What's Holding Back Sustainable Business? The Challenges That Matter Most

Forbes

5 hours ago

The race to a sustainable future is on
In the next five years, an entire generation of 2030 sustainability goals will finally come due.
ESG reports and shareholder letters alike are soon going to face their biggest reckoning yet: will all the lofty promises translate into real progress?
Early signs suggest the answer will be sobering.
While ambition has soared, actual outcomes have continued to lag stubbornly behind. The reality is not that business leaders lack the will, rather, it's that the pathways to sustainability are far murkier, slower, and more difficult than anyone knew, or perhaps wanted to admit.
For many organizations, the past few years have revealed a brutal truth: good intentions alone are not enough.
Across industries, leaders are confronting the growing reality that sustainable business challenges run deeper than public promises and ESG reports might suggest.
Without the right goals, infrastructure, and incentives, sustainability efforts either stall or end up serving more as marketing than meaning.
The subtle forces working against sustainability are often invisible at first: misaligned incentives, fragile infrastructure, and underpriced risk.
It's time we look at them more clearly if we want to build companies that can genuinely claim to have moved the world forward.
The Importance of Aligning Goals With Real-World Sustainability Execution
At the heart of any real change is leadership that understands both the limits of today and the possibilities of tomorrow.
Kenn Ricci, founder of Flexjet, is an executive who strives to embody both while also running a business in one of the more challenging industries to be sustainable in, aviation.
As he explains it, Ricci's sustainability philosophy doesn't fall into the trap of setting goals that look good but collapse under operational scrutiny. Instead, he focuses on what could become possible with enough pressure and patience, and then works to build the conditions to achieve it, whether it is to further sustainability across his fleet of jets or simply managing the day-to-day operations at the back office.
'When you lead people, you can't just say, 'This is where we're going,'' Ricci explains.
'You have to build a path under their feet, step by step, that makes it believable and doable. Otherwise, it's just a dream. Worse yet, it might be just your dream, and never become theirs.'
At Flexjet, Ricci has consistently pursued operational improvements that align with larger sustainability aims, but without forcing the business to lurch into goals it cannot yet support. He argues that trust, not slogans, is what sustains long-term change.
'Sustainability isn't a checkbox even if some still treat it as such,' Ricci continues.
'It's an ongoing negotiation between ambition and reality. The leaders who win are the ones who never let go of either side.'
His pragmatic optimism stands in stark contrast to much of the corporate world, where sustainability targets are often designed by communications departments rather than operational leaders.
And herein lies the first reason why we haven't seen as much progress on ESG goals as we would have wanted. For far too many companies, sustainability has not been a metric that they have actively led with themselves.
Ricci puts it bluntly: 'Sustainability has to be a steering wheel, not a rearview mirror. If you're just reporting it, you're already too late. And the leaders have to be the ones with both hands on it, not just the sustainability or comms team.'
He's also keenly aware that true leadership requires putting real capital behind sustainable change, not just political or reputational capital, but operational resources that can withstand market cycles.
'Anyone can make promises when the sun is shining,' Ricci says. 'The question is what you stick to when the headwinds come. That's where real commitment shows.'
Why Sustainability Depends on Infrastructure: Lessons From Aviation and Energy
If setting the right goals is the first battle, building the right infrastructure is the war.
Kennedy Ricci, CEO of 4AIR and son of Kenn Ricci, has spent his career focusing precisely on this frontier. His company offers a certification program for aviation's environmental impact, not by promising zero emissions tomorrow, but by helping aviation stakeholders take verifiable, incremental steps today.
'A lot of people get paralyzed because they think the only good goal is net-zero tomorrow,' Kennedy Ricci explains. 'But if you can measure, track, and improve a little bit every day, that's how you actually get there.'
4AIR's approach doesn't pretend aviation can become clean overnight. Instead, it recognizes that building credibility today through offset programs, sustainable aviation fuels, and transparent reporting lays the groundwork for deeper decarbonization later.
The company's rise is testament to the power of pragmatic ambition anchored by real-world execution.
Kenn Ricci reflects on his son's growing success: 'Building an empire is one thing. Building a legacy that adapts to the future is something else entirely. I'm proud that Kennedy's taking on the harder challenge.'
He continues, "We've always believed that real leadership isn't about announcing goals, it's about laying bricks, patiently, and getting others to walk the road with you. 4AIR is doing just that."
Meanwhile, infrastructure challenges aren't limited to aviation.
The broader energy ecosystem faces its own existential bottlenecks that a handful of companies are doing their best to break open for the rest of us.
Deóis Ua Cearnaigh, CTO at Aeon Blue, a company specializing in energy transition technologies and sustainable fuel, emphasizes that sustainability isn't about simply adding more renewables into the grid. It's about fundamentally rethinking how the grid operates.
'It's wonderful that we have more wind and solar now,' says Cearnaigh. 'But you still need a spinning reserve for when the wind dies and the sun sets. If that reserve is fossil-powered, your emissions story isn't as clean as it looks.'
Their bigger point is this: you can't just add renewables on top of a fragile or misaligned system and expect magic. Without reengineering grid storage, reserve capacity, and distribution models, the true sustainability gains remain elusive​.
