Uber had already lost its London operating license once, in 2017. The company was running on borrowed trust with the city’s regulators. A second misstep — or even a publicly adversarial response to the mayor’s clean air agenda — could have ended Uber’s presence in one of its most strategically visible global markets. This was not a policy question. It was an existential one.

"One of our core beliefs is that in order to effect systematic change at scale, you actually need economic incentives to drive behavior. People trying to do the right thing can act as a catalyst for activity, but ultimately, it runs out of steam unless you have an economic flywheel. This is not getting 1,000 vehicles over to EV, it's not getting 2,000, it's hundreds of thousands of vehicles."

— Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber

The Turning Point

Uber’s instinct, historically, had been to fight policies that raised the cost of rides. Khosrowshahi himself acknowledged that congestion pricing, on first reading, violated one of the company’s core values around affordability. The decision to lean in rather than push back was neither obvious nor automatic.

Susan Hooper had joined Uber’s London board as an independent non-executive director in 2018, part of a deliberate effort to rebuild governance credibility after the license loss. She was in the room, at board level, when the ULEZ rules landed — and when the leadership team made the call to treat the regulatory pressure as a strategic opening rather than a threat to be neutralized.

What the Exec Team & Board Did

The structural innovation that made everything else possible was the London Clean Air Fee: a 3% surcharge on every Uber ride, credited directly to individual driver accounts and redeemable toward EV purchase or lease. It was funded by riders, administered by Uber, and designed to give drivers a path to EV ownership without taking on personal debt. Over three years, it raised £145 million.

But the unglamorous work mattered as much as the financial mechanism. Chris Hook, Uber’s global sustainability strategy lead, and the operations team spent significant time sitting with drivers and simply asking why they hadn’t switched. What came back wasn’t resistance — it was confusion and fear. Drivers didn’t know which EV to buy. They couldn’t evaluate charging specs. And charging anxiety was visceral: for a driver whose time is income, spending 30 to 45 minutes at a charger instead of two minutes at a fuel pump was not an inconvenience, it was a direct threat to earnings. The EV Hub built in response wasn’t sophisticated technology. It was basic, trusted information placed inside an app drivers were already using. A charging map followed — not because the data didn’t exist elsewhere, but because drivers weren’t opening Google Maps. The battery-aware matching feature, which automatically routed shorter trips to low-battery drivers, removed the fear of being stranded mid-shift.

When corporate communication hit its limits, Uber turned to peer trust. The EV Ambassador program deployed experienced EV drivers to talk to other drivers. Hook was direct about what this revealed: the ambassadors were better spokespeople than Uber’s management team. The EV Mentor program formalized it further, matching new EV drivers with veterans. The implicit admission was important — Uber acknowledged it could not close the knowledge gap from the top down. Trust had to travel laterally.

The board alignment was harder than it looked from the outside. The $800 million global commitment Uber eventually announced in 2020 was, by COO Andrew Macdonald’s own account, more art than science. There was no model that made it ROI-positive on any reasonable horizon. The full cost of global electrification, he acknowledged, would run to tens of billions. The condition the board set was direct: deliver profitability, and the investment would follow. The sustainability commitment and the financial turnaround were explicitly linked. Hooper’s presence as an independent voice on the London board — accountable to regulators as much as to shareholders — was part of what gave that commitment institutional credibility with the city.

The Outcome

London and Amsterdam reached 40% of miles driven electrically by end of 2025, up from near zero. The other five European focus cities reached roughly 25%. The U.S. lagged further behind. Then, in late 2025, the federal government eliminated EV subsidies entirely, widening the cost gap that Uber had spent years closing. The 2030 target for fully electric rides in the U.S. and Canada remains on the books. The path to it just became harder.

The strategic response to that setback was telling. Rather than defending the original timeline, Uber restructured its U.S. incentive program around targeted $4,000 driver grants in states still offering complementary subsidies. The question being asked internally was not whether the goal remained valid, but what Uber could uniquely do, with constrained resources, to keep the behavior moving. There was no triumphalism in it.

The bet that looked bold in 2019 looks different now — not because it succeeded cleanly, but because the people who made it knew it wouldn’t, and made it anyway.

