On the Forbes.com website, Ioannis Ioannou, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, delivered a thoughtful and balanced assessment of the current state of ESG. Here are some extracts:

• ESG may have become popular, but popularity is not the same as conviction. Some firms adopted the language because it was fashionable, because capital was flowing, or because it provided cover during a reputational crisis. Now that the context has shifted, they are quietly backing away. But others—the ones who built sustainability into operations, governance, and strategy—are staying the course. For them, this moment is not comfortable. But it is clarifying.
• Still, it would be a mistake to treat this as merely a corporate issue. Part of the backlash stems from a failure to build broader legitimacy. For years, the sustainability conversation took place among regulators, investors, and executives. But in doing so, we left out too many others. Workers, consumers, small business owners—many felt they were watching from the outside. The conversation became technocratic, filled with acronyms and abstraction. Net-zero by 2050, Scope 3 emissions, transition taxonomies. These terms may be essential, but they do not inspire. And when sustainability is framed as an elite project, it becomes easier for opponents to cast it as a threat to jobs, freedom, or even national identity.
• We also underestimated the strength and sophistication of the counter-narrative. Fossil fuel interests and political operatives didn’t just reject ESG—they reframed it. As a cultural imposition. As economic sabotage. As a political ideology. And while they were telling that story—consistently, loudly, emotionally—we were speaking predominantly in compliance language. We made it too easy for disinformation to take hold. We didn’t build the coalitions we needed. And we waited way too long to respond.

Ioannou concludes: “What’s needed is a deeper recalibration. A shift away from ESG as a branding exercise, and toward ESG as a form of strategic foresight. A way to anticipate disruptions, manage transition risk, and allocate resources for long-term resilience. That means tying sustainability more closely and convincingly to core business outcomes. To innovation, efficiency, talent, and market relevance. It also means being clearer about trade-offs. Not every initiative will yield immediate returns. Not every audience will be persuaded. But leadership under pressure is still leadership.”

That article’s almost a year old now, and there’s evidence that the recalibration he refers to is in progress. Still, it was a little startling to see ISSB Chair Emmanuel Faber quoted on a recent podcast as follows:

• To those who say that ESG is over and it’s all about geopolitics now, I’d say, I’d agree. We’ve never been about ESG.

He noted, “ISSB Standards have been created to end ESG as an alphabet soup of ratings, numbers and disclosures that are voluntary and unverifiable.” That’s long been part of the standard ISSB messaging, except that the references to ESG seem lately to have become far more pejorative than they used to be. The contention that Faber and the ISSB have “never been about ESG” can easily be disproved; for example, when interviewed by the Economist in 2022, he said very plainly: “Putting climate and other ESG topics in the strategic planning cycles of companies is the way forward”; interviewed by Time in 2021, he said: “Employees collectives are asking questions about ESG, big time. More and more, the war for talent is there for the larger companies. So many of the highly educated talents don’t want to work for these large companies. More and more employers are asking the new generation what they want: Meaning, they want impact.”

And then, the assertion of it being “all about geopolitics” seems strained at best. He says:

• Companies have stopped showcasing everything good they do for the world and are thinking really hard about the risks and opportunities they have, in value chains and over time horizons.
• Geopolitics does one thing: it accelerates and aggravates those risks and opportunities. It cuts value chains and strategic options or opens others.

But in the context of such a meaninglessly broad statement, Faber seems to be using “geopolitics” synonymously with, basically, everything. Presumably any reputable company would claim to have always thought “really hard” about the relevant risks and opportunities, although of course the components of that hard thinking evolve to reflect changing circumstances. And if ESG is over, how come two of the four items on the ISSB workplan at the time of writing relate to human capital and to biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystems services, both of which could hardly be more ESG-aligned. And if it’s all about geopolitics, how come a search of ifrs.org at the time of writing turns up only three measly uses of the term, all cautionary if not fearful in nature, for example:

• The intersection of geopolitics and financial reporting is increasingly complex. For instance, British and European companies with subsidiaries in the US face challenges due to differing legal frameworks around sustainability reporting. In the UK and Europe, companies are required to disclose diversity metrics, while in the US, such disclosures can be contentious, potentially leading to cuts in funding.

Of course Faber, like any leader, should adjust his messaging as required, and we’ve previously noted the IFRS Foundation’s potential vulnerability on this front. But even so, for the Chair of the ISSB to join in with the newly-trendy trashing of ESG seems tasteless and unseemly…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.