The Resilience Imperative | Look Forward Ep. 39

That said, let's dive into sustainability quarterly and the resilience imperative that the journal very brilliantly covers.

There's several papers that cover a broad range of subjects of how resilience is implemented and assessed.

They range topically from AI governance and energy infrastructure to geographically with a paper specifically on Turkey, host country of COP 31, of course.

At a high level, when you step back from the individual findings, what is the most important conclusion that connects all of the papers?

I think at a very high level, sustainability in 2026 is a story of resilience.

It's how our stakeholders balancing urgent, often changing, sometimes competing priorities in the face of disruption and uncertainty.

And all the papers in this research journal explore different facets of resilience.

So one paper in specific, it looks at energy and climate as a function of geopolitics.

And as you're describing the global order that's being reshaped by wars, energy flows, AI and climate change.

What do those updated scenarios tell us about how, as a result of some of these shocks and tectonic shifts, how policymakers and companies are defining resilience?

So this, I'm glad you bring this up because this scenarios report is foundational work.

And my colleague, Paul McConnell, leads it each year in his role as S&P Global Energy's head of scenarios.

And for this new 2026 report that kicks off the S&P Global Sustainability Quarterly, it's energy resilience that's the name of the game.

And essentially we find that resilience is a defining lens for understanding the global energy future.

People want to understand how to create resilience amid all this volatility we've been talking about.

And it's become the new mantra for policymakers, for companies, because of course the future is unknown.

And so these scenarios offer sort of different alternative potential pathways to what the future might look like.

And we've got our base case scenario, which describes a world that conclusively pivots the global energy system away from fossil fuels while still meeting growing energy needs of developed and emerging economies.

We've got an adaptation scenario that balances a fossil fuel powered economic growth future against the risks of heightened global warming.

And in this scenario, countries pivot towards strategies that are emphasizing adaptation to climate change over emissions mitigation.

And that means that energy consumption and fossil fuel demand remain robust over the long term.

So two very different views there.

We've also got a fracture scenario, and that looks at the possibility of accelerated technological progress in a weak policy and governance environment.

And then there's the renaissance scenario, which is a lower emissions future that minimizes climate impacts, doesn't eliminate them entirely.

And this scenario also maximizes domestic energy supply through accelerated build out of clean energy technologies.