Takeaways

1. Treat regulatory pressure as a strategic forcing function, not a communications problem. Uber’s instinct was to resist policies that raised ride costs. The London board chose a different frame: the regulation was an invitation to rebuild trust with the city on terms that created long-term competitive advantage. The question worth asking in your own boardroom is not how to respond to a policy, but what the policy is actually making possible.
   

2. Design financial mechanisms that move behavior, not just sentiment. The Clean Air Fee worked because it credited individual driver accounts directly, creating a tangible, personal stake in the transition. Broad sustainability funds rarely move individuals. Structures that make the benefit concrete and attributable to specific people do.
   

3. Go where the confusion actually lives before building the solution. Uber’s product team expected driver resistance to EVs. What they found instead was basic informational confusion — about which vehicle to buy, how charging worked, what the real costs were. The EV Hub was not a sophisticated product. It was the right information in the right place. Diagnosis before design is not a principle boards often enforce; it should be.
   

4. Let trust travel laterally. The EV Ambassador program outperformed corporate messaging because drivers trusted other drivers more than they trusted Uber. Boards overseeing large-scale behavior change should ask whether the change agents in their strategy are the right messengers — and whether the answer is actually their own people.
   

5. Link the sustainability commitment to the financial mandate explicitly. The Uber board did not approve the $800 million commitment on environmental grounds alone. It approved it as part of a package: Khosrowshahi would deliver profitability, and the board would back the investment. Sustainability commitments that float free of financial discipline are vulnerable. Those anchored to a clear business condition are harder to reverse.
   

6. Name what you do not know before the board asks. Macdonald’s admission that the $800 million figure was more art than science, and that full electrification would cost tens of billions, was made internally before the commitment was announced. Boards that surface the uncertainty in a proposal build more durable alignment than those that present false precision. The question is not whether the numbers are complete. It is whether the belief underlying them is sound.

Susan Hooper served as an independent non-executive director on Uber’s London board from 2018, playing a governance role during the period in which Uber’s Clean Air strategy was conceived and launched. Susan is also co-founder and board director for Chapter Zero. Chris Hook served as Uber’s Global Sustainability Strategy and Analytics Lead, leading the operational and commercial design of the electrification programs described in this story. Both are members of Chapter Zero and contributors within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Stories like this one are the foundation of what the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability teaches: that climate leadership is, at its core, a business decision. Explore programs designed for executives and board directors at our website: Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability External Education & Mobilization.

Solera sits at the center of a fragmented industry — car manufacturers, insurers, aftermarket service providers, recyclers, dealerships, logistics operators — each holding a piece of the picture, none of them talking to each other in any systematic way. Liao had spent years watching these sectors operate in parallel, each managing their own sustainability constraints in isolation, each running into the same walls. She saw that the data Solera held could reveal something none of them could see alone: where the real economic value in circularity was sitting, unclaimed.

“We really took a step back and said — is this a make-you-feel-good thing, or is there actual real business in it? And we’ve done a real focused job turning sustainability into real business, and created a lot of successes. That became the foundation.”

— Jing Liao, CAO, Solera; General Partner, Vista Equity Partners

The Turning Point

Liao’s realization was not that sustainability was under political threat — that was obvious to everyone in the room. Her realization was that arguing about the political environment was a waste of the time that first movers would use to build advantage. Her framing: wherever you go, you get headwinds. The question is how to build tailwinds. She had watched Ford’s CEO publicly wish he had started the EV transition earlier. She did not want to be in that position.

The Global Circularity Consortium was her answer — not as a values statement, but as an infrastructure for cross-industry business creation. Launched in 2024, the GCC brought together insurers, OEMs, recyclers, governments, and academic institutions that had never shared a table. The premise was that Solera’s data could surface economic opportunities that none of these players could find individually, and that a consortium structure could convert those opportunities into shared commercial commitments.

What the Exec Team & Board Did

The first moves were concrete and deliberately small. Liao tested the model in North America first — with the state of Massachusetts, the Automotive Recyclers Association, and in Canada with insurers and repair networks. That gave the GCC a strong proof of concept before expanding into new geographies.

One early experiment illustrated the economic logic directly. Working with a paint producer in the automotive repair sector, the GCC ran a controlled trial on sustainable paint formulations. The result: lower cost and shorter job completion time. A product that the industry had assumed would be more expensive turned out to be more valuable. That single data point — presented at the GCC’s European launch in London — shifted the conversation in the room from skepticism to interest faster than any policy argument could have.

