reveal a different focus. Forty-six percent of Canadian executives identify the changing regulatory environment as their top concern, a higher proportion than their global peers. Climate change and technology adoption follow closely behind, underscoring the growing imperative of regulatory compliance, robust risk management and digital transformation.

At the same time, talent shortages are Canada’s leading barrier to sustainability deployment. With 85% of Canadian organizations experiencing stakeholder pressure to accelerate sustainability action, these findings highlight the need for targeted investment in people, processes, and systems to strengthen execution and prepare for increasing transparency and credibility.

Boardroom Actions: Moving Forward

Organizations that embed sustainability into their value proposition are better positioned to maintain momentum even in times of uncertainty. This is where boards play a central role in ensuring sustainability strategies are backed by supported by strong governance, reliable information and the capabilities needed for execution. Boards should focus on the following areas of oversight and action:

• Championing Integration: Directors can help advance sustainability maturity by ensuring it is embedded across all functions—from finance to operations—rather than siloed within ESG teams. This requires cultivating a mature control environment, where sustainability data and processes are held to the same standard of rigor and reliability as financial information. Boards should also consider assurance readiness as an integral part of this journey, guiding management to strengthen internal controls, documentation, and data quality well before external assurance becomes mandatory.
• Strengthening Risk Management: With climate-related risks having the potential to become increasingly material, Boards must ensure that scenario planning and risk assessments are part of the organization’s governance framework. Embedding these practices within enterprise risk management enables Directors to oversee how sustainability-related risks and opportunities are identified, quantified, and managed, supporting both resilience and long-term value creation.
• Investing in Capabilities: Boards can support management in developing the skills, systems and technologies needed to deliver on sustainability goals. Directors should also ask how emerging technologies, including AI, can enhance the organization’s ability to monitor progress, analyze data, and strengthen decision-making.
• Grounding in Materiality: A sound materiality assessment lies at the core of risk management and value creation. Directors should ensure their organizations maintain an updated assessment that meets stakeholder expectations and reflects current regulatory and market realities. They should understand when the last assessment was conducted, how topics were prioritized, and whether reporting still captures what is most relevant to the business. Grounding the assessment in recognized global standards such as the ISSB enhances authenticity and credibility, helping ensure the organization focuses on the sustainability issues that truly drive enterprise value.
• Exercising Patience: Boards should balance short-term performance expectations with long-term resilience. Directors can help management stay focused on sustained value creation, recognizing that meaningful sustainability outcomes often taken time to materialize but strengthen enterprise resilience over the long run.
• Understanding Dependencies: Directors should consider the broader conditions that influence progress. Boards can identify what external enablers such as policy shifts, technology breakthroughs, market incentives or ecosystem partnerships are required to achieve our sustainability objectives. Understanding these dependencies allows directors to advocate for collaboration and innovation beyond the organization’s immediate control.

As regulatory expectations evolve and global standards continue to align, Directors and Boards have an opportunity to guide their organizations toward both system-level progress and enduring enterprise value.

For further details, please review the full Global Report and Canada Report.