50 Influential Thought Leaders in Sustainability and ESG Globally

The sustainability and ESG landscape has never been more contested, more consequential, or more in need of clear-eyed guides. Around the world, the question of how organisations can balance profitability with environmental responsibility, social accountability, and sound governance has moved well beyond compliance checklists and annual reports. It now cuts through corporate strategy, public policy, investment management, scientific communication, supply chain design, and cultural change. The people shaping this conversation matter enormously, and knowing who they are makes it easier for organisations to stay ahead of a shifting landscape.

According to LinkedIn's Global Green Skills Report, green job postings grew at roughly ten times the rate of overall job postings in the period studied, signalling an irreversible integration of sustainability thinking into professional life. Yet despite that demand, the loudest voices in this space are not always the most useful. Many sustainability discussions recycle the same prominent names and the same high-altitude frameworks without ever reaching the operational, financial, or cultural specifics that decision-makers actually need.

This list brings together 50 voices from across six continents and a dozen disciplines who are contributing original thinking to sustainability and ESG. They include atmospheric scientists and investment heads, policy architects and corporate responsibility officers, circular economy innovators and environmental justice advocates. Some have hundreds of thousands of followers. Most sit in the mid-tier range where original content, genuine engagement, and real-world application are the norm. Several are not yet household names outside their disciplines, which is precisely why this list exists.

The list was deliberately built to move past the most prominent household names in order to surface voices that practitioners, investors, and sustainability professionals will genuinely find useful. Whether you lead a team wrestling with ESG reporting requirements, manage an investment portfolio navigating climate risk, or are building a sustainability practice inside a school, hospital, or government agency, the people on this list are worth following.

If your organisation is planning an event or conference and wants to complement your sustainability content programme with sessions on leadership, team dynamics, or communication, Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with organisations globally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your programme.

Why Sustainability and ESG Matters Now: The Stakes

The stakes of sustainability and ESG have shifted dramatically in the past three years. The EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the International Sustainability Standards Board frameworks, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, and a thickening web of national disclosure requirements have moved ESG from optional signalling to mandatory corporate practice in jurisdiction after jurisdiction. At the same time, a well-documented backlash in parts of the United States and Europe has prompted organisations to ask harder questions about what ESG actually requires of them and what it is actually for.

Sustainability Magazine's 2026 recognition of the top 250 sustainability leaders noted that the field now spans professionals in finance, technology, manufacturing, retail, energy, and the public sphere, all grappling with how to accelerate decarbonisation, advance just transitions, and embed sustainability into core business models rather than treating it as a communications function. Those challenges require intellectual leadership. They require people willing to challenge orthodoxies, make the financial case with rigour, and communicate the urgency of action without losing the trust of audiences who are increasingly sceptical of greenwashing.

The voices on this list are doing exactly that work. Following them is not a passive gesture. It is a practical investment in understanding what the next phase of sustainability looks like for the organisations that will still be relevant a decade from now.

If your team needs support building the leadership foundations that enable sustainability initiatives to actually land, Jonno White facilitates Working Genius workshops and executive offsites that help leadership teams align on how they contribute and what gets in the way. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start a conversation.

For further context on hiring a sustainability keynote speaker for your next event, see the blog post "35 Best Keynote Speakers on Sustainability and ESG" at consultclarity.org/post/keynote-speakers-sustainability-esg.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, substantive contribution to the specific conversation around sustainability or ESG, whether through published research, a recognised leadership role, a book, a policy initiative, or a sustained body of original content. Second, active engagement with the field in a current role or capacity confirmed by a recent primary source. Third, a deliberate effort to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered alongside those they already know.

The list brings together practitioners, academics, investors, advocates, and communicators from six continents, spanning corporate sustainability leadership, climate finance, environmental justice, innovation, policy, and science. It deliberately moved past the most prominent household names to reflect the full depth of a field that is far larger and more intellectually diverse than any single top-ten list can convey.

Category One: Climate Science and Communication

The credibility of any sustainability conversation rests in part on the quality of the underlying climate science and the ability of communicators to translate that science for business and policy audiences. These six voices sit at that critical intersection.

1. Katharine Hayhoe

Few scientists have done more to build bridges between climate research and the audiences most resistant to engaging with it than Katharine Hayhoe. As Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy and a Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University, she brings rare credibility across both the scientific community and the general public, with a TED Talk on climate action that has accumulated over four million views and a body of work that includes her widely-read book Saving Us.

Her research focuses on high-resolution climate projections and the impacts of climate change on human society and natural environments. Where she stands apart from most scientists, however, is in her sustained commitment to communicating that research to audiences whose values might make them sceptical, treating connection as the prerequisite for communication. That approach, and the discipline behind it, makes her a cornerstone voice for anyone building a sustainability communication strategy.

2. Assaad Razzouk

Assaad Razzouk, CEO of Gurin Energy and host of The Angry Clean Energy Guy podcast, is one of the most direct and prolific voices on renewable energy and climate action in Asia and globally. Based in Singapore, he built and ran Sindicatum Renewable Energy before co-founding Gurin Energy, a renewable energy development platform focused on greenfield projects across Asia, giving him the on-the-ground commercial experience to complement his communication work.

His 2022 book Saving the Planet Without the Bullshit, published by Atlantic Books, argues that the gap between climate ambition and climate action is largely a problem of clarity and will rather than technology or economics. On LinkedIn and through his podcast, he applies that same directness to the current state of clean energy markets, geopolitics, and the energy transition in Asia, reaching an audience well over 100,000 across platforms. He is a consistent amplifier of emerging voices in the space.

3. Tara Shine

Tara Shine is the CEO of Change by Degrees, an Irish-based organisation that helps individuals and businesses make sustainability actionable rather than aspirational. Her work sits at the intersection of behaviour change and systems thinking, drawing on her background as an environmental scientist and her experience advising governments and international organisations on climate policy.

What distinguishes her as a thought leader is the practical register she brings to sustainability communications. Where many voices in the space operate at the level of strategy and frameworks, Shine consistently translates sustainability commitments into concrete, implementable steps for organisations and individuals. Her LinkedIn following of over 13,000 reflects a community that finds her content genuinely useful rather than abstract. She regularly speaks at events across Europe and internationally, making her a strong candidate for organisations building sustainability literacy at the team level.

4. Antoine Halff

Antoine Halff is the Chief Analyst and Co-Founder of Kayrros, a Paris-based global environmental intelligence company that has been recognised by TIME magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Companies in the World. Kayrros uses satellite observation and artificial intelligence to monitor methane emissions, deforestation, and other climate-critical environmental data in near real-time, providing the kind of independent evidence base that voluntary climate commitments have long lacked.