Liao also made a deliberate decision to anchor the GCC’s credibility in academic validation. Research partnerships with MIT and Stanford MBA students on GCC’s go-to-market strategy gave the consortium’s findings external legitimacy. The Stanford Leadership Experience (formerly called Championing Sustainable Growth from the Boardroom) had given Liao a network she used immediately: she brought board members from her cohort into executive roundtables, connected CEOs across previously siloed industries, and used those connections to generate new GCC members and launch events. The framework she had encountered in the Stanford classroom — connecting every necessary party to move faster together — became the operating model for GCC itself.

She launched the GCC in Asia, convening a roundtable in Hong Kong that included a Stanford program alumna now serving on a major industry board, a representative from the Hong Kong government, and the CFO of the world’s largest salvage parts company — people from entirely different industries who, as Liao put it, had never had a reason to be in the same room. That meeting produced not goodwill but deals. Within a year of launching, LATAM operators were reaching out through social media asking Liao to bring GCC to Brazil, and Massachusetts came back with additional requests.

The Outcome

The GCC is early, and Liao says so without hedging. What it has produced so far is momentum and inbound demand, not a completed transformation of the transportation industry. The model was proven in North America first, then extended across APAC and Europe — a sequencing that generated significant global attention. China and LATAM represent the next wave of expansion opportunities, with inbound demand from both. And the GCC’s partner base is growing: Waymo and a major charge and battery provider have both recently joined as members, a signal that the consortium is becoming a destination for the companies shaping what transportation infrastructure looks like next.

What has not yet been resolved is whether the consortium model scales beyond the transportation sector, and whether the commercial commitments it generates compound over time or remain episodic. Liao is direct about the limiting factor: the CSO function, even when it has the right network and the right data, still has to fight for recognition as a P&L contributor inside organizations that measure it differently. Her answer to that is not to change the measurement first — it is to create enough visible success that the measurement argument becomes hard to make.

In a room full of headwinds, Liao’s bet was that the people who built the most tailwinds — not the people who waited for the wind to change — would own the next decade of the industry.

Takeaways

1. Reframe the question before you design the solution. Liao did not ask how to defend sustainability against political headwinds. She asked whether there was real economic value in circularity that the industry had not yet captured. That reframe — from compliance and values to business opportunity — changed what she built. Boards facing sustainability retreats should ask the same question before deciding whether to hold, reduce, or restructure their commitments.

2. Use your data to see what your partners cannot see individually. Solera’s 5 petabytes of transportation activity data gave Liao a system-level view that no single insurer, OEM, or recycler could construct alone. The GCC was built on that asymmetry. Boards should ask what data their organizations hold that, if shared selectively across a cross-industry coalition, could surface economic opportunities invisible to each party individually.

3. Build cross-industry coalitions around specific commercial experiments, not general principles. The GCC’s early credibility came from a paint trial that produced lower cost and faster job completion — a concrete result that answered the “is this more expensive?” objection in the room. Sustainability coalitions that lead with values get polite interest. Those that lead with measurable commercial results get commitment.

4. Treat peer networks as operating infrastructure, not social capital. Liao used contacts from the Stanford Board Sustainability Program to populate GCC launch events with board-level credibility, connect CEOs across industries, and accelerate new market entries. The network was not a benefit of the program — it became a direct input to the consortium’s commercial model. Boards should ask whether their sustainability leaders have the external networks required to build coalitions at the speed the moment demands.

5. Create tailwinds through visible success, then let others carry the story. Liao’s model for overcoming organizational resistance is not persuasion from the top — it is elevation of internal and external success stories until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore. She identifies people who have already done something that works, gives them a platform, and lets peer proof do what executive advocacy cannot. Boards can apply the same logic: find the proof points inside the organization, and build outward from there.

6. Move before the conditions are comfortable. Liao held a climate tech conference in Washington, DC in 2024 — when colleagues told her the timing was wrong — and generated commercial outcomes from it. She proved the GCC model in North America before taking it global, building proof of concept with the state of Massachusetts, the Automotive Recyclers Association, and Canadian insurers before launching across APAC and Europe. The organizations she watches most closely are the ones that started late and now wish they hadn’t. First-mover advantage in cross-industry sustainability infrastructure is real, and the window for it does not wait for political consensus.

