The Future of Sustainability Leadership: Three Days in Tuscany

Across every major economy, the rules governing how businesses invest, report, and operate are being rewritten simultaneously.
Since 2019, the EU has committed over €1 trillion to its Green Deal (European Commission, 2020), the most ambitious climate regulatory programme ever enacted by a major economy.
In 2022, the US Inflation Reduction Act directed $369 billion toward clean energy (US Department of the Treasury, 2023), triggering over $115 billion in private manufacturing investment by 2024 (US Department of the Treasury, 2023), before the incoming administration began unwinding key provisions in early 2025.
The global carbon credit market reached $114 billion in 2025 and is projected to surpass $480 billion by 2035 (Global Market Insights, 2026).
From 2026, CBAM certificates will require importers to pay EU carbon prices, which will cover approximately 75% of EU emissions (Council Fire Resources, 2026).

The scale of capital in motion is unprecedented. So is the complexity. And the leaders responsible for navigating it are discovering that no single sector, no single jurisdiction, and no single function has the full picture.

This June, Terras returns to Villa Lena in Tuscany for its third consecutive year. Eighty leaders. Three days. No slides, no scripts, no recordings.
Over 200 leaders from more than 25 countries have passed through Terras gatherings since 2024. The format has not changed. The world around it has changed dramatically.

The ground has moved
When Terras first gathered in Tuscany in 2024, the European Green Deal was accelerating, the Inflation Reduction Act was reshaping American industrial policy, and transatlantic regulatory convergence on sustainability felt, if not inevitable, at least plausible. By 2026, that assumption has collapsed.

The EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive has been diluted under pressure from member states. The US has entered a political cycle in which the very vocabulary of ESG has become contested, and billions in clean energy funding have been cancelled or frozen. ISSB standards, finalised in 2023, are being adopted unevenly across jurisdictions. Carbon border adjustment mechanisms are creating new trade frictions that nobody fully understands yet. And artificial intelligence, which barely featured in sustainability strategy two years ago, is now forcing every CSO in the world to reconsider how they measure, report, and communicate impact.

This is not a landscape that rewards leaders who stay within their lane. A Chief Sustainability Officer at a luxury conglomerate cannot navigate EU due diligence requirements without understanding how those same regulations are being interpreted by the financial institutions that underwrite their supply chain. A managing director deploying capital into the energy transition cannot price risk accurately without understanding the policy environment in both Washington and Brussels.

These are not hypothetical interdependencies. They are the daily reality of leaders like Nancy Mahon at Estée Lauder, who is navigating disclosure requirements across multiple jurisdictions while simultaneously driving sustainability strategy for one of the world's largest beauty companies. Or Anisa Kamadoli Costa at Rivian, where the intersection of clean energy policy, automotive manufacturing, and capital markets plays out in every strategic decision.

The AI question nobody has answered yet
Perhaps no theme illustrates the convergence problem more clearly than artificial intelligence.

Since 2024, AI has moved from a peripheral concern to a central one for sustainability leaders. The computational energy demands of large language models are creating new carbon footprints that offset efficiency gains elsewhere.
AI-driven ESG scoring tools are proliferating, but their methodologies remain opaque. Regulators are scrambling to understand how AI intersects with existing disclosure frameworks. And corporate sustainability teams are being asked to integrate AI into their strategies without a shared understanding of what responsible deployment even looks like.

This is precisely the kind of challenge that cannot be solved within a single function or sector. It requires the CSO who understands operational reality, the policy expert who sees the regulatory trajectory, the investor who is pricing AI risk into portfolio decisions, and the technologist who knows what the tools can and cannot do. Velislava Ivanova, EY's Global Chief Sustainability Strategist, is among those grappling with these questions. The value is not in any single perspective. It is in the collision.

Carbon removal at a crossroads
The carbon removal industry is at an inflection point. McKinsey estimates the market could reach $300 billion to $1.2 trillion by 2050, with cumulative investment needs of $6 to $16 trillion over the coming decades (McKinsey & Company, 2023). But the path from here to there is far from certain.
The voluntary carbon market crashed from $1.87 billion in 2023 to $723 million in 2024 during its credibility crisis (World Economic Forum, 2025), and while it is rebuilding around higher-integrity standards, the gap between what exists and what is needed remains vast.
In 2026, the EU is finalising certification methodologies for carbon removal and planning a buyers' club to coordinate procurement (Heatmap, 2025). In the US, the Biden administration earmarked $1.2 billion in 2023 for direct air capture projects (US Department of Energy, 2023) that now face potential cancellation under the current administration.

There is something fitting about having this conversation surrounded by 500 hectares of Tuscan farmland. The tension between natural ecosystems and industrial systems is not abstract at Villa Lena. It is the landscape you walk through between sessions.