Cearnaigh believes that while renewables will dominate the next twenty years, nuclear energy will inevitably rise as the long-term backbone for sustainable baseload power.
'The zeitgeist today is wind, solar, and geothermal,' he reflects. 'But it does also seem that nuclear is one inevitable destination as well.'
Without grappling with these infrastructural realities, sustainability risks becoming a story we tell ourselves, not a future we actually live.
This mindset mirrors the thinking of Brett Bouchy, CEO of Freedom Forever, a company deadset on revolutionizing residential solar.
'The solar revolution doesn't happen because people feel good about the environment,' Bouchy points out. 'It happens when saving money on your electricity bill is cheaper and easier than sticking to the grid.'​
Bouchy's laser focus on efficiency is another reminder that for sustainability to scale, it must compete not just morally, but economically.
As Bouchy frames it, "We don't succeed by selling dreams. We succeed by selling better economics. And better economics drive real environmental change."
He's blunt about the reality check the green economy still needs:
"Nobody switches to solar because you guilt them into it. They switch because it's cheaper, easier, and works better. That's how you win hearts, wallets, and the future. And for that, you need the infrastructure to be in place, management to know what goals to drive towards, and an audience that is ready to trust what you are selling."
Bouchy also sees a deeper, long-term opportunity that transcends energy bills:
"Every home we upgrade is a client win, sure. But it's another node in a smarter, decentralized energy system. Sustainability isn't a utopian idea. It's the byproduct of millions of small, self-interested decisions that add up to a revolution."
If only revolutions were easy, which is exactly why stories like the above are worthy of retelling. Companies that rise up to the challenge of sustainability cannot be taken for granted, simply because of how rare they still remain.
That is particularly true for investments, which is the third missing pillar that is making 2030 feel further away than it should.
Why Long-Term Investment Is the Missing Piece in Sustainability Strategy
If setting the right goals is the first battle, and building the right infrastructure is the war, then making the right investments is the long campaign, often fought without fanfare, headlines, or even immediate returns.
And it's here where sustainable business faces one of its most persistent barriers: the cruel mismatch between moral urgency and financial immediacy.
Capital, by its nature, seeks returns.
It rewards speed, liquidity, and demonstrable gains. But sustainability often demands patience, long arcs of investment, and a willingness to fund seeds that may only bear fruit decades from now. It asks us to invest in forests we may never personally walk through.
Doing good, it turns out, is relatively easy. But doing good money, investments that compete at par with traditional, short-horizon opportunities, remains the real Everest to climb.
This doesn't mean that the private sector is full of villains twirling their overgrown mustaches.
It's simply important to recognize the system we've built and how it operates.
Until the returns of sustainability become structurally competitive, whether through market shifts, regulatory frameworks, or pure innovation, capital will continue to flow where it always has: toward the short, the sure, the profitable and the now.
The uncomfortable truth is that economics, not ethics, will be the final arbiter of the transition's speed, even if ethics gets to set the goal.
And yet, there are signs of things shifting.
Signs that smart leaders know: a world where customers demand sustainable products is fast approaching. A world where supply chains simply cannot function without green tech is not far behind.
Companies who wait until the economics are easy will find that the customers, the talent, and the licenses to operate have already gone elsewhere.
Which brings us to the handful of players quietly laying the groundwork.
ENEOS, Japan's largest energy group, offers one instructive case.
They are investing heavily in hydrogen transportation, synthetic fuels, battery recycling, and carbon capture, not because it makes perfect financial sense today, but because they know what survival will require tomorrow.
'There's no question the world needs cleaner energy,' an ENEOS representative explained in an interview. 'But if you exit fossil fuels too quickly, you leave markets in chaos, and ironically, you can make the transition slower, not faster.'
The trick, as they frame it, is not to burn the bridges while crossing the river. Real transition demands continuity, not collapse.
"You can't dismantle today's infrastructure before tomorrow's infrastructure is ready," added another ENEOS representative noted. 'The world is too interconnected for idealism alone. You need to build pathways people can actually walk.'
This recognition, that reality, not rhetoric, is the substrate upon which change must be built, permeates the thinking of those who are keen to see sustainability truly take root today.
Brett Bouchy, CEO of Freedom Forever, who is busy scaling residential solar across America, frames it in plain terms: 'You don't win by selling dreams. You win by selling better economics. If going solar isn't easier and cheaper than sticking with the grid, the revolution doesn't happen. Period.'
It's a bracing, necessary reminder that narratives alone don't move markets. Incentives do.
And this brings us full circle to the real challenge ahead: building an economy where sustainability isn't a premium add-on for the wealthy or the virtuous, it's the baseline expectation for everyone.
In that future, "green" won't be a differentiator. Instead, it will simply be the cost of doing business.
Those who invest today with that reality in mind, patient, practical, sometimes lonely, will be the ones best positioned when the forest finally blooms.
And those who don't may find themselves, too late, standing outside the gates of a new economy that has no room left for yesterday's math.