Jing Liao is Chief Administration Officer at Solera and General Partner at Vista Equity Partners, where she focuses on enterprise software and the transformation of the global transportation sector. She is the founder of the Global Circularity Consortium and a graduate of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s flagship executive program called the Stanford Leadership Experience (formerly Championing Sustainable Growth from the Boardroom), second cohort.

Stories like this one are the foundation of what the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability teaches: that climate leadership is, at its core, a business decision. Explore programs designed for executives and board directors at our website: Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability External Education & Mobilization.

As the organisation responsible for procuring goods and services on behalf of the NHS — from everyday consumables such as toothpaste and toilet roll to complex equipment like MRI scanners and operating theatre systems — NHS Supply Chain plays a critical role in influencing sustainability outcomes across the wider health system. This activity represents billions of pounds in annual spend, with the majority of environmental impact sitting within the supply chain.

In this context, there is value in evolving metrics to reflect both tangible actions and system-wide impact. While targeted initiatives remain important, embedding sustainability within procurement offers a more strategic way to drive meaningful, long-term change at scale.

"Sometimes the best way is just to get the two people in the room — the person who's actually having to go generate this data and has the story to tell, and the person who wants the assurance around it — together to make sure we can tell the story and get that information across accurately and clearly."

— Heidi Barnard, Head of Sustainability, NHS Supply Chain

The Turning Point

Heidi Barnard joined NHS Supply Chain as Head of Sustainability and quicky identified that the wrong thing was being measured. The turning point was not a single launch moment, but the point at which successive iterations of the KPI converged into a consistent and scalable way of measuring sustainability across all frameworks. Rather than building in isolation, the KPI evolved year-on-year as capability and data matured. This also meant working with the board to build confidence in a metric whose full impact would only emerge over time, rather than within a single reporting cycle.

She also identified the design constraint that would shape everything that followed: if the definition of a sustainability opportunity was too narrow, it would exclude half the product base. The language that emerged — “opportunities onto frameworks” — was deliberately broad enough to flex across categories that share almost nothing in common, from commoditised dressings and gloves to capital diagnostics equipment and facilities maintenance contracts.

What the Exec Team & Board Did

Barnard did not move directly to a fixed KPI design. Instead, she evolved the KPI over time while embedding sustainability into the procurement process and strengthening the supporting data and capability, alongside running carbon literacy training across category teams.The carbon literacy programme became the connective tissue. Teams trained together, and the afternoon of each workshop focused specifically on what opportunity looks like within individual roles and categories — with real examples drawn from across the healthcare sector covering every product type and circularity model relevant to their work.

On the board side, Barnard ran masterclasses to establish a shared baseline before presenting any KPI options. Board members held significantly different views of where the organisation actually sat on sustainability maturity — some wanted to move faster than the infrastructure could support, others questioned the level of ambition. The masterclasses were not designed to persuade the board toward a predetermined answer. They were designed to get everyone to the same starting point. Multiple KPI options were then presented, with a clear recommendation but genuine alternatives, giving board members real input rather than a rubber stamp exercise.

The real turning point came through a planned engagement with the assurance lead and the chair of the performance committee. There was a shared recognition that the existing reporting format — set by a third-party performance team — wasn’t enabling clear oversight or assurance. By addressing this directly, the reporting approach was redesigned to better reflect both the data and the and the underlying narrative. The shift wasn’t about bypassing governance, but about ensuring it was working as intended.

From a Board perspective, this shift was not immediate. When Devyani Vaishampayan joined the board, ESG was not yet a regular feature of board-level discussion or oversight. Through a series of one-to-one conversations with the Chair, fellow board members and the CEO, a shared understanding emerged of both the importance of ESG and the structural challenges involved. NHS Supply Chain operates across a highly complex system — serving around 200 NHS trusts with varying levels of sustainability maturity, working with approximately 1,200 global suppliers with diverse ESG practices, and operating within constraints shaped by government policy.

A key early step was to embed ESG into the remit of the Board Performance Committee, creating a formal mechanism for the development and ongoing review of sustainability KPIs. From a non-executive perspective, this regular scrutiny of metrics has played an important role in strengthening oversight and driving progress.

The board also supported closer alignment between sustainability and commercial decision-making, encouraging organisational changes to better integrate ESG considerations into the commercial function. Alongside this, participation in external forums such as Chapter Zero helped build broader board-level awareness of the strategic nature of climate and sustainability, reinforcing the need for sustained, system-level change.

