Twenty years ago, the typical C-suite was relatively easy to recognise.

There was a Chief Executive Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, perhaps a Chief Operating Officer, and depending on the company, leaders responsible for technology, marketing or human resources.

Then another title began appearing on executive teams: Chief Sustainability Officer.

At first, the role could have been mistaken for an extension of corporate social responsibility. Today, it can sit at the intersection of strategy, finance, operations, regulation, supply chains, risk and reputation. And companies have been hiring accordingly.

Research by Strategy&, PwC's strategy consulting business, found that the number of Chief Sustainability Officer appointments globally tripled in 2021 compared with 2020. The study examined the role across 1,640 listed companies and tracked CSO appointments globally from 2011 onwards.

The increase was not simply about companies becoming more environmentally conscious. Something larger was changing inside business itself. Sustainability was becoming too important, too complicated and too interconnected to remain everyone's secondary responsibility.

Even at The Better Voice, our idea right from the nascent ideation stage of the platform was to have Better Sustainability as a separate domain; not include it under any one section and lessen its impact.

Why are companies hiring Chief Sustainability Officers?

For years, sustainability often lived at the edge of the organisation. It might have appeared in a CSR report, a philanthropy programme, an environmental target or a communications campaign. Important work was being done, but it was frequently separate from the decisions that determined what a company produced, where it sourced from, how it invested or how it grew. That separation has become increasingly difficult to maintain.

Climate risk can affect supply chains. Energy decisions affect operating costs. Product design affects waste. Sustainability claims create legal and reputational exposure. Investors ask for environmental data. Regulators require increasingly sophisticated disclosures. Customers and employees can scrutinise corporate promises in real time. What once looked like an environmental issue now regularly becomes a finance issue, an operations issue, a legal issue and a strategy issue.

That is precisely why sustainability is increasingly becoming part of business strategy rather than remaining a parallel corporate initiative. Someone has to connect those conversations. That person is increasingly the Chief Sustainability Officer.

What does a Chief Sustainability Officer actually do?

There is no universal job description. According to MIT, a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) oversees the environmental impact of a company or organisation and helps ensure the business meets relevant sustainability standards. The role can involve setting sustainability priorities, coordinating targets, overseeing reporting, assessing ESG-related risks, engaging stakeholders and helping different parts of the company translate sustainability commitments into operational decisions.

Deloitte and the Institute of International Finance have described the evolving CSO as a "sense-maker in chief", responsible for interpreting changes in the external sustainability environment and understanding their strategic implications for the organisation.

That description may explain the role better than any conventional corporate title. A CSO is not simply expected to know about carbon emissions. They may need to understand regulation, investor expectations, procurement, supply chains, technology, reporting standards, climate science and corporate strategy, while persuading completely different departments to act on the same agenda.

In many companies, sustainability cannot be delivered by the sustainability department alone.

Procurement chooses suppliers. Finance determines where capital goes. Operations shape resource consumption. Product teams determine what gets designed. Marketing decides what gets claimed publicly. Human resources influences culture and incentives. The CSO may therefore own the agenda without directly controlling many of the decisions required to deliver it. That makes influence as important as expertise.

Reporting turned sustainability into a management problem

Another reason for the rise of the CSO is comparatively simple: companies are increasingly expected to prove what they say. Sustainability is becoming more data-intensive. International reporting frameworks have developed, investors expect comparable information, and regulations have brought sustainability information closer to traditional corporate reporting.

In Europe, for example, companies within the scope of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive are required to report information about sustainability-related risks and opportunities as well as their impacts on people and the environment. The European Commission has continued revising and simplifying these standards, including changes adopted in July 2026 designed to reduce reporting burdens while maintaining sustainability disclosures.

The details of regulation will continue to evolve. The larger transformation is harder to reverse. Once sustainability information becomes something a business must measure, govern, verify and explain, it stops being only a communications exercise. It becomes a management system. And management systems need ownership.

The role has moved closer to the centre of business

More recent research suggests that sustainability leadership has continued to become institutionalised.

The Forbes Research 2025 State of Sustainability Survey, based on more than 1,100 executives at companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue, reported that 79% of participating organisations had a Chief Sustainability Officer or an equivalent sustainability role. Among the CSOs surveyed, 96% reported directly to the CEO or board of directors, while 76% said sustainability governance had become a core pillar of their organisation's long-term business strategy.

The methodologies of these studies differ, so the figures should not be treated as a direct historical comparison. Instead, they illustrate a clear direction of travel. Sustainability leadership has moved much closer to the centre of large-company decision-making.

But a CSO title does not guarantee authority

This may be the more important part of the story.

In Strategy&'s research, roughly half of CSOs were still positioned two or more hierarchy levels below the C-suite. The researchers described many of these positions as "CSO light", reflecting a limited sustainability mandate or insufficient influence over corporate transformation.

That distinction matters. A company can appoint a Chief Sustainability Officer and still leave the difficult decisions untouched. It can publish targets while capital allocation remains unchanged. It can announce environmental commitments while procurement continues to reward the cheapest short-term option. It can give sustainability a C-suite title without giving sustainability a C-suite voice. The presence of a CSO is therefore not evidence, by itself, that a business is becoming sustainable.

Authority matters. Budgets matter. Access to the board matters. And perhaps most importantly, whether sustainability influences actual commercial decisions matters.

Could the Chief Sustainability Officer eventually disappear?

There is an interesting paradox at the centre of the role. The more successful a CSO becomes, the less sustainability should need to exist as a separate organisational concern.

If finance understands climate risk, procurement understands sustainable sourcing, product teams understand circular design, operations understand emissions and boards understand sustainability-related strategy, then responsibility begins spreading throughout the organisation.

As sustainability becomes embedded in more business decisions, parts of the central CSO function could eventually become less necessary. That would not necessarily mean sustainability had lost importance. It might mean exactly the opposite. It had become normal business.

The Better Voice Point of View

The rise of the Chief Sustainability Officer tells us something bigger than the popularity of another executive title. It tells us that sustainability has crossed an organisational threshold. Businesses once asked sustainability teams to explain what the company was doing for the planet. Increasingly, they are asking them to explain what environmental and social change means for the company itself. That is a very different mandate.

The real measure of progress, however, will not be how many businesses appoint a CSO. It will be whether those leaders can influence investment, operations, products, supply chains and strategy. Perhaps the most successful Chief Sustainability Officer of the future will be the one who makes sustainability so deeply embedded in business that eventually, it no longer needs to be treated as a separate agenda at all.

References

Strategy& / PwC. (2022). Empowered Chief Sustainability Officers: The Key to Remaining Credible and Competitive.

MIT Professional Education. What Is a Chief Sustainability Officer?

Deloitte & Institute of International Finance. (2021). The Future of the Chief Sustainability Officer.

European Commission. (2026). Corporate Sustainability Reporting.

Forbes Research. (2025). 79% of Companies Now Have a Chief Sustainability Officer.