Michelle You, CEO of Supercritical, will lead a conversation in Tuscany on where carbon removal stands at this critical juncture. Supercritical has positioned itself at the intersection of corporate demand and removal supply. The question is no longer whether carbon removal works. The question is whether the market infrastructure, the buyers, the builders, and the capital allocators can mature fast enough for it to matter.

Rethinking what business is actually for
Behind the technical debates about regulation, carbon accounting, and AI lies a more fundamental question that has resurfaced with new urgency: What is the role of business in society?

The backlash against ESG, particularly in the US since 2023, has forced sustainability leaders to articulate their case in economic terms rather than moral ones. The companies that are thriving in this environment are those that have embedded sustainability into their business model rather than bolting it on as a reporting function.
Charlie McGregor, CEO of The Social Hub, has built a company where social impact and commercial performance are not in tension but are structurally inseparable. That experience carries particular weight at a moment when many leaders are being asked to justify the existence of their function.

This leadership challenge resonates across sectors.
Gregg Meyer at Steve Madden is embedding sustainability across a portfolio of consumer brands in a market that is increasingly sceptical of sustainability messaging. Linda Freiner at Zurich Insurance is navigating the intersection of climate risk and underwriting as the insurance industry is forced to reckon with the physical reality of climate change. Subho Mukherjee at Nokia is working at the nexus of technology infrastructure and environmental impact. The specifics differ. The underlying question is the same.

The transatlantic fracture
If there is one thread that connects all the challenges above, it is the divergence between European and American approaches to sustainability governance.

For a decade, the assumption was that regulatory frameworks would gradually converge. That assumption has been replaced by a reality in which companies operating across both markets must navigate fundamentally different expectations, reporting requirements, and political dynamics.
The EU's €620 billion annual green investment gap is growing as the Recovery and Resilience Facility expires in 2026 (Bruegel, 2024). In the first quarter of 2025 alone, $6.9 billion in US clean technology manufacturing projects were cancelled, even as $67.3 billion in clean energy investment continued to flow (Clean Investment Monitor, 2025).
The signals are contradictory, and the leaders caught in the middle need more than their own sector's perspective to read them accurately.

Teresa Johnson, Partner at WilmerHale, brings the legal perspective on this fracture. Robert H. Edwards Jr., Managing Director at Hamilton Clark, brings the capital markets view. Michael Kobori, who led sustainability at Starbucks through multiple political cycles, brings an operational perspective gained from navigating this terrain before.

Aurelia Figueroa at Breitling and Iris Van der Veken at the Watch and Jewellery Initiative 2030 are both navigating European regulatory frameworks from within the luxury and watch industries. Kurt Harrison at Russell Reynolds Associates is advising boards on sustainability governance at a moment when the definition of fiduciary duty is being contested. Marcello Palazzo brings yet another vantage point. The transatlantic question looks different from each of these positions. Seeing it from all of them simultaneously is what changes the quality of the decisions that follow.

The format as thesis
What three years at Villa Lena have demonstrated is that the format itself is an argument. When you replace keynote stages with outdoor panels beneath the trees, boardrooms with guided hikes through the Tuscan hills, and conference catering with organic farm-to-table dinners made from locally sourced produce, something shifts. Leaders stop performing and start thinking together. A wine tasting becomes a negotiation. A shared breakfast becomes a partnership. An evening with live music under the Tuscan sky becomes the conversation that should have happened at the last three conferences but never did.

The rules are diverging. The leaders must converge.

And at Terras, they already are.

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Sources

1. European Commission, "Finance and the Green Deal," 2020. commission.europa.eu
2. US Department of the Treasury, "FACT SHEET: How the Inflation Reduction Act's Tax Incentives Are Ensuring All Americans Benefit from the Growth of the Clean Energy Economy," October 2023. home.treasury.gov
3. Global Market Insights, "Carbon Credit Market Size, Global Report 2026–2035," January 2026. gminsights.com
4. Council Fire Resources, "What is EU Green Deal?," February 2026. resources.councilfire.org
5. McKinsey & Company, "Carbon Removals: How to Scale a New Gigaton Industry," December 2023. mckinsey.com
6. World Economic Forum, "The New Renewable Revolution: Why Carbon Dioxide Removal Will Transform the Carbon Market," 2025. weforum.org
7. Heatmap, "After a Slow 2025, Where Does Carbon Removal Go From Here?," December 2025. heatmap.news
8. US Department of Energy, Direct Air Capture Hubs Programme, 2023. energy.gov
9. Bruegel, "An Investment Strategy to Keep the European Green Deal on Track," 2024. bruegel.org
10. Clean Investment Monitor, "Q1 2025 Update," 2025. cleaninvestmentmonitor.org

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