The Outcome

The KPI is live and generating data — and the data has already produced one significant surprise. A substantial volume of sustainable opportunities already existed on NHS Supply Chain’s frameworks. Nobody knew about them. Sustainable options were buried inside frameworks containing thousands of product lines, with no clear signposting to differentiate them. The problem was not supply. It was communication.

The first year’s results also revealed a wide distribution: roughly 48% of frameworks had no sustainability opportunities at all, while the 52% that did sometimes carried thousands of qualifying product lines. That finding directly shaped the following year’s KPI. The first year measured opportunities per framework. The second year shifted to ensuring every framework has at least one. The metric is iterating in response to what the data actually reveals.

The plastic cups are still gone — but the work that replaced them is harder to photograph and takes years to show up in a graph, which is precisely why it matters more.

Takeaways

1. Start by measuring what is material, not what is visible. Easily counted metrics can create a sense of progress without materially affecting your organisation’s footprint. In procurement-led organisations, the most significant impacts often sit in Scope 3. The challenge is not just identifying these areas, but developing metrics that can meaningfully capture them over time.

2. Develop measurement alongside organisational capability. Effective sustainability KPIs are rarely fully formed at the outset. In practice, they evolve alongside improvements in data, systems and organisational understanding. Iterating the metric over time allows it to become more robust and meaningful, rather than attempting to define a perfect measure upfront.

3. Design the metric to fit the breadth of the organisation, not the narrowness of the obvious answer. In complex organisations, a narrow definition risks excluding significant areas of activity. Metrics need to flex across very different categories, ensuring they capture meaningful opportunities without being constrained by the easiest areas to measure.

4. Get board members to the same starting point before presenting options. Board-level discussions are more effective when there is alignment on the organisation’s current maturity and capability. Building that shared understanding upfront enables more productive conversations about ambition and prioritisation.

5. Ensure accountability is matched with visibility and access to data. Assigning accountability at senior levels is important, but effectiveness depends on how closely those individuals are connected to the underlying data and activity. Metrics are more likely to drive change when ownership, insight and operational reality are aligned.

6. Continuously refine reporting to support effective assurance. Reporting formats should evolve to reflect what decision-makers need to see. Regularly reviewing whether reports provide clear, meaningful insight — and adjusting them where needed — helps ensure governance processes remain effective and aligned with their purpose.

7. Treat sustainability metrics as something to evolve, not fix. Early versions of a KPI are unlikely to capture the full complexity of the system. Allowing space to test, learn and refine over multiple cycles leads to a more credible and useful measure over time.

Heidi Barnard is Head of Sustainability at NHS Supply Chain, the organisation responsible for procuring goods and services on behalf of the NHS across the United Kingdom. Devyani Vaishampayan is a non-executive director with NHS Supply Chain and a Fellow of Chapter Zero.

Stories like this one are the foundation of what the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability teaches: that climate leadership is, at its core, a business decision. Explore programs designed for executives and board directors at our website: Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability External Education & Mobilization.

Climate Director Carl Moxley was looking for a solution to this challenge that was financially credible, ecologically sound, and reputationally strong. That’s how Pudding Wood came about: this wasn’t just a carbon credit bought at the lowest available price from a potentially unreliable or inscrutable project, but a long-term commitment to L&G’s goals, aligned with the company’s ethos and purpose - “Investing for the long term. Our futures depend on it.”

“This isn’t a race to the bottom of trying to create a carbon credit as cheaply as possible. This is a genuine, reputationally strong and long-term UK nature ambition that we want to bring to life with the right people.”

— Carl Moxley, Group Climate Director, Legal & General

The Turning Point

L&G was holding a 155-hectare site next to Gatwick Airport — Pudding Wood — as a strategic land asset. Carl saw the potential in this land and an alternative to selling it: using the property for nature restoration by generating high-integrity carbon credits aligned with the UK carbon market’s verification framework.

The concept was relatively straightforward but the execution would involve multiple steps and challenges. A special purpose vehicle was established to manage the overall cashflows and ownership, the site design and agreeing all accounting and tax treatment. Next came ecological baselining, initiating and securing grants, third-party tender processes for the long-term management of the site and the important community consultation with local residents.

