Innovation Watch: Is the CSO role a temp job?

A temporary function with a fundamental impact?

Last week’s World Sustainability Congress , Sustainability Leaders' flagship gathering, delivered inspiration and valuable insight for 300 sustainability professionals gathered in Amsterdam. But, beyond that, the event underscored what is required to deliver a more sustainable future.

Among the many highlights over two days, what really shone through for me was the need to accelerate cross-functionality within sustainability, and the ways in which businesses are working towards this.

Research from our Sustainability Planning Guide 2025 – exclusive to Sustainability Leaders members – shows that the average central sustainability team consists of seven people. This number is simply insufficient to support the breadth of work required to meet environmental and social targets, which is why leaders in this space are working towards baking sustainability into how the business operates.

“I hope my job doesn’t exist in the next 10 to 15 years,” Wineke Ploos van Amstel - Haagsma Ploos van Amstel, CSO of 普华永道 Netherlands, said during a panel on how the role is evolving. “By that time, sustainability should be part of how our different functions do their job, and I won’t be needed.”

It’s fascinating to think that sustainability will only be a temporary function within business, created to fundamentally change organisations’ direction of travel. Wineke’s view was shared by Schneider Electric – whose SVP of sustainability development, Xavier Denoly – told me that while the company has a relatively small central ESG team, it has thousands of employees in different functions working to improve sustainability in some way. This, he said, is the only way that the business can meet its goals.

Embedding sustainability in this way means identifying the most critical functions across the business and working together with them to incorporate sustainability into their roles. Indeed, our research shows that one of the principal responsibilities of CSOs and their teams is to engage stakeholders and introduce new ways of working. There are various tools that sustainability professionals use to make the business case to these stakeholders, from regulatory requirements to market differentiation and cost reductions.

The reality is there is still much work for many businesses to do to develop cross-functionality. But last week’s Congress showed that leaders in this space are committed to transforming how their companies do business and taking concrete steps to make cross-functional sustainability a reality.

It might just be that, as PWC’s Wineke said, the need for a chief sustainability officer won’t exist 15 years from now.