Ten years after the Paris Agreement, governments and companies have invested about $17 trillion in sustainable technologies — roughly $4 trillion above the pace expected a decade ago. Yet, the progress of the transition has been deeply uneven. This is the conclusion of Bain & Company’s fourth edition of the “Visionary CEO’s Guide to Sustainability,” which describes this new phase as an “era of divergence,” with markedly different speeds in investment, technology, corporate decisions, and consumer behavior.
Over the past decade, governments and private enterprises have invested about $17 trillion in sustainable technologies. Only in 2025 did investment reach a record $2.4 trillion, the highest value ever. Across these ten years, almost 90% of the capital invested was concentrated in just three areas: green energy, buildings, and mobility, where scale and falling costs created a cycle of greater adoption and new investment. Green energy alone absorbed 57% of total investment.
Yet areas such as agriculture, land use, and the manufacturing and materials industries received less than 10% of total investment, despite collectively accounting for about 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This contrast shows that the transition is advancing at different paces and that companies must be more discerning in how they identify growth opportunities and bet on value creation.
The technological evolution reveals the same pattern. According to Bain’s Green Technology Performance Index, which compares the actual adoption level in 2025 with the projections made ten years ago for 37 sustainable technologies, only three — solar energy, battery storage, and electric vehicles — clearly outperformed initial forecasts, while 29 underperformed and five progressed in line with expectations. In the underperforming cases, at least one of three critical factors did not evolve as expected: technology, consumer behavior, or policy and regulation.
The report also identifies a significant difference in the execution of decarbonization depending on the shareholder structure of companies. In a sample of more than 700 companies owned by private equity funds, privately held, and publicly listed that report to the CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, 53% of companies with a concentrated shareholder structure were in more advanced decarbonization stages in 2025, compared with 38% of listed companies with more dispersed capital. Across the analysed companies, the combined median intensity of emissions also reversed course: after rising 9% between 2021 and 2023, it fell 7% between 2023 and 2025.
“In technologies that fell short of forecasts, the vision was rarely wrong: one of three conditions failed — technology, regulation, or consumer adoption. Pulling back on investment would be a mistake, but spreading it too thin would also be. The competitive advantage comes from concentrating capital where there is conviction that these conditions will be in place sooner than the market expects.”, says Francisco Sepúlveda, a partner at Bain & Company.
Environmental concern grows among consumers and even the most skeptical adopt sustainable habits
Pela primeira vez em três anos, a preocupação ambiental dos consumidores aumentou. Este ano, 85% dos cerca de 7.500 consumidores inquiridos pela Bain nos Estados Unidos, Reino Unido, Itália, Brasil e Indonésia disseram estar preocupados com a sustentabilidade ambiental, face aos 79% do ano passado. Os fenómenos meteorológicos extremos, como ondas de calor, cheias e incêndios, continuam a ser o principal motivo de preocupação, sobretudo entre os mais jovens e nos mercados em crescimento.
The report also shows that consumers are incorporating more sustainable habits into their daily lives. 83% have already adopted at least three more sustainable habits, such as recycling, saving energy, or choosing to buy local products, up from 73% recorded in 2023. Even among consumers who say they do not worry about sustainability, almost half have already adopted at least three of these habits, compared with 35% in 2023. Bain characterizes this pattern as a version of the do-say gap: these choices are often motivated by economic reasons, health, personal preference or convenience, and not necessarily by a direct environmental concern.
However, Bain’s report notes that, on average, consumers say they are willing to pay 18% more for a product with sustainability benefits, a share that rises to 24% when the product also offers health benefits. More than half also say they buy more local products than before, especially to support local businesses and ensure greater availability of goods.
Consumers overestimate AI energy use by almost 30x
Bain also identifies a gap between perception and reality regarding AI’s energy impact. According to the report, executives estimate that within three years, AI will account for almost 16 times the share of global energy consumption than projected by Bain’s model, and consumers nearly 30 times higher. Yet this perception is already influencing behavior, as almost two-thirds of consumers say they have already taken some action due to their concerns about AI, including limiting the information they share, switching platforms, or stopping the use of certain tools.
In a survey of 400 executives, leaders estimate that AI will represent about 11% of global energy consumption within three years, while consumers point to 19%. Bain’s IntersectSM model projects a share of 0.7%.
Also among companies, the pace of adoption is uneven. Among organizations with greater maturity in AI and sustainability — the group Bain designates as “shapers” — 90% view AI as a major opportunity to accelerate goals in this area. Among less mature organizations, that figure dropped to 41%, compared with 57% recorded last year. Bain notes that this gap tends to widen as the more mature companies accumulate practical experience and more visible results.
The misalignment also extends to how sustainable AI is prioritized internally. Within the companies themselves, there is another divergence: business leaders place financial return first when evaluating investments in sustainable AI, while sustainability leads prioritize regulatory compliance and risk management — placing financial return only in fourth place.
Climate resilience gains prominence on corporate agendas
Recent extreme weather events underscore the importance of climate resilience for businesses. Losses from natural disasters are rising by 5% to 7% per year in real terms, and the gap between total losses and the portion covered by insurance remains sizable.
Bain emphasizes that climate disruption will not affect all companies in the same way and that as impacts intensify, better-prepared organizations can gain an advantage, with greater market share and stronger revenues.
An analysis of around 150,000 assets across 12 sectors shows that resilience can often be integrated at relatively low additional costs when it coincides with natural moments of investment, construction, or renewal of assets. These opportunities, however, do not arise at the same pace across sectors. In solar energy, they can arise already in the construction phase and recur more frequently. In industries with very high investment costs, such as steel and cement, asset renewal cycles can span 25 to 35 years, making every investment decision particularly important.
“The sustainable transition is not retreating, but it is not advancing at the same pace across sectors, technologies and companies either. As these differences widen, the ability to anticipate changes and strengthen resilience is likely to weight more heavily on companies’ competitiveness,” concludes Diogo Rebelo, Associate Partner at Bain.