These important steps needed to be taken before any progress on the ground but L&G team members’ passion, expertise and commitment meant that only twelve months elapsed between the agreement of the strategic vision and the first shovel going into the ground.

What the Board Did

Carl developed the concept and took a formal paper to the relevant Committee, laying out the problem, the options, and the financial modeling that made the project viable. Once approved, L&G commissioned specialists including ecologists, foresters, biodiversity experts, and health and safety advisors to bring this vision to life. Community engagement was key, ensuring that concerns were listened to and discussed including with the tenant farmer who had been managing the land.

Nilufer Kheraj, who sits on L&G’s main board with specific responsibility for climate and nature, played a different but complementary role. The project fell below the financial threshold that would ordinarily require full board sign-off. Carl and Nilufer regularly discussed the project, and she ensured other non-executive directors understood its existence and significance.

The Outcome

By the end of March 2026, around 100,000 trees had been planted at Pudding Wood: a milestone marked with a small ceremony. The Forestry Commission provided grants post-project, which Carl treats as an early credibility signal from an independent authority. The first verified carbon credits are expected over the next five or more years, with ecological monitoring in place to track species diversity across the site over time.

This project is included in L&G’s Climate and Nature report, giving it wider visibility, including to shareholders.

One outcome neither Carl nor Nilufer anticipated: the sheer level of interest that was generated among L&G’s employees. Around 10% have expressed a desire to undertake volunteering on the site. Carl’s response was unambiguous: “I did not expect that.”

The trees at Pudding Wood will take decades to mature — which is, precisely, the point. It all goes to the heart of L&G’s purpose.

Takeaways

1. Review your transition plan targets with a mindset of solutions, not problems.

   Reviewing with a long-term mindset and recognising L&G could not reach its 2030 targets through its own actions alone, he outlined the options available to ensure sufficient visibility was given to this issue. This was a challenge to all involved as it was new and innovative. His team were instrumental in driving the solution and executing this ambitious vision. Trust in those involved has resulted in an outcome that L&G are proud of.

2. Surface below-threshold decisions at board level where the impact is greater than just financial..

   Pudding Wood did not require full board approval. Nilufer brought it to the board’s attention regardless, because its strategic and reputational significance exceeded its financial footprint. Directors should actively look for decisions that fall outside formal sign-off thresholds but carry disproportionate exposure — or disproportionate opportunity.

3. Commission the science; do not try to own it.

   Carl did not build an internal ecology team. He ran tender processes and hired specialists in wildlife, biodiversity, forestry, and health and safety for the project, complementing existing in-house skills and building on existing market connections to find the best specialists. For boards overseeing sustainability initiatives in domains outside their core expertise, third-party credibility is an asset — not an admission of weakness.

4. Engage communities before they fill the gap with assumptions.

   Local resident engagement is key. Narratives were formed in local communities as to what L&G wanted to achieve with the Pudding Wood site, which were not always afforestation and habitat creation. This had scope to generate resistance before any consultation began. Boards overseeing land use, infrastructure, or community-facing projects should insist on early, direct communication about intent — not just about outcome.

5. Use small projects to build the evidence base for large ones.

   Carl is explicit that Pudding Wood is a proof of concept. If it succeeds, L&G will have the operational track record and verified carbon data to potentially deploy pension capital into nature-based assets at scale. This project and concept has already attracted attention from some of L&G’s corporate relationships. Boards should think about which small, contained initiatives can function as structured pilots for strategies that would otherwise be too large to test.

6. Track the signals your financial model cannot predict.

   Volunteering requests from the workforce were not in any projection, nor can a tangible financial impact be calculated. Boards evaluating sustainability investments should build in mechanisms to capture reputational and cultural returns that sit outside the original business case — because those returns may ultimately prove more durable than the carbon credits themselves.

More details on this story at L&G’s website: https://group.legalandgeneral.com/en/sustainability/pudding-wood

Carl Moxley is the Group Climate Director at Legal & General, responsible for the organisation’s climate and nature strategy, transition plan, and associated risk management. Nilufer Kheraj serves on the main board of Legal & General with specific responsibility for climate and nature, acting as the bridge between executive and non-executive governance on these issues. Both are affiliated with Chapter Zero, the network for climate-engaged board directors that forms part of the context for this story.

