Corporate sustainability reports in 2026: what companies published, and what they stopped publishing

295 fewer sustainability reports. Only 18 of them from the S&P 500.

1,444 Russell 3000 companies published a sustainability report in 2025. In 2024, 1,739 did. A 17 percent drop, the first in the five years the survey has run.

The decline is concentrated. S&P 500 publishing fell 4 percent, from 476 to 458. The rest of the loss is mid-cap and small-cap, where the report competes with everything else one small team already owns.

Plenty of companies kept the work going and stopped talking about it. ESG in the report title fell from 40 percent of S&P 100 companies in 2023 to 6 percent by April 2025, while 87 percent of S&P 500 firms still disclosed climate targets, unchanged from the prior year. EcoVadis surveyed 400 executives at US companies above $1 billion in revenue: 87 percent had maintained or increased sustainability investment, and 31 percent are investing more and promoting it less.

Going quiet still costs you.

The rating agencies score you either way. S&P Global states that when a company does not respond, analysts complete the assessment on its behalf using public information. Around 70 percent of the underlying questions need public data to score any points, and remaining gaps get modeled from industry peers. A Stanford Graduate School of Business review found MSCI appears to assume a non-responder performs at the industry average. FTSE assumes the worst.

Evidence expires too. S&P's 2026 CSA handbook caps attached documents at 24 months. EcoVadis caps KPI data at two years. Skip two cycles and part of your documentation falls out of the window while the questionnaires keep arriving.