A new executive report from IESE Business School Institute for Sustainability Leadership and SE Advisory Services on why most of the financial value sustainability creates never reaches the bottom line — and what separates the companies that capture it from the rest. Download the 2026 executive report, produced by IESE Business School Institute for Sustainability Leaderships and SE Advisory Services. The analysis draws on SE Advisory Services' client engagements and on the CSO Circle convened by IESE's Institute for Sustainability Leadership, with sustainability and finance leaders from AltamarCAM Partners, Barceló Hotel Group, BBVA, CaixaBank, Gestamp, MANGO, Roca Group, and Suma Capital.
The capture gap
Companies have largely won the argument that sustainability pays. The unsolved problem is capture: why so little of the proven value reaches the bottom line. Climate exposure has moved from projected scenarios to tangible financial impact — reaching cost structures, asset values, insurance, and access to capital — while the same forces reward the companies that manage them with more resilient margins and better financing terms. The gap between companies that manage this exposure and those that do not is therefore not only a risk gap; it is a value gap.
The constraint is capability
Most large companies hold the conviction and the data. What they lack is the means to measure exposure in financial terms, govern the decisions that follow, and act on them. That capability rests on two enablers working together: digital systems that turn fragmented data into financial signal, and governance that connects those signals to capital allocation, board oversight, and executive incentives. Because the relationship is multiplicative, a single weak link holds back the whole — which is why companies with real ambition still capture only a fraction of what is available.
Returns that recur across three channels
The returns are concrete and recur across three channels, each measurable in financial terms:
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In operations, drawing on SE Advisory Services' work across more than 1,100 industrial energy projects, energy savings of 15 to 20% are typical, with payback periods of 3 to 4 years.
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In the value chain, one industrial group's move to circular business models was modelled to add €1 billion in incremental revenue.
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In access to capital, a single decarbonization roadmap unlocked roughly €100 million in sustainability-linked financing.
In this report, you'll discover
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Why the binding constraint on sustainability value is capability, not ambition — and how governance and digital systems decide how much value a company captures
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How physical, transition, and natural-capital exposure is already repricing cost structures, asset values, borrowing costs, and insurance
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Where the returns concentrate across operations, the value chain, and access to capital — quantified in financial terms
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How companies that build this capability report up to 20% lower energy use in year one, up to 30% less unplanned downtime, and two to three times greater visibility of their own supply-chain emissions within eighteen months
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What boards can do to move deliberately up the value-capture curve — measure, govern, act
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First-hand perspectives from sustainability and finance leaders across eight companies
Download the report
SE Advisory Services helps organizations turn sustainability into measurable financial value, supported by Resource Advisor+, its AI-native platform for energy and sustainability management.
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