Guest post by: Amelia Zimmerman, Co-Founder at The Climate Hub

Over the past several years, I have worked with dozens of climate technology companies on their messaging and positioning. This messaging is always an attempt to match where corporate sustainability strategies are headed: What are sustainability teams worried about this year? What are they talking about, planning for, getting budget approvals for?

Sustainability teams can be unusually honest with vendors, so we are often privy to inside information about these conversations. In this way, the language that climate tech companies use in their positioning offers clues about where corporate sustainability strategies are headed and what may be prioritised in the near term.

Reflecting on the industry since that great line in the sand, the COVID pandemic, we can divide the last six years of climate tech messaging into three distinct phases.

Phase 1: Voluntary action

The phase that emerged during the pandemic was an appeal to voluntary climate action and corporate climate leadership. We saw many value statements along the lines of ‘Reach net zero!’ and ‘Hit your targets!’ — even an occasional ‘Do your part for the climate’. I call this ‘save the planet’ language, and it was everywhere during the pandemic and immediately afterward, as sustainability teams and the climate tech industry servicing them rode high on the wave of corporate net-zero announcements. There was widespread belief that voluntary action from the private sector would be the catalyst the world needed, putting us on track for a just-in-time net-zero transition.

Phase 2: Compliance

That period of optimism was brief. In just over a year, the European Commission proposed the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in April 2021, the IFRS Foundation announced the creation of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) at COP26 in November 2021, and the U.S. SEC proposed its climate disclosure rule in March 2022.

What felt like an obligation for corporates was a relief for climate tech. The industry believed that widespread compliance mandates would mean booming business for carbon accounting and reporting platforms, climate intelligence products, and carbon removal projects and technologies.

Though it took some time for the ramifications of these announcements to ripple through the corporate world, from about the end of 2022 onwards, we saw climate tech pivot to regulatory- and climate-focused language.

‘Compliance’ became the mot du jour. We saw value statements like ‘Get CSRD-ready’ and ‘Compliance made simple’. Entire campaigns were run and online ‘academies’ built to help customers determine their exposure and get started with complying.

Though the more naive optimism that had characterized the era of voluntary action was dwindling, the theory that public-sector regulation would push the entire private sector forward was an exciting one.

Anyone not swept away by the regulatory hype knew that the gap between disclosure mandates and meaningful action was as wide as it had ever been. It should have also been clear that the speed at which new disclosure mandates are announced matches the speed at which they can be revoked.

Phase 3: Adaptation

Enter the third phase. After witnessing the total annihilation of any climate ambition from the SEC (and now the US federal government at large) and the spectacular rollback of the CSRD, ‘compliance’ messaging is no longer the safe harbour it seemed to be for climate tech. Many large and mid-sized corporations, freed of reporting obligations, are cutting investments in sustainability and have dropped the ambitious rhetoric.

Now, in 2026, after a year or more of regulatory rollbacks and shrinking corporate enthusiasm, the language of climate tech companies is being edited again. Climate tech companies have explicitly told us that their new positioning will focus on risk management, resilience, and adaptation. The moral imperative of the voluntary days is gone, as is the urgency of compliance. Instead, sustainability is entering its ‘strictly business’ era.

What can we intuit from this new language? Firstly, we can see a noticeable shift from mitigation to adaptation. This signals a more conservative approach — an understanding that climate risk is real and isn’t going away, even if disclosure mandates are. Rather than capitalising on the promotional value of bold sustainability commitments, companies are channelling their energies into avoiding losses and protecting the bottom line. This makes sense in an era of economic and geopolitical uncertainty. It’s also what investors wanted to see from climate strategies all along.

The opportunity, as many see it, is that sustainability may finally get its seat at the big table, contributing to real financial and business-strategy discussions about risk and ROI. In particular, a focus on adaptation means that all levels of the corporate leadership hierarchy see climate risk as real, and as something more than just an exercise in reputation management.

The risk is that adaptation takes up all the oxygen in the room, leaving nothing for mitigation. Mitigation typically comprises commitments to collective climate action, such as reducing emissions in jurisdictions without a carbon tax, which may not directly benefit the company in the near-term. Without mitigation, we lose much of the private-sector ambition we saw during the early voluntary action era and even the compliance era. Of the two possible responses to climate change, adaptation is the more self-interested; it focused on protecting your own. Companies should absolutely invest in adaptation, but mitigation is equally necessary in the global scheme of things. To commit to mitigation is to acknowledge our shared responsibility for the global climate crisis.

Ignoring mitigation means we risk losing sustainability’s intrinsic value and moral obligation. A world focused on adaptation sees sustainability not as good in its own right but only as a means to a cost-saving end. In some ways, to give up on mitigation looks is to admit defeat. Gone is the ambition to address climate change at its source; instead, companies are simply resolving to deal with whatever eventuates.

This may be beneficial to operations in the near term, but it will surely be catastrophic to the world in the long term.