How well are corporate sustainability goals designed? A global assessment of corporate commitments to water, ecosystems, climate, and materials and waste management

Amid rising global challenges, corporate sustainability commitments are under increasing scrutiny. This study offers a data-driven analysis of how companies develop sustainability goals and how these align with seven transformative criteria. We used a global dataset of 818 goals from 534 companies, evaluated through the Embedding Project’s third-party Sustainability Goal Assessment framework, to assess the prevalence and quality of commitments. We compared how frequently aspects like system resilience, strategic impact or commitment transparency were included in commitments across different company types and geographically. Climate-related goals were most common and tended to receive higher scores for quality, mainly due to alignment with established reporting frameworks, but often fell short on systemic change, transparency, and implementation clarity. Ecosystem and water-related goals, though less frequent, were more likely to aim for strategic impacts and systemic change reflecting the role of multi-stakeholder coordination and strategic alignment. Commitments were scored as higher quality on average in the communication service sector compared to industrials, information technology and consumer discretionary sectors and in cases of private ownership structures. Relational network analysis revealed dependencies among criteria, highlighting that transparency’s plays a central role in goal quality and the importance of actionable plans. Our findings suggest that achieving improvements in the quality of sustainability commitments requires corporate stakeholders to define measurable, time-bound sustainability goals, which extend accountability across the value chain, and integrate transparent reporting, and have incentives for systemic change. Policymakers can support this by standardizing terminology, creating fiscal incentives, and ensuring stable, long-term regulations that mandate transparency and full life cycle accountability.Author summary: In this study, we explored how companies set and communicate their sustainability goals, and what this means for addressing urgent global challenges. We reviewed 818 goals from 534 companies around the world, assessing their quality and how well they support meaningful, long-term change. We found that climate-related goals were the most common and often scored well because they follow established reporting practices. However, these goals frequently lacked important elements, such as clear implementation pathways, transparency, and integration into broader strategies. Goals focused on ecosystems and water were less common, yet they often showed stronger links to high-impact practices, including collaboration across sectors and alignment with wider societal priorities. We also observed differences in goal quality depending on a company’s sector and ownership structure. Our findings highlight the need to embed sustainability into core decision-making and structured reporting and to give equal attention to climate, biodiversity, and water to create more balanced and effective strategies for the future.