Surviving Disruption, Following The Money

It has been a brutal year for many of the most senior sustainability leaders in financial institutions across Europe and the US, with teams downsized, leadership positions cut, and reporting functions absorbed into mainstream departments. In Asia, by contrast, green finance jobs are growing as capital flows into clean energy, grids and electric mobility reach record levels. The macro direction is clear: disruption is inevitable.

We are already deep into a turbulent transition – messy, uneven, and impossible to reconcile with business as usual. Plausible disruption scenarios include the breakdown of parts of the food system, a climate-induced credit crunch through uninsurability, or major supply-chain shocks. Any of them would have immediate implications for financial institutions and jobs within them. Disruption will not be contained to sustainability teams. It will cascade through risk, strategy, lending, investment, technology, and client functions. At the same time, turbulence and innovation will unlock major economic opportunities. The next wave of growth will come from new technologies and business models designed for a carbon- and resource-constrained world. But these will not be “green jobs” in the way they were understood in the past.

Green jobs in finance have never been a constant. Early roles often emerged out of CSR, communications or technical compliance teams. As societal concerns about the future grew, financial institutions chased the zeitgeist – creating dedicated sustainability teams to manage those expectations and support the development of ambitious targets and new ‘green’ products. These teams swelled during the ESG boom, in response to burgeoning reporting burdens – then shrank in the ensuing backlash. The pattern is clear: jobs follow market cycles and political winds, and sustainability teams are no longer immune from the cyclicality of the markets. Only work that is clearly tied to near-term commercial survival is certain to endure – and is increasingly integrated into core business functions once it becomes commercially central.

The question is what comes next. One answer is already visible. AI is reshaping every function in financial institutions and, in the process, redefining jobs. Billions are being invested in redesigning core risk and credit systems and in reskilling staff to work with these models. Tomorrow’s sustainability work is more likely to be about training algorithms to price systemic risk than drafting reports.

And commerciality is king. If you don’t understand how the business makes money, and you can’t situate your role in relation to how it will make money in future, you probably won’t have a job there in future. In the past, corporate sustainability teams often focused on high-profile initiatives, reflecting pressure to make bold public claims. These efforts delivered visibility but were vulnerable when reputational plays began to attract political attacks and activist investor scrutiny rather than capital inflows. As Africa’s COP30 Special Envoy, Carlos Lopes, puts it: “There is no such thing as voluntary markets – it is either voluntary in which case it is philanthropy, or it is a market. The sector will follow the money. So should professionals planning their careers.”

In future, the jobs that will have the greatest impact will be in mainstream functions that decide how money is made. At the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, our programmes have evolved to reflect this reality – helping leaders test strategies against disruption, identify promising bets, and build the momentum to scale them. We expect five roles to dominate the next decade of finance:

• Deal-makers in transition finance – investment bankers, private equity and venture specialists structuring capital into disruptive technologies across energy, transport, agriculture, real estate, infrastructure and industry. Their challenge: back the winners and avoid stranded assets.
• Risk managers who price disruption as business as usual – credit, risk and insurance professionals embedding geopolitical, technological and environmental shocks directly into lending, trading and underwriting.
• Client transition advisors – relationship managers who guide firms through credible transition plans, helping them transform their business models via viable financing strategies.
• Foresight and data leads – strategists and quants using advanced analytics and AI to model exposures, test pathways and identify profitable growth opportunities.
• Policy and market navigators – senior advisors ensuring portfolios and deals align with shifting disclosure rules, industrial policies and trade regimes, while engaging credibly with regulators and policymakers to enable disruption to be priced into mainstream models.

Which roles scale fastest will depend on who is writing the cheques. Sovereign wealth funds and pensions are channelling capital into renewables, grids and agri-tech, creating demand for dealmakers and risk specialists. Private equity is targeting both the decarbonisation of legacy assets and the scaling of low-carbon industries. With fundraising under pressure, firms are becoming more selective – which makes operational turnaround, growth execution and policy fluency critical to success. And big tech’s race for AI power is driving huge new investment in clean energy and storage. These flows are not driven by sustainability labels, but they are reshaping markets and pulling financial talent toward the sectors that define the transition.

The real action will be in the deal rooms, trading floors and risk committees where capital gets committed. Success will go to those who follow the money, connect their work to growth and combine contextual intelligence, entrepreneurial drive and tech savviness.