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The case for sustainability in a retreating world 17 Jun 2026

Over the past year, commentators have written obituaries of sustainability, declared environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dead as an investment principle, and delivered eulogies for net zero. From New York to London to Lagos, the dominant claim of 2025 – 2026 has been that "sustainability is dead" – the whole idea of it having collapsed under the weight of its own ambition and the hostility of renewed right-wing populism.

The sentiment did not emerge from nowhere. It has been fuelled by a sequence of events that, on the surface, appear to confirm it. On 20 January 2025, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement – the second such withdrawal in a decade. Within months, a procession of American banks – JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, among others – exited the UN-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), hastening its collapse by late last year. Canadian, Australian, Japanese, and several European institutions soon followed.

While the debate ensued across financial commentary platforms, a farmer in Katsina State, Nigeria, watched his millet dry in the soil during the last harvest season, the third year running. He does not know what ESG stands for, nor has he ever heard of the NZBA. He would be genuinely puzzled if you told him that American banks have been backing away from climate commitments. None of that news would change the colour of his sky or add moisture to his soil. The obituaries for sustainability are not wrong because they misread the politics. They are wrong because they confuse the death of virtue-signalling with the death of universal necessity.

What actually died in 2025 – 2026 was American participation in a particular diplomatic framework, not the global recognition that climate risk is real. Likewise, the NZBA collapsed, but the banks that abandoned it have mostly retained internal climate targets. JPMorgan still publishes a climate report. Goldman Sachs still talks about transition finance. What died was the public alliance, not the underlying calculation that climate-related risks affect loan books, supply chains, and long-term asset values. For the farmer in Katsina and most of the world, sustainability was never a fashion. It is and has always been a necessity. 

The laws of physics and economics do not change when voluntary sustainability alliances collapse. Countries with deep capital markets, diversified economies, and robust infrastructure can manage climate risks better than vulnerable ones that stand to lose most. In other words, countries that did the least to cause global warming are now being left with the largest share of the bill for adaptation and resilience efforts. This asymmetry is not removed by the retreat of Western banks and the US withdrawal from climate governance.

For developing countries across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America, sustainability was never a branding exercise. It was always, at its core, a question of survival and economic competitiveness. Africa, in particular, bears a disproportionate burden of climate consequences despite contributing the least to the historical accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions. The continent is home to some of the world's most climate-vulnerable populations. Droughts and floods are eroding agricultural output across the Sahel. Coastal cities from Dakar to Dar es Salaam face rising sea levels and intensifying storm surges. Pastoral communities from the Horn of Africa to the Sahel are caught in a deepening spiral of ecological stress and resource conflict. These are not future scenarios. They are present-day realities.

The economic toll compounds the human one. The African Development Bank estimates that climate change could reduce the continent's GDP by up to 15 per cent by 2050 if adaptation investments are not urgently scaled. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund's data shows that most sub-Saharan African economies remain trapped in a cycle of fiscal constraint and declining per capita income – precisely the conditions that make them most vulnerable and least able to self-finance the resilience they need. The global retreat from ambitious climate commitments does not make these numbers disappear. It simply makes the path to addressing them harder and more expensive.

Serious countries in this context are not waiting for a new United Nations consensus before investing in food security. They are not deferring grid reliability until Washington rediscovers climate politics. And they do not abandon industrial diversification strategies because a few American banks have left an alliance. The retreat of the West from performative sustainability actually creates space for a more honest, development-centred conversation about what the agenda should always have been: a framework for building productive, resilient, competitive economies in a world of finite resources and intensifying environmental risk.

Some African governments have already begun to inhabit this space with greater confidence. Rwanda's green growth strategy has consistently integrated climate resilience into its national planning architecture. Kenya has built one of the continent's most diversified renewable energy grids, driven not by international optics but by energy security imperatives. Morocco's investments in solar energy have repositioned it as a potential green industrial hub for Europe and West Africa alike. These are not countries waiting for the US to set the terms of the conversation.

Nigeria, Africa's largest economy, presents a more mixed but not unpromising picture. Last year, the federal government launched the Nigerian Climate Investment Platform, designed to mobilise up to $500 million for infrastructure, resilience, and adaptation projects. The government’s sovereign green bond programme has continued to demonstrate investor appetite, with the Series III issuance oversubscribed in a difficult economic environment. Plans for a broader $2 billion climate fund are still in view. These instruments are imperfect and underfunded relative to the scale of the need. But they are not the actions of a government that has concluded the agenda is irrelevant.

What is missing in Nigeria, and across much of the continent, is not commitment in principle but clarity of purpose and discipline in execution. The recurring flaw has been treating sustainability as a reputational exercise rather than a development strategy and a productivity agenda. A country that cannot guarantee reliable electricity cannot build competitive manufacturing. A nation whose smallholder farmers are displaced by floods and conflict cannot feed itself. A Nigeria where adaptation investments bypass the communities most exposed to climate risk will not build the resilience that investors and citizens will eventually demand.

There is a geopolitical dimension worth stressing. As the United States steps back from international climate governance, the space for African and other developing‑country voices to shape the post‑alliance architecture has widened. The Global South now has both the standing and the incentive to reframe sustainability on its own terms – less moral sermon, more economic logic; anchored in blended finance, technology transfer, and genuine co‑investment rather than conditional philanthropy. But that influence has to be built on credible domestic action – institutions that deliver, projects that endure, and outcomes that can be measured – not on declarations made at high-level conferences and quietly abandoned at home.

Sustainability may be losing its glamour in some Western capitals. For Africa, it must become the framework for economic survival, growth and development. The underlying pressures that gave rise to it have not disappeared. If anything, the retreat of top-down, alliance-driven approaches makes the case for building local institutions and domestic policy frameworks stronger, not weaker.

When global enthusiasm fades, serious countries build. They invest in systems that endure beyond donor cycles, in institutions that can withstand political turnover, and in policies that translate into measurable improvements in daily life. In Nigeria, sustainability must cease to be a slogan and become a national operating principle. Climate resilience, social progress, and economic advancement need to be embedded in national policies – the way budgets are written, infrastructure is financed, and communities are protected.

Martins Hile is a sustainability strategist and editorial consultant.