His thought leadership focuses on the intersection of energy geopolitics, environmental monitoring, and the hard data behind corporate and government climate claims. His writing on illuminem, where he has been among the most-read contributors on energy transition topics, reflects a disciplined scepticism about progress claims that makes his analysis particularly valuable for investors and policy audiences who need to distinguish credible commitments from messaging.

5. Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery spent more than six years as a Global Vice President at SAP before departing to build an independent practice as an energy, climate, and supply-chain analyst and keynote speaker. His Climate Confident podcast and weekly newsletter, read by over 3,100 senior leaders, give him direct access to a practitioner audience across energy, manufacturing, and finance. He ranks among the top three on the Thinkers360 2026 sustainability leaderboard, reflecting the volume and quality of his independently authored content.

His value as a thought leader lies in connecting the technical and commercial dimensions of the energy transition: understanding why battery costs falling to record lows is not an academic data point but a strategic signal that reshapes how organisations should be planning their infrastructure investments right now. His content is consistently actionable and grounded in the real-world economics of decarbonisation, with a global audience that trusts his analysis precisely because it comes without corporate agenda attached.

6. Edna Odhiambo

Edna Odhiambo has worked as an independent climate consultant for over a decade, building a practice that spans public speaking, training, stakeholder engagement, and advisory work across Africa and internationally. Her voice is particularly valuable in a field that often defaults to Northern-hemisphere framings of sustainability, bringing the lived experience and policy realities of African climate contexts into conversations that can otherwise feel disconnected from the regions most acutely affected by climate change.

Her work on LinkedIn reflects a communicator committed to making climate action concrete and inclusive rather than abstract and elite-facing. She is an advocate for the view that effective climate communication must meet communities where they are, and her practice reflects that principle in both the advisory and speaking work she undertakes. For organisations working in or with African markets, or seeking to ensure their sustainability programmes reflect global rather than parochial perspectives, she is an essential follow.

Category Two: ESG Finance and Investment

Sustainable finance is where the language of intentions meets the discipline of numbers. These eight voices are shaping how capital is allocated, how ESG data is used and misused, and how the financial system is being rewired to account for long-term environmental and social risk.

7. Jane Ambachtsheer

Jane Ambachtsheer serves as Global Head of Sustainability at BNP Paribas Asset Management, where she oversees the firm's approach to sustainable investment through its Sustainability Centre. She brought to the role more than eighteen years at Mercer, where she founded the responsible investment practice, making her one of the longest-serving senior practitioners in sustainable finance globally.

She was a founding member of the TCFD, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, which has become one of the most consequential frameworks in the history of corporate sustainability reporting. As an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto and a Research Affiliate at Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, she continues to contribute to the academic as well as practical development of the field. Her commentary on the relationship between sustainability and long-term financial performance is consistently grounded, rigorous, and resistant to both overclaiming and dismissal.

8. Harald Walkate

Harald Walkate is a founding partner of Route17, an independent blended finance advisory firm, and a member of the ESG Advisory Committee of the UK's Financial Conduct Authority. His previous roles as Head of ESG at Natixis Investment Managers and Global Head of Responsible Investment at Aegon Asset Management give him deep institutional perspective on how ESG considerations are actually integrated into investment decision-making rather than merely signalled.

What makes him a particularly important voice at this moment is his willingness to apply rigorous scepticism to ESG frameworks and data, including his illuminem article on what is actually needed to create bankable projects in least-developed countries, which challenged comfortable assumptions about the relationship between ESG rhetoric and capital flows to the places that need it most. For audiences trying to navigate between ESG enthusiasm and ESG backlash, his analysis is exceptionally useful.

9. Markus Muller

Markus Muller serves as Chief Investment Officer for ESG and Global Head of the Chief Investment Office at Deutsche Bank Private Bank, a role that gives him oversight of how one of Europe's largest private banking operations integrates sustainability into investment strategy. He is also a Steering Council Member of the Ocean Risk Resilience Action Alliance and a columnist for the Global Policy Journal at Durham University.

His writing on illuminem, where he was the most-read ESG author in 2024 according to the platform's rankings, reflects a broader commitment to public thought leadership that goes well beyond Deutsche Bank's own communications. His most-read piece, exploring the need for a recalibrated perspective on economic growth, engaged directly with the fundamental tension between GDP-centred development models and sustainability imperatives. He is currently completing his third book, India: The 21st Century, exploring that country's path toward a post-industrial economy.

10. Aaron Yoon

Aaron Yoon is an Associate Professor of Accounting and Information Management at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, where his research on ESG measurement and portfolio integration has been described by the Financial Times as a turning point in how investors approached ESG data. His methodologies have been widely adopted by asset owners and investment managers globally, representing a rare case of academic research translating directly into changed professional practice.

He has won the Responsible Business Education Award from the Financial Times, the Crowell Prize for Best Paper in Quantitative Investing, and the Graham and Dodd Scroll Award from the CFA Institute. His work is regularly cited in Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. For any investor or analyst trying to understand what ESG measurement actually tells us, and what it does not, Yoon's research is foundational reading.

11. Romie Goedicke

Romie Goedicke has led the nature thematic at the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative, where she led work on nature-related risk, disclosure, and mainstreaming. Her role placed her at the centre of one of the fastest-moving developments in sustainable finance: the convergence of biodiversity and nature into the mainstream investment risk conversation, driven in part by the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures framework.

Her experience includes senior programme management roles on nature and finance in Asia and Africa, giving her a genuinely global perspective on how different financial markets are engaging with nature-related risks and opportunities. Her illuminem article "The future is green: trends to watch in 2024" was among the most-read pieces on sustainable finance that year, reflecting an ability to communicate complex technical territory to broad audiences without losing the precision that financial practitioners require.

12. Antoine Mach

Antoine Mach is the managing partner of Covalence, an ESG rating agency based in Geneva, Switzerland, which he co-founded in 2001, making him one of the longest-standing practitioners in the ESG data and ratings space. He also teaches sustainable finance at two Swiss business schools, connecting his commercial work to the next generation of practitioners.

His illuminem article "After the ESG party", which became one of the most-read ESG pieces of 2024, addressed head-on the question of whether ESG as a framework has outlived its usefulness or whether it remains the best available tool for embedding sustainability considerations into financial analysis. That willingness to examine the foundations of the field rather than simply its application gives his thought leadership an intellectual rigour that is rarer than it should be. His perspective as both a pioneer and a critic of ESG ratings practice is genuinely distinctive.

13. Philippe Benoit

Philippe Benoit is a Senior Scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, a role he holds alongside former positions as Manager at the International Energy Agency and the World Bank, giving him an unmatched vantage point on how multilateral institutions approach the financing of the energy transition in developing economies.