Stories like this one are the foundation of what the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability teaches: that climate leadership is, at its core, a business decision. Explore programs designed for executives and board directors at our website: Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability External Education & Mobilization.

A carbon project covering nearly 10% of Kenya’s landmass. Tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Blue-chip buyers — household names in global tech — are purchasing sequestered carbon at scale. By every conventional metric, this was sustainability working as intended.

But when a veteran finance executive and Stanford lecturer arrived in northern Kenya and sat down with Maasai community leaders in the shadow of their half-finished eco-hotel, something did not add up.

“We’re doing all this work,” the elders explained. “We’re changing how our livestock graze. We’re reporting everything back. We’re restoring the land. But we aren’t seeing any money. We don’t understand what’s going on.”

Few people in the room at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business were better positioned to follow that thread. This lecturer’s career began in the early 1990s, deploying M&A expertise in post-communist Europe — leading large-scale privatizations in Germany and Hungary as these countries transitioned from centrally planned economies to capitalism. From there came a pivot into energy infrastructure investment, then into the emerging architecture of international carbon finance: structuring equity funds, managing cross-border risk, taking personal stakes in low-carbon investments in markets as varied as the Philippines and Brazil, and navigating the transition from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement.

In short, decades of building the very systems that are now under scrutiny.

And so, sitting in the back of a Jeep rolling through the Kenyan bush, the investigation began.

What the Numbers Were Hiding

The project was legitimate and, in ecological terms, genuinely significant: it covered 10 percent of Kenya and counted as the largest soil sequestration project in the world. By changing grazing patterns and allowing grasslands to recover, the land was sequestering carbon in the soil at a meaningful scale. This was the kind of market-driven, least cost climate solution that economists had long advocated.

The problem was not the model. It was the money flow.

After painstaking financial analysis, tracing revenues through layers of intermediaries and a powerful, well-connected conservation agency, the picture became clear: most of the tens of millions generated by this project was not reaching the communities whose land, labor, and changed livelihoods made it possible.

Meanwhile, some of the communities’ most urgent needs went unmet. Schools sat half-built. Women still walked miles each day to fetch water, hours that could have been spent on work, education, or rest. The eco-hotel, built by hand from the landscape itself and overlooking breathtaking Kenyan bushland, stood unfinished. The carbon revenues that could have completed it, built and maintained the solar wells, and provided electricity to the schools and scholarships for the children were absorbed elsewhere.

The transition was happening. The “just” part was in question.

When the Classroom Becomes a Reckoning

The story became a business school case study — one that caught significant attention because it named something most business education avoids: the question of redistribution and for those who capture value when markets are designed to solve global problems.

In one unforgettable class session, Maasai elders joined via a video stream from their villages, with the connection cutting in and out, to speak directly with students about what this carbon project meant to them. The imperfect technology only underscored the gap between the world making climate commitments and the world living their consequences.

The case propels students, future executives, and board members to grapple with a question that belongs in every sustainability strategy conversation: When do we claim our initiative creates impact, impact for whom, exactly? And how do we know?

What This Means for Leaders

Carbon markets are not niche instruments. The EU’s compliance market has driven emissions down by roughly a third since 2013. China is launching a market projected to be twice as large. Brazil, Mexico, and many others are following. These are not voluntary offset purchases; they are mandatory, multi-trillion-dollar regulatory systems that will increasingly shape how global capital flows to lower carbon technology.

And as these markets scale, so does the question of governance: who sits at the table when the project economics are structured, and who does not.

For executives and board members, this story surfaces three questions worth asking in your next sustainability review:

1. Follow the money, not just the metric. A carbon project, a supply chain commitment, or a biodiversity pledge can show strong headline numbers while concentrating value away from the communities most affected. Ask your team to trace the economic flows, not just report the outcomes.

2. “Just transition” is not a communications strategy; it is a design requirement. Whether your organization is navigating decarbonization internally or investing in external climate solutions, the question of who bears the costs and who captures the benefits belongs in the governance conversation, not the CSR report.

3. Complexity is where accountability goes to hide. The most significant sustainability failures rarely involve outright fraud. They involve structures that are technically defensible but intrinsically unjust, and leaders (including buyers and investors) who did not ask enough questions early enough. Simplicity and transparency in how impact is measured and distributed are themselves governance choices.

