where are those sustainability jobs we were promised?
Hey, I’m Chloe! I came to NYU four years ago convinced that caring about the planet and building a career didn’t have to be in conflict. As a Social Entrepreneurship minor studying Media, Business and Politics at Gallatin, I was surrounded by people who felt the same; the energy was hopeful and slightly manic, group projects and materiality debates and the shared assumption that if you oriented yourself toward purpose, stability would follow.
Over the past year, especially with the latest administration changes in the U.S., something has shifted. The hope is still there, but it feels quieter. In between classes, I hear more talk about visas, salary concerns and layoffs in the sustainability space. We’re still committed to caring for the world around us but we’re also asking very practical questions: will there actually be jobs for us?
A few years ago, the path felt clearer. We were told that green jobs were booming, that ESG was a growth area, that the future of work would be climate-aligned by default. If you cared about the planet, you aimed for a sustainability role and trusted you were walking towards both purpose and stability.
Now, in those same classrooms, people are probing professors for honesty. My professor Alison Taylor calls it a zero trust economy—a generation that cares deeply but has stopped expecting institutions to deliver. Yes, we still want meaningful work. We also want to know how to pay rent.
published 5.14.26
the gap between the headlines and the hiring
When I started digging into this properly, the first layer of results was familiar: green job boom projections, WEF reports on the future of work, optimistic pieces on clean energy and energy efficiency investment. Broad, not exactly wrong, but mostly from 2025. The closer I got to 2026—to now, to my own year of graduation—the thinner the coverage became. Long range projections are confident; the near‑term picture is blurrier. And that gap between now and 2050 is precisely where my career is slated to bloom.
So I went to Reddit, which turned out to be far more useful than polished career resources. Thread after thread of people comparing notes: entry level roles asking for five to seven years of experience, applications going unanswered, a persistent suspicion that a lot of corporate sustainability work is really about managing how sustainable a company appears rather than what it actually does.
The threads were frustrated but not directionless. Specialist consultancies (not the big four we often see at campus careers fairs), but smaller, focused firms kept coming up as the places where varied and substantial work still happens. Corporate ESG at public companies was described as intense but meaningful, precisely because disclosure requirements give it actual teeth. The clearest advice, consistently, was to go where accountability is structural rather than voluntary. Where sustainability has a budget, a reporting obligation and a governance home, not just a mention in the annual report.
What struck me, though, was how much labour that puts on the job seeker. You can’t just google a company and trust what comes up. You have to talk to people inside, read between the lines of job descriptions, work out whether a role has genuine scope or just a good title. Recruitment in this space now needs something closer to investigative journalism, especially if you are looking for purpose in your work.
the disappearing CSO and what it actually means
The Chief Sustainability Officer role, which not long ago felt like an obvious destination for people building towards sustainability leadership, is quietly being restructured out of some of the world’s largest organisations. Apple, HSBC and Unilever have all parted ways with their sustainability heads without naming replacements, the role absorbed into communications, split between executives, or simply dropped. What matters isn’t whether the title persists, but whether the function does.
The official argument is that this is a sign of maturity: sustainability becoming embedded in core business operations rather than sitting in a silo. Sometimes that could genuinely be true. An integrated model, done properly, means climate and social risk built into planning from the beginning, not reviewed at the end. It means real authority, real financial backing and a seat at the table before decisions are made.
But there is a real version of integration and a hollow version, and from the outside they can look almost identical. The hollow version makes sustainability “everyone’s responsibility”, which in practice can mean it is no one’s priority.
For anyone entering the field, this creates a new kind of literacy requirement. It’s not enough to know what a CSO does; you have to be able to read how sustainability is really held inside a business. Is it anchored with someone who has line authority, resources and direct access to the board? Or has it been quietly downgraded into a set of KPIs spread thinly across teams who already have full time jobs?
We’re told the roles most likely to stick are the ones where you’re on the ground, connected to communities, doing work that’s harder to cut because it’s rooted in relationships (and that tracks). It also describes a relatively narrow slice of what people in my program have been studying and training for.
So the question becomes less “is there a CSO?” and more “where does sustainability actually sit here?” Is it in finance? Legal? Strategy? Operations? Who would be in the room if a major climate or human rights risk showed up tomorrow? As a student, I’m realizing those are the questions that will matter more than whatever title is on the role I’m applying for.
the contradiction, honestly
At Gallatin, every student designs their own concentration. To graduate, you defend it in a colloquium: ninety minutes, two faculty members, one student, making the case for why their particular combination of study holds together. I was on this topic when my professors stopped me. Why, they asked, does every thread of accountability in your analysis run back to corporations? Where are the people in this?
It’s a question sustainability education doesn’t ask enough. We learn to map corporate structures and critique disclosure frameworks, which is useful, but it can quietly train you into a posture of waiting: trusting that if you find the right company, the planet gets fixed along with your career and that meaningful action only begins once you have enough seniority or the right role, rather than thinking seriously about what you could do with whatever access you already have.
This piece doesn’t end with a tidy answer or maybe it ends with one that’s only tidy for now. Climate aligned work is growing and at the same time graduates are walking into hiring freezes and roles that expect senior level experience. Professors teach integrated systems thinking; job descriptions describe something much narrower. Trellis’ recent survey of over 500 sustainability professionals found the most common word they used to describe themselves was ‘discouraged.’ Nearly as many said ‘resolved.’ They haven’t walked away. Maybe for people my age, it starts inside that tension rather than after it resolves.
I say this with some relief, and I’m aware of the privilege in that. I accepted a position with GLG that I feel genuinely excited about and aligned with. Being specific about what I cared about closed some doors and opened this one. That doesn’t resolve the broader issue that most of my peers are still in (hunting for a job). But it did teach me something: the version of this field worth entering is the one where you’re allowed to ask real questions during the hiring process, not just answer them. Those conversations exist. They’re just harder to find than the job postings.
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by Chloe Wright-Haynie
Marketing Intern