His illuminem work on what is needed to finance the clean energy transition in least-developed countries was among the most-read content on sustainable finance in 2024, addressing the persistent gap between the capital available for sustainability in high-income markets and the financing needs of the countries where the transition matters most. For organisations or investors engaged with emerging-market sustainability, his analysis of the structural barriers to green financing in those contexts is essential.

14. Helle Bank Jorgensen

Helle Bank Jorgensen is Global Managing Director of Board Development at Board Intelligence, the role she moved into following the acquisition of Competent Boards, which she founded, by Board Intelligence in 2025. She has spent more than thirty years building the case for integrating sustainability into board governance, creating what she describes as the world's first green account, the first integrated report, and the first holistic responsible supply chain programme.

Her book Stewards of the Future: A Guide for Competent Boards has become an Amazon bestseller on governance, and board members and executives in over 55 countries hold the Global Competent Boards Designation in Sustainability, ESG, Climate and Biodiversity. She was inducted into the Corporate Governance Hall of Fame by IR Magazine in 2024 and won the Corporate Governance Lifetime Achievement Award the same year. Her perspective on what boards need to understand and do about sustainability, rather than what their communications teams need to say about it, is consistently practical and demanding.

For more on what effective board governance of sustainability looks like in practice, and how organisations can build the leadership culture to support it, contact Jonno White at jonno@consultclarity.org. Jonno delivers executive offsites, Working Genius facilitation, and leadership development programmes for senior teams globally. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect, and Jonno works virtually as well as in-person.

Category Three: Corporate Sustainability Leadership

The integration of sustainability into core business strategy rather than treating it as a corporate communications function requires practitioners willing to argue for both financial rigour and genuine accountability. These nine voices are making that argument from inside the world's most consequential organisations.

15. Alison Taylor

Alison Taylor is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Stern School of Business and former Executive Director of Ethical Systems. Her book Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World was featured on the Financial Times' list of the best business books of 2024 and won the Porchlight Award for the best leadership and strategy book of 2024. The book has also been shortlisted for the 2025 Thinkers50 Leadership Award.

The Onalytica community ranked her as the number one ESG influencer to follow, a reflection of her willingness to take positions that challenge both ESG enthusiasts and ESG sceptics with equal vigour. Her argument that ESG has become a victim of overcommitment and PR spin, and that the field needs a more honest reckoning with what business can and cannot deliver on social and environmental problems, is one of the most important intellectual contributions to the field in recent years. For anyone trying to understand the structural limitations of current ESG frameworks, her work is essential.

16. Kate Brandt

Kate Brandt is Chief Sustainability Officer at Google, where she leads the company's commitment to operating on carbon-free energy twenty-four hours a day across all its operations globally. She was previously the first Chief Sustainability Officer of the US federal government under the Obama administration, giving her a perspective on sustainability implementation that spans both the largest tech company in the world and the largest government.

Sustainability Magazine ranked her as the number one woman in sustainability in 2025 and number two in its overall Top 250 Leaders. Her LinkedIn following of over 40,000 reflects an audience drawn to her optimistic and technically grounded approach to corporate sustainability, including her work on how artificial intelligence can advance environmental goals. She represents the best of what a corporate CSO can be when the role is properly empowered: a genuine strategist rather than a communications manager.

17. Pia Heidenmark Cook

Pia Heidenmark Cook served as Chief Sustainability Officer at IKEA for fourteen years before moving to an independent consulting and speaking practice. Her time at IKEA spanned one of the most ambitious corporate sustainability programmes in retail history, including the company's commitments on renewable energy, sustainable materials, and circular business models.

Her LinkedIn following of over 14,000 reflects sustained engagement with a practitioner audience. She writes about corporate sustainability strategy, ESG reporting, and renewable energy from the vantage point of someone who has had to translate ambitious commitments into operational reality across a supply chain involving hundreds of thousands of suppliers. Her practical experience of what it actually takes to move a large organisation toward sustainability targets, rather than just announce them, is rare and valuable.

18. Kate Wylie

Kate Wylie is Chief Sustainability Officer at CHANEL, where she leads the global luxury brand's sustainability strategy across all its operations and supply chains. Her work at CHANEL has included a widely noted commitment to transition the packaging of Chanel No.5 to recyclable glass, a signal that sustainability demands in the luxury sector are moving beyond aspirational statements toward material changes in product design.

Her LinkedIn presence connects a corporate executive audience with both the internal challenges of embedding sustainability in a brand built on heritage and permanence and the external pressures from consumers, regulators, and investors who are raising expectations consistently. She represents the growing community of CSOs in legacy industries who are building genuine sustainability programmes under intense scrutiny, and her approach to integrating luxury and responsibility is instructive for any sector where sustainability sits in tension with core brand identity.

19. Alexandra Palt

Alexandra Palt serves as Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer at L'Oreal and Executive Vice-President of the Fondation L'Oreal, placing her at the intersection of corporate sustainability strategy and philanthropic impact at one of the world's largest consumer goods companies. Her work encompasses L'Oreal's broader sustainability commitments alongside her specific focus on women's role in addressing climate change.

She was instrumental in L'Oreal's support for the Women4Climate initiative, which mobilises women in business and civil society around climate action. Her LinkedIn writing on female empowerment and the importance of equal leadership within sustainability reflects a commitment to ensuring that diversity and inclusion are not treated as separate from the environmental and governance dimensions of ESG but as integral to all of them. Her dual corporate and foundation role gives her an unusually broad platform for this integration work.

20. Jessica Sansom

Jessica Sansom is Sustainability Director at Huel, the UK-based nutrition company, where her responsibilities include minimising the company's impact on the environment, ecosystems, and communities through its supply chains and product choices. Her work addresses one of the most practically complex intersections in corporate sustainability: the food and drink industry, where environmental impact is deeply embedded in product design rather than just operational choices.

Her LinkedIn content reflects the day-to-day realities of building a corporate sustainability programme inside a fast-growing business where sustainability is both a genuine value and a commercial proposition. She writes about working with farmers, managing supply chain impacts, and navigating the challenge of making environmental claims that are accurate and substantiated in a regulatory environment that is increasingly hostile to vague green claims. For practitioners in consumer goods or food businesses, her practical orientation makes her a particularly useful follow.

21. Lucas Joppa

Lucas Joppa was Microsoft's first Chief Environmental Officer before leaving to become Chief Sustainability Officer and Senior Managing Director at Haveli Investments, a private equity firm focused on embedding net-zero operations across its portfolio companies. He holds a PhD in Ecology from Duke University and has published extensively in the journals Science and Nature.

His move from a corporate sustainability role at one of the world's most prominent companies to private equity reflects a conviction that the most powerful lever for decarbonisation at scale may be embedding sustainability into capital allocation rather than corporate communications. At Microsoft he founded the AI for Earth programme, a five-year USD 50 million initiative applying artificial intelligence to climate, agriculture, water, and biodiversity challenges. His ability to bridge ecology, technology, and investment strategy makes him a distinctive and important voice in the sustainability space.

