The Resilience Imperative

Welcome to our 2026 Special Edition of the S&P Global Sustainability Quarterly.

This year marks our fifth anniversary since launching S&P Global’s flagship sustainability research journal, and it comes at a pivotal moment for sustainability, climate and energy. 

Sustainability in 2026 is a story of resilience — how stakeholders balance urgent and sometimes competing priorities in the face of disruption, uncertainty and rapid change.

War in the Middle East, growing AI-driven power demands and increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events are dramatically reshaping the balancing act between energy security, energy affordability and energy sustainability. In 2026, it is increasingly clear that the three parts of this energy trilemma can work in tandem.

In the research that follows, we explore some of the most pressing questions arising from this complex environment:

• How is the global energy mix changing in 2026? S&P Global’s latest Energy and Climate Scenarios map pathways to resilience through this uncertain landscape.
• How well are companies prepared for the physical risks of climate change? S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment data shows that companies are increasingly creating climate adaptation plans to help build resilience — but progress on the comprehensiveness of these plans varies widely.
• How can sustainable agriculture practices help build resilient food systems? As physical climate risks and food security concerns grow, we look at rice and soybeans, two of the crops most critical to global food systems, to understand the costs of transitioning to sustainable agriculture practices. 
• How can emerging markets balance the risks and opportunities of the data center boom? Data center developers are looking to emerging markets to meet increasing energy capacity demands, but energy and water constraints pose risks to growth.
• How are global power generation assets responding to physical climate risk? Amid surging power demand from the AI-driven data center build-out, the resilience of critical energy infrastructure becomes essential.
• How robust is corporate governance of AI technology? AI is now firmly established as a cornerstone of future economic dynamism, but recent headlines about security breaches, community pushback on data centers and public misgivings about AI’s impact on the environment and society put this topic squarely in the spotlight. Our research suggests a governance gap. 

All these challenges have created major disruptions to the status quo, requiring companies and countries to reassess how they manage this delicate balancing act to create strategies that can endure. This is what we call the resilience imperative.

This Special Edition coincides with Climate Week NYC, Sept. 20-27. We have seen a growing network of cities hosting Climate Week events all around the globe this year, but New York remains the largest, convening an estimated 100,000-plus people across more than 1,000 events. Climate Week NYC also marks the start of a busy season of events that will put climate, nature and energy on the global stage, culminating in November with the UN’s Climate Change Conference of the Parties, COP31. Türkiye is scheduled to host the event, and we end our research journal on a forward-looking note by asking: What can the world learn from Türkiye’s energy transition strategy and its ties to both climate and strategic resilience objectives?

COP31 and other important events on the horizon will convene companies, scientists, policymakers and local communities from around the world to address some of the world’s most difficult questions. We hope the data, analysis and insights shared here can contribute to those discussions and solutions.