This story was shared by a Stanford GSB-trained finance executive who spent three decades structuring international carbon markets, leading privatizations across post-communist Europe, and raising equity funds across the Global South, and who now teaches climate finance at Stanford. It is one of many stories being collected by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability to capture what real sustainability leadership looks like in practice.

If you’re ready to bring that same rigor to your own organization, and to engage with leaders doing this work across industries, explore the executive and board-level programs at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s External Education & Mobilization.

At a moment when many companies were committing to 50% reductions by 2030, this was unambitious and was misaligned with the Paris Agreement. For a company which was proud of its role in the automotive industry’s shift from internal combustion to electric vehicles, it made even less sense. Climate was central to the purpose of the business.

"Looking at board decisions today, there is no status quo. Business as usual is gone. Insurance premiums are rising, weather events are intensifying, and the risks around climate, nature, and water are all interdependent. But the opportunities are massive for those who act."

The Turning Point

The company had recently established a sustainability committee. The new board member recognized that their most valuable contribution to the committee was not technical expertise, but bringing a different perspective. Working with a global network of board-level sustainability leaders across different sectors had given them visibility into how dozens of other industries were approaching exactly these problems. They could see that the internal team was ready to be challenged, but it was not clear how far behind they were, and what was genuinely achievable.

The conversation about ambition had to happen at the right level, not buried in an internal working group, but with the CEO and CFO in the room.

What the Board Did

The sustainability committee was structured for traction from the start. It included the CEO, the CFO, and a non-executive chair who brought boardroom credibility. The new non-executive director brought a second voice to the discussion. One committed voice can be outvoted. Two can create structural support that is harder to dismiss. And the audit committee chair, with deep sustainability knowledge from other board roles, brought additional insight to the board.

The committee brought in strong external advisors to model energy savings with concrete return-on-investment projections. They signed up for Science Based Targets, committing to an externally validated benchmark. And, critically, they framed every investment proposal as a business decision rather than just an environmental gesture. Energy reduction had direct cost benefits. The transition to electric vehicles was embedded in the company’s survival strategy. Sustainability and commercial logic were the same argument.

The work did not stop at the boardroom door. Regional leaders across North America, Europe, and Asia had sustainability built into their performance metrics. Small teams of engineers across the company were empowered to innovate. One group redesigned a pump: half the weight, half the materials, half the energy consumption. A product win, an emissions win, and proof that this thinking needed to be in the company’s DNA.

The Outcome

The board raised its ambition to a 50% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030, aligned with Science Based Targets. Work on Scope 3 was initiated. The relatively-new CEO led the programme of action: sustainability moved from a compliance exercise managed by a small team to a company-wide orientation embedded in strategy, operations, and individual accountability.

Then a private equity takeover arrived. The work was interrupted mid-journey. The targets, the frameworks, the cultural groundwork, all of it passed into new ownership before the full arc could complete.

It is a reminder that in board governance, you plant seeds whose harvest you may never see. The work still mattered.

Six Takeaways for Board Directors

1. This must be led by the CEO and CFO. Sustainability decisions without the chief executive and finance officer are advisory at best. Their active endorsement is what converts committee work into real commitments.

2. Frame it as a strategy, not stewardship. Every sustainability initiative needs a commercial anchor: cost reduction, resilience, competitive positioning, and regulatory risk. If it cannot survive a budget cycle, it will not survive.

3. Build your board coalition deliberately. One advocate can be ignored. Two or three, especially when one chairs the audit committee, create structural support that is difficult to dismiss.

4. Embed sustainability in performance, not just policy. Targets set at the board level mean little if they are not reflected in how regional leaders and frontline teams are evaluated. Culture changes when incentives change.

5. Draw on cross-industry experience. Board director networks exist to give members visibility into what other sectors have already solved. What feels unprecedented in your industry often has a tested playbook somewhere else.

6. Hold your nerve. Regulatory headwinds, market uncertainty, and shifting political environments will always offer reasons to delay. The physical risks of inaction do not pause during periods of policy uncertainty.

This story was shared by a 30-year non-executive director with board experience across the automotive supply chain, financial services, and professional services. It is part of Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s ongoing series capturing real-world sustainability leadership from board directors and senior executives.

Stories like this one are the foundation of what the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability teaches: that climate leadership is, at its core, a business decision. Explore programs designed for executives and board directors at Stanford University.