22. Laura Basconi

Laura Basconi is Chief Sustainability Officer at AWorld, the official sustainability engagement platform of both the United Nations and the European Commission. Her role gives her a perspective on sustainability engagement at the largest institutional scale, working with the two bodies most responsible for setting the global sustainability agenda.

Her illuminem writing, including the most-read piece in environmental sustainability for 2024, "Why climate change is everyone's business", reflects a communicator who understands that the gap between sustainability frameworks and public engagement is as much a communications and culture challenge as a policy or technical one. Her position at the intersection of UN climate work and European regulatory sustainability makes her a valuable source for organisations trying to understand where institutional sustainability standards are heading.

23. Sandhya Sabapathy

Sandhya Sabapathy has held senior sustainability roles at multiple FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies, including as Global Head of Environment and Net Zero at Entain, the FTSE100 company. She is also the founder of Kaleidoscope, through which she advises organisations on integrating sustainability into business strategies at the leadership level.

Her illuminem article on transferable skills and corporate citizenship was one of the most-read ESG pieces of 2024, reflecting her ability to speak to the human dimension of sustainability leadership: the skills practitioners need, the career pathways available, and the cultural changes inside organisations that make genuine sustainability integration possible rather than cosmetic. For sustainability professionals at any stage of their career, her perspective on what the role actually requires is grounding and generous.

Building a leadership culture that enables sustainability to land requires more than a strategy document. Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast, helps leadership teams across schools, corporates, and nonprofits build the team clarity and communication habits that make strategic commitments stick. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. Many organisations find that flying Jonno in costs less than engaging high-profile local providers, and he works virtually as well.

Category Four: Climate Policy and Governance

Policy shapes the landscape in which every corporate sustainability commitment must operate. These seven voices are working at the intersection of government, international institutions, and the private sector to define what the rules of the game will be.

24. Nigel Topping

Nigel Topping became Chair of the UK Climate Change Committee in July 2025, following his earlier role as the UN's High-Level Climate Champion for COP26, where he launched the Race To Zero and Race To Resilience campaigns and partnered with Mark Carney to establish the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. Before that he was CEO of We Mean Business, a coalition working with major corporations to accelerate decarbonisation.

He brings nearly two decades of private sector experience to a regulatory role that sits at the centre of the UK's net zero accountability architecture. As Chair of the Climate Change Committee, he now oversees independent scrutiny of government progress against legislated carbon budgets and provides advice on interim targets. His career arc from private sector executive to international climate champion to independent regulatory chair makes him one of the most complete sustainability governance practitioners in the field globally.

25. Georg Kell

Georg Kell was the founding director of the United Nations Global Compact, the world's largest corporate sustainability initiative, which he led from its founding in 2000 until 2015. He now serves as Chairman of Arabesque, a technology company that uses artificial intelligence and big data to assess sustainability performance, connecting his experience building the global architecture of corporate sustainability commitments to the data infrastructure that makes those commitments measurable.

His illuminem article "Corporate sustainability at a crossroad" was one of the most-read ESG pieces of 2024, arguing that the field has reached a point of genuine crisis where the gap between corporate commitments and corporate action is too wide to be papered over by improved reporting frameworks alone. His perspective combines the institutional memory of someone who helped design the current system with the pragmatic candour of someone who can see its limitations clearly.

26. Patricio Lombardi

Patricio Lombardi is the Executive Director of the Environmental Markets Fairness Foundation, a strategic alliance between regions, governments, and civil organisations from the Global South. He was the first-ever Climate Minister appointed in the Americas, serving as Secretary of Climate Change for Argentina, giving him direct experience of what climate governance looks like when you are on the receiving end of the global commitments made in places like Glasgow and Dubai rather than at the table where they are negotiated.

His illuminem writing on biodiversity credits, carbon markets, and the structural inequities embedded in global climate finance frameworks brings a Global South perspective to conversations that are often dominated by European and North American framings. For organisations engaged with climate justice, just transitions, or working in Latin American markets, his voice provides both intellectual challenge and practical context that is genuinely difficult to find elsewhere.

27. Andrea Bonime-Blanc

Andrea Bonime-Blanc is the Founder and CEO of GEC Risk Advisory, a firm specialising in the governance of change, strategic risk, leadership trust, geopolitics, and sustainability. She serves as Senior Fellow at several think tanks including The Conference Board's Governance and Sustainability Center and is founding global faculty at the Institute for Corporate Directors Malaysia Mandatory Board Sustainability Certificate.

Her sixth book, Governing Pandora: Leading in the Age of GenAI and Exponential Technology, is published by Georgetown University Press. Her expertise spans the full spectrum of governance risk at a moment when that spectrum has expanded dramatically: geopolitical risk, sustainability risk, AI governance risk, and leadership trust risk are all colliding inside organisations that are still trying to manage them as separate functions. Her integrative perspective on how boards and leadership teams can govern complexity is increasingly essential.

28. Heather Zichal

Heather Zichal is Chief Executive Officer of the American Clean Power Association, the United States' leading industry body representing renewable energy, storage, and clean hydrogen companies. The ACP works to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels by advocating for the policy infrastructure, transmission investment, and grid modernisation that clean energy at scale requires.

Her experience includes serving as a senior White House energy and climate advisor during the Obama administration, giving her deep institutional knowledge of how energy policy is made and unmade at the federal level. She brings that experience to a CEO role at a moment when the US energy transition is navigating significant political headwinds, making her perspective on the gap between market forces and policy signals particularly valuable for investors and energy professionals globally.

29. Peggy Liu

Peggy Liu was named a TIME Hero of the Environment and has been described by Foreign Policy as a key shaper of US-China relations on clean energy. She serves as Chairperson of the Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, an organisation committed to accelerating the clean energy transition in the world's two largest economies simultaneously, a mission that has become simultaneously more important and more politically complex in recent years.

Her LinkedIn content gives followers visibility into the practical and diplomatic dimensions of clean energy collaboration across geopolitical divides, a perspective that is genuinely rare. For organisations operating in both US and Chinese markets, or for investors tracking the geopolitics of the energy transition, her work on how clean energy cooperation can survive and navigate political tensions is essential context that few communicators can provide with her combination of access and credibility.

30. Andrea Bonzanni

Andrea Bonzanni is International Policy Director at the International Emissions Trading Association, where he leads global engagement on carbon market policy and international climate cooperation. His role places him at the centre of the voluntary and compliance carbon market architecture that is among the most contested and consequential terrains in practical climate action.

His previous work at EDF Trading in London in regulatory and compliance roles gives him a commercial foundation that informs his policy work. The carbon market has gone through significant turbulence in recent years, with questions about integrity, additionality, and measurement creating both credibility challenges and reform opportunities. His position at the IETA means he is working on those questions from the inside of the international policy process, making his perspective on carbon market governance both timely and authoritative.

For organisations working on sustainability strategy and seeking to build the team culture and leadership capacity to execute it, Jonno White delivers keynotes, Working Genius workshops, DISC communication sessions, and executive offsites globally. Whether you are in Brisbane, London, New York, or Singapore, reach out to jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect.

Category Five: Sustainable Innovation and Technology

Innovation is where sustainability ambitions meet engineering, supply chain reality, and business model change. These seven voices are shaping how technology and innovation are being applied to the sustainability challenge.

31. Sheri Hinish

Sheri Hinish is the founder of Supply Chain Revolution and ranks fifth on the Thinkers360 2026 sustainability leaderboard, reflecting a sustained commitment to generating and sharing original content on the intersection of supply chain management and sustainability. Her work centres on how organisations can build supply chains that are not only efficient but genuinely sustainable, addressing the scope three emissions, social impacts, and material flows that make supply chains the largest single sustainability footprint in most large organisations.

She brings both practitioner depth and communicator skills to a topic that is technically complex but practically unavoidable for any organisation serious about its sustainability commitments. Her LinkedIn presence reflects consistent engagement with a community of supply chain, procurement, and sustainability professionals who are working on these problems in real organisations rather than writing about them from a distance. Her ability to make supply chain sustainability accessible without dumbing it down is a relatively rare capability.

32. Joel Carboni

Joel Carboni is the founder of GPM, the Green Project Management organisation, which has developed a sustainability framework for project management that has been adopted by practitioners in over 70 countries. His work addresses a practical gap in the sustainability landscape: most sustainability frameworks focus on what organisations should achieve rather than how projects, the mechanism through which most organisational change actually happens, should be designed to achieve it.

He ranks fourth on the Thinkers360 2026 sustainability leaderboard and has built a genuinely global practitioner community around the idea that every project is an opportunity to advance sustainability rather than an activity that sustainability happens around. His perspective on embedding sustainability into project delivery methodologies is applicable across industries, from construction and infrastructure to technology and services, making him a genuinely cross-sector voice.

33. Marga Hoek

Marga Hoek is an author, board member, and independent sustainability advisor who has spent over two decades making the case for sustainable business models as drivers of competitive advantage rather than constraints on it. She ranks eighteenth on the Thinkers360 2026 sustainability leaderboard and has written extensively on the business case for sustainability, including the relationship between technology, innovation, and the transition to a circular economy.

Her books and LinkedIn content reflect a practitioner-facing orientation that connects sustainability strategy to the commercial realities of competitive markets, addressing the persistent challenge that even organisations genuinely committed to sustainability struggle to translate that commitment into the language of business value that boards and investors can act on. Her perspective is pragmatic, commercially grounded, and consistently focused on what organisations can do rather than what they should aspire to.

34. Alex Hong

Alex Hong is Director of AEIR and a LinkedIn Top Voice in Green for Singapore. His work spans ESG data and analytics, climate risk in financial institutions, and the specific sustainability challenges and opportunities of Southeast Asia, a region that is both highly exposed to physical climate risk and home to some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

He was among the most-read sustainability authors on illuminem in 2023, with a focus on how digital technologies, data infrastructure, and AI can accelerate the sustainability transition in Asia and globally. His perspective on the intersection of data, technology, and sustainability is particularly relevant for organisations operating in the Asia-Pacific region, where the sustainability regulatory landscape is evolving rapidly and the gap between ambition and measurement infrastructure remains significant.

35. Navi Radjou

Navi Radjou is an innovation advisor and the co-author of Jugaad Innovation, a book that has sold over 200,000 copies globally and introduced the concept of frugal innovation to mainstream business audiences. He ranks fifteenth on the Thinkers360 2026 sustainability leaderboard and has spent the past decade building the intellectual case for frugality as a sustainability principle rather than merely a cost-management strategy.

His work connects the innovation practices of emerging market entrepreneurs, who have always had to do more with fewer resources, to the sustainability imperative facing established businesses in high-income economies. That connection between inclusive development and environmental sustainability gives his thought leadership a breadth that is relatively unusual in a space that often treats social and environmental dimensions as separate tracks. He is based between Europe and the US and speaks globally on innovation, sustainability, and the circular economy.

36. Kamales Lardi

Kamales Lardi is CEO and Founder of Lardi and Partner Consulting, a firm focused on digital transformation and its intersection with sustainability strategy. She ranks forty-second on the Thinkers360 2026 sustainability leaderboard and has built a thought leadership practice connecting the two largest strategic conversations happening in most large organisations right now: digital transformation and sustainability, and specifically how the first can accelerate the second.

Her writing on LinkedIn and other platforms reflects sustained engagement with the practical question of how organisations can use digital tools, data infrastructure, and AI to make their sustainability strategies more measurable, more responsive, and more genuinely integrated into operations rather than sitting in a sustainability report that nobody reads. Her perspective is particularly valuable for technology-sector audiences navigating the tension between AI's sustainability potential and its own significant energy footprint.

37. Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjorkskov

Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjorkskov is the founder of No Objectives, a non-profit research and design agency based in Denmark that turns minority insights into majority actions on sustainability and climate. His illuminem article "The dawn of regenerative leadership: steering away from ecological bankruptcy" was among the most-read overall sustainability pieces in 2024, arguing that the field needs to move from sustainability, which at best maintains the status quo, toward regeneration, which actively restores ecological and social systems.

His work sits at the conceptual frontier of the sustainability conversation, pushing beyond the language of ESG compliance and corporate responsibility toward a more fundamental rethinking of the relationship between organisations and the living systems they depend on. For those already fluent in mainstream ESG frameworks and looking for the intellectual territory that comes next, his voice is an important one, particularly for organisations working in the space of nature-based solutions and regenerative business.

Category Six: Social and Environmental Justice in Sustainability

Sustainability divorced from justice is incomplete. These six voices are insisting that the environmental and the social dimensions of ESG be treated with the same rigour and the same urgency, and that sustainability conversations reflect the full diversity of the communities most affected by environmental change.

38. Wava Gatheru

Wava Gatheru is the Founder and Executive Director of Black Girl Environmentalist, an organisation in the United States focused on supporting Black girls, women, and gender-expansive individuals in the climate sector. Under her leadership, the organisation has become nationally recognised in the US, working with over 80 corporate and non-profit partners and hosting events across more than twelve cities.

Her work bridges environmental justice and climate policy, making the case that the communities most affected by environmental harm are also the communities most underrepresented in the spaces where environmental decisions are made. Her approach to sustainability is intersectional, connecting race, gender, and economic opportunity to the climate conversation in ways that challenge predominantly white, predominantly elite framings of what sustainability is and for whom. She is an important voice for any organisation trying to build a sustainability practice that takes the S in ESG as seriously as the E.

39. Ayo Sokale

Ayo Sokale is a Chartered Civil Engineer and founder of Sokale Group, and she combines technical expertise in infrastructure and environment with advocacy for sustainability and greater diversity in the engineering and sustainability professions. She served as a Deputy Mayor and Councillor, giving her direct experience of how sustainability decisions are made in local government, a level of governance that is often underrepresented in sustainability thought leadership.

Her LinkedIn content, which reaches a growing audience of engineers, sustainability professionals, and policymakers, reflects a commitment to making sustainability practical and inclusive rather than abstract and exclusionary. She is a passionate advocate for structural changes in professional practice and public policy that are required to make sustainability commitments real rather than cosmetic. Her dual background in technical practice and civic engagement makes her a particularly grounded voice in the space.

40. Jef Teugels

Jef Teugels is Interim Director of Nested Circle, a consultancy focused on planet-and-people-first solutions, and a faculty member of the Executive MBA programme at the Krakow University of Economics. His illuminem article on global plastic production forecasts, which noted projections of a triple increase in plastic production and use by 2060, was one of the most-read ESG pieces of 2024.

His work sits at the intersection of sustainability systems thinking, consumer behaviour, and organisational change, exploring the friction between how customers currently behave, how organisations are currently structured, and how exponential technologies are reshaping both. His EMBA faculty role means he is also actively shaping the sustainability thinking of the next generation of European business leaders, which gives his voice an institutional reach that extends well beyond his published output.

41. Isha Datar

Isha Datar is Executive Director of New Harvest, a non-profit organisation advancing research in cellular agriculture, the science of growing animal products including meat, dairy, and eggs directly from cells rather than from whole animals. New Harvest funds and coordinates academic research in this space, and Datar has become one of the most visible communicators explaining why cellular agriculture matters for food system sustainability.

Her work addresses one of the most consequential and least-resolved sustainability challenges of the coming decade: how the world feeds nine to ten billion people with dramatically reduced land use, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions. Her perspective as both a science communicator and an advocate for a specific technology pathway gives her content a clarity of purpose that is relatively rare in a space that can default to vague system-level critique without engaging the specific innovations that might actually address it.

42. Letizia Magaldi

Letizia Magaldi is Executive Vice-President of Corporate Development and Global Marketing at Magaldi, an Italian industrial company that has developed a thermal energy storage technology using fluidised sand that can store heat from renewable sources and discharge it on demand, addressing one of the most significant practical barriers to industrial decarbonisation.

Her illuminem article on decarbonising industrial heat, described as "the ready-now opportunity for Europe's net-zero push", was among the most-read sustainable business pieces of 2024. Her work represents the intersection of thought leadership and commercial advocacy for a specific deep-tech solution that addresses scope one industrial emissions, a category that has historically been among the hardest to decarbonise. For manufacturing and energy audiences, her technical and strategic content on industrial heat transition is among the most practically useful sustainability content available.

43. Gokul Shekar

Gokul Shekar is Head of ESG and Climate Change at The Carbon Collective Company, an organisation that collaborates with businesses to advance positive impacts on climate, ecosystems, and communities. He brings over eighteen years of experience in B2B education and global team leadership across the Middle East, Asia, and beyond to a role focused on helping businesses move from ESG awareness to ESG action.

His illuminem writing has reached a global audience on climate change in travel and tourism, a sector with an outsized carbon footprint and a complex relationship with sustainability, given both the industry's reliance on emissions-intensive transport and its economic dependence on the ecological and cultural assets that climate change threatens. His ability to translate ESG frameworks into specific sector contexts makes him a useful follow for practitioners working outside the financial and technology sectors where most ESG thought leadership is concentrated.

For organisations in the travel, hospitality, or events sector seeking to build leadership capability alongside sustainability initiatives, Jonno White has delivered keynotes and workshops across Australia, the UK, and internationally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org or visit consultclarity.org for more information.

Category Seven: Emerging and Global Voices

The sustainability field is larger, more diverse, and more geographically distributed than any single list can fully capture. These seven voices represent a growing community of mid-tier practitioners, academics, and advocates doing original work that has not yet achieved the visibility it deserves.

44. Geoff Gourley

Geoff Gourley is a LinkedIn Top Voice in sustainability based in Australia, where he builds a following through regular, substantive commentary on ESG trends, corporate sustainability strategy, and the specific challenges and opportunities of the Asia-Pacific sustainability landscape. He brings a practitioner perspective to sustainability communications in a region where the policy and regulatory environment is evolving rapidly.

His content reflects the kind of grounded, operationally-minded sustainability thinking that serves practitioners in the Asia-Pacific region better than content generated entirely from European or North American contexts. For Australian, New Zealand, and wider APAC organisations building or refining their sustainability practices, his local context and active LinkedIn presence make him a particularly relevant voice to follow, particularly as the region navigates the intersection of resource export economics and decarbonisation ambition.

45. Vojtech Vosecky

Vojtech Vosecky is a Czech Republic-based ESG consultant and communications specialist who has built one of the most active LinkedIn presences in the European sustainability space, producing regular, substantive content on ESG strategy, corporate sustainability communications, and the practical navigation of the EU's expanding sustainability regulatory requirements. He represents a new generation of sustainability voices who combine digital influence with consulting expertise.

His focus on sustainability communications, and specifically on how organisations can communicate their sustainability commitments in ways that are credible, compliant with anti-greenwashing standards, and genuinely useful to stakeholders, addresses one of the most practically pressing challenges facing corporate sustainability teams right now. His mid-tier following reflects a community of European sustainability practitioners who find his content directly applicable to the regulatory and communications challenges they face daily.

46. Jane Thomason

Jane Thomason is an independent author, advisor, and thought leader whose work spans sustainability, technology, and social impact. She ranks fourteenth on the Thinkers360 2026 sustainability leaderboard and has built a practice connecting the emerging landscape of Web3 technologies, digital assets, and decentralised finance to sustainability and social development goals.

Her work on the potential of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies to support transparency in supply chains, carbon markets, and impact investing reflects a future-facing perspective on how digital infrastructure might address some of the trust and verification challenges that have historically undermined ESG data credibility. Her global perspective and cross-disciplinary background make her a valuable voice for organisations exploring the intersection of technology and sustainability strategy.

47. Capt Pradeep Singh

Capt Pradeep Singh is CEO of Karma Developers in India, and ranks second on the Thinkers360 2026 sustainability leaderboard, reflecting a sustained output of thought leadership content on sustainability strategy, corporate sustainability in emerging markets, and the specific opportunities and constraints of building sustainable businesses in the Indian context.

His voice represents the substantial community of sustainability practitioners and advocates across South Asia who are building practices often with fewer resources and fewer institutional supports than their counterparts in Europe or North America, but in markets where the scale of both the sustainability challenge and the sustainability opportunity is among the largest in the world. Following practitioners in India and the wider South Asian context is a genuine gap in most Western sustainability reading lists, and his output begins to address it.

48. John Friedman

John Friedman is an independent sustainability author and speaker whose work centres on the intersection of corporate responsibility, communications, and long-term stakeholder value creation. He ranks twenty-ninth on the Thinkers360 2026 sustainability leaderboard and has spent more than two decades advising organisations on how to build sustainability programmes that are accountable to real outcomes rather than aspirational frameworks.

His focus on the communications dimension of sustainability, specifically on how organisations can tell honest stories about both progress and challenges without slipping into either greenwashing or the defensive silence that often follows greenwashing scandals, is particularly relevant at a moment when anti-greenwashing regulation is tightening and stakeholder expectations for transparency are rising simultaneously. His practitioner-oriented content makes him a consistently useful follow for corporate sustainability teams.

49. Andrew R. Barron

Andrew R. Barron leads sustainability science and innovation at MiDAS Green Innovations and ranks first on the Thinkers360 2026 sustainability leaderboard, reflecting an extraordinary volume of original content on materials science, clean technology, and the intersection of chemical engineering with sustainability. He brings academic and industrial experience to the question of what new materials and processes will enable the physical infrastructure of a sustainable economy.

His work on carbon capture, sustainable materials, and clean energy technology sits at a technical depth that distinguishes him from most sustainability communicators: rather than discussing the transition in general terms, he engages with the specific chemistry, materials science, and engineering questions that determine whether specific solutions scale. For technical audiences, investors in cleantech, and sustainability practitioners who want to understand what is actually possible rather than merely aspirational, his content is a rare resource.

50. Mark Esposito

Mark Esposito is Professor of Technology Policy at Northeastern University and a Harvard Social Scientist affiliated with the Kennedy School. He has been recognised by Thinkers50 as one of the thirty most prominent rising business thinkers in the world and was World Top 50 Influencer in Global Sustainability by Thinkers360 for three consecutive years. He co-founded Nexus FrontierTech and serves as Chief Economist at micro1.

His multiple books, including The Great Remobilization, published by MIT Press in 2023, and Digitizing the Emerging Economies, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024, address the intersection of technology, economic transformation, and sustainability at a depth and breadth that reflects his cross-institutional academic career. His perspective on how emerging economies are navigating the sustainability transition, informed by his work across India, the UAE, Europe, and North America, is particularly valuable for organisations operating across multiple economic contexts.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several voices were seriously considered for this list but were ultimately set aside by editorial choice. Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek would appear on most broad leadership lists, and their work has genuinely shaped how organisations think about culture, motivation, and purpose. We deliberately moved past these household names to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered. Mark Carney, in his role at Brookfield Asset Management and as Canada's incoming Prime Minister, and Fatih Birol, as Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, are both enormously influential in the energy transition and climate finance space. Their scale of influence means they reach audiences of hundreds of thousands or millions through team-managed channels, which places them in a different category from the voices on this list who are actively engaging and creating original content at a personal level.

Boyan Slat, founder of The Ocean Cleanup, and Jane Goodall, whose environmental advocacy spans decades, are both iconic voices whose work is well-documented. We also considered Katharine Wilkinson, co-editor of All We Can Save and co-founder of The All We Can Save Project, whose work on the intersection of climate science, feminism, and action has been widely recognised. Each of these voices has contributed enormously to the sustainability conversation in their own right.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Building a Sustainability Reading List

The most common mistake sustainability practitioners make when building a reading and following list is defaulting to the same ten names that appear on every other list. Brene Brown on vulnerability, Adam Grant on organisational change, and Simon Sinek on purpose are all genuinely valuable thinkers, but their work does not specifically address the technical, regulatory, and financial dimensions of ESG that practitioners actually need to navigate. Building a reading list that only includes mainstream leadership voices without the disciplinary depth of climate finance, sustainability reporting, or environmental science will leave significant gaps in your understanding of how the field actually works.

A second common mistake is treating sustainability thought leadership as a North American and European domain. The most consequential sustainability challenges of the coming decade will play out largely in Asia, Africa, and Latin America: in the supply chains that connect those regions to consumption in wealthy economies, in the infrastructure investment decisions that will determine whether those regions develop along high-carbon or low-carbon pathways, and in the climate adaptation needs of communities that contributed least to the problem. A reading list that does not include voices from those regions is not just incomplete; it is likely to produce decisions that look well-intentioned from a European boardroom but land badly in the contexts where they actually matter.

A third mistake is conflating ESG communication with ESG substance. Several of the voices who dominate social media engagement in the sustainability space are primarily communicators rather than practitioners or researchers. Following them is not the same as building a genuine understanding of the field. The best reading and following list combines people who have published original research, people who have implemented sustainability programmes in real organisations, and people who can communicate across those domains with precision and honesty.

A fourth mistake, particularly important at this moment, is failing to engage with the ESG backlash rather than retreating from it. Alison Taylor, Harald Walkate, and Antoine Mach are all on this list in part because they are willing to ask hard questions about the foundations of ESG frameworks rather than simply advocating for them. Understanding the critique of ESG is essential for anyone trying to build a sustainability programme that will survive scrutiny rather than simply satisfy today's reporting requirements.

Finally, a fifth mistake is treating thought leadership consumption as a substitute for action. The voices on this list are valuable not because following them on LinkedIn is itself a sustainability contribution, but because their work can accelerate and improve the decisions and implementations that organisations are undertaking. Read critically, engage substantively, and use what you learn to build better programmes, ask harder questions of your leadership teams, and hold your own sustainability commitments to a higher standard than your communications require.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Sustainability Reading and Following List

Start by identifying which domains within sustainability and ESG are most material to your organisation. A manufacturing company with a complex global supply chain has different information needs from a financial institution managing climate risk in its investment portfolio or a government agency developing sustainability policy. The voices on this list span all of those domains, but you do not need to follow all fifty immediately. Choose five to eight whose disciplines align with your most pressing challenges and start there.

On LinkedIn, follow each person and turn on notifications for their posts if you want to engage in real-time. Many of the voices on this list, particularly those in the mid-tier range of 5,000 to 50,000 followers, respond to thoughtful comments and engage with their communities in ways that create genuine learning opportunities. A well-considered comment on a post by Tara Shine, Vojtech Vosecky, or Ayo Sokale is as likely to start a real conversation as anything else you could do to build your sustainability network.

