07/04/2026
A Head of Sustainability told me she'd spent six months trying to find budget for climate literacy training.
It wasn't that the organisation didn't care.
It was that nobody knew whose problem it was.
Leadership said: "Sounds like an L&D thing."
L&D said: "We don't really own sustainability content."
HR said: "Is this compliance? Culture? Both?"
And the budget sat in the gap between all three.
Here's what I see happen a lot: sustainability education gets treated like a specialist topic. Something technical. Niche. For the people whose job title includes the word "sustainability."
But climate literacy isn't a sustainability team problem. It's a business literacy problem.
The FD who doesn't understand transition risk is making capital allocation decisions in the dark. The Operations Director who sees decarbonisation as a cost — not a constraint to design around — will keep deprioritising it. The CEO who can't speak fluently about scope 3 is exposed every time they sit in front of an investor or a customer.
This isn't about awareness. It's about decision-making quality.
When you frame it that way — climate education as a business capability, not a values exercise — the budget conversation changes.
It stops being a sustainability line item. It becomes a leadership development investment.
L&D gets it. HR gets it. The CFO sometimes even gets it.
The