Beyond LinkedIn, look for the podcasts, newsletters, and platforms where these voices publish regularly. Tom Raftery's Climate Confident newsletter and Assaad Razzouk's podcast are both free resources that go significantly deeper than social media posts. Illuminem, where many of the finance and policy voices on this list publish their longer-form analysis, is worth bookmarking as a regular reading source. Several of the voices on this list, including Markus Muller, Harald Walkate, and Georg Kell, have published work on illuminem that represents some of the sharpest analysis available anywhere on the current state of ESG and sustainable finance.

For the research-oriented voices, look at their academic work as well as their public communications. Aaron Yoon's ESG measurement research, referenced in the Financial Times as a turning point for the field, is accessible and worth reading in full. Jane Ambachtsheer's TCFD work and the frameworks she helped design are documented publicly and worth understanding in depth if sustainability reporting is relevant to your organisation.

Set a regular time to engage with sustainability thought leadership rather than consuming it reactively. The field moves quickly enough that passive consumption rarely produces insight. Scheduling thirty minutes each week to read deeply from two or three voices, rather than scanning dozens of posts, produces significantly better learning outcomes. And when you find content that challenges your assumptions rather than confirming them, which on this list might come from Alison Taylor, Kasper Bjorkskov, or Patricio Lombardi, that is precisely the content worth spending the most time with.

If your organisation is planning a conference, PD day, or team event and wants to add a session on leadership culture, team dynamics, Working Genius, or communication to your sustainability programme, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out with 10,000+ copies sold globally and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, delivers keynotes and workshops globally. Book via jonno@consultclarity.org. For more on the bestselling book visit https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD

Frequently Asked Questions

What does ESG stand for, and how is it different from sustainability?

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. It is a framework used primarily by investors and financial markets to assess how organisations manage their environmental impact, their social responsibilities, and their governance structures. Sustainability is a broader concept that encompasses the long-term viability of ecological, social, and economic systems. ESG is effectively the operationalised, measurable subset of sustainability that financial markets and regulators have agreed to assess. In practice the terms are often used interchangeably, but ESG tends to imply a more structured, disclosure-oriented approach while sustainability can encompass a wider range of cultural, scientific, and ethical commitments.

How was this list compiled?

Every person on this list was selected on the basis of substantive contribution to the sustainability or ESG conversation, current active engagement in a confirmed role or capacity, and a deliberate effort to surface a geographically and disciplinarily diverse set of voices. The list draws on platform rankings including Thinkers360 2026, illuminem's most-read author rankings for 2024, industry speaker directories, LinkedIn Top Voice recognitions, and primary source verification of each person's current role and organisation. The selection deliberately moved past the most prominent household names to include the mid-tier voices that are often more valuable to practitioners precisely because they are more accessible and more specific.

Who are the most important ESG voices to follow on LinkedIn?

The most valuable voices to follow on LinkedIn depend on your domain. For ESG finance and investment, Jane Ambachtsheer, Harald Walkate, and Aaron Yoon are all exceptional. For corporate sustainability, Alison Taylor, Kate Brandt, and Pia Heidenmark Cook offer complementary perspectives. For climate science and communication, Katharine Hayhoe and Assaad Razzouk are both extraordinary in their respective registers. For policy and governance, Nigel Topping and Georg Kell bring institutional depth. And for emerging voices worth engaging with now before they achieve household-name status, Tara Shine, Vojtech Vosecky, and Ayo Sokale are all producing original, substantive content that is genuinely useful.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership or team sessions alongside our sustainability programme?

Yes. If your organisation is running a sustainability conference, staff development day, or executive retreat and wants to complement the sustainability content with sessions on leadership, team dynamics, communication, or culture, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant with a 93.75% satisfaction rating at the ASBA 2025 National Conference, works with organisations globally. He has facilitated Working Genius workshops, DISC communication sessions, executive offsites, and keynotes for schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. Email jonno@consultclarity.org, or visit consultclarity.org for more information. Whether virtual or face to face, Jonno travels globally and many organisations find that international travel is far more affordable than they expected.

What are the best resources for staying current on ESG and sustainability?

For free, high-quality sustainability and ESG analysis, illuminem publishes original thought leadership from over 1,500 voices globally and its most-read rankings are a useful guide to what the community finds most valuable. The Tom Raftery Climate Confident newsletter provides weekly signal on energy, climate, and supply chain sustainability. For regulatory and legal developments, Freshfields and Clifford Chance both publish regular ESG trend analyses that are publicly available. For sustainable finance specifically, the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative, the PRI, and TCFD-related resources from major asset managers are all worth following. And for a daily news diet, ESG Dive covers leadership and regulatory developments with good depth and timeliness.

Is ESG still relevant given the 2024 and 2025 backlash?

Yes, though the conversation has evolved significantly. The backlash of 2024 and 2025, concentrated primarily in parts of the United States, has prompted many organisations to recalibrate their ESG communications while maintaining the substance of their sustainability programmes. The regulatory requirements driving ESG, particularly in Europe, have continued to expand and tighten regardless of the US political environment. The financial case for managing climate and nature-related risks has strengthened rather than weakened as physical climate impacts have become more economically visible. Several of the voices on this list, including Alison Taylor and Harald Walkate, offer nuanced analysis of both why ESG as a framework has earned some of the criticism it has received and why the underlying sustainability imperative remains intact.

Final Thoughts

The fifty voices on this list represent a fraction of the intellectual energy being directed at sustainability and ESG globally right now. What they share is a commitment to original thinking, honest engagement with complexity, and active participation in a field that is genuinely consequential for the organisations and communities they work with.

The best thing you can do with this list is not to follow all fifty people but to find the five or six whose work speaks most directly to your specific challenges and engage with that work seriously. Read the books. Listen to the podcasts. Respond to the LinkedIn posts. Bring the thinking into your own organisation's conversations. That is how thought leadership actually produces value.

If your team is working on sustainability strategy and you want support building the leadership culture that will allow that strategy to land, Jonno White works with organisations globally on exactly that question. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, Jonno helps leadership teams build the clarity, communication, and accountability habits that turn strategic commitments into operational reality. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your organisation's needs.

You can also find Jonno's book Step Up or Step Out at Amazon Australia and explore more resources at consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

If you are building out your understanding of the sustainability and ESG speaker landscape, you will find the blog post "35 Best Keynote Speakers on Sustainability and ESG (2026)" a useful companion to this thought leader directory. It focuses specifically on practitioners you can book for conferences and events, ranging from CSOs and climate scientists to policy advocates and innovation leaders.

Keep reading: consultclarity.org/post/keynote-speakers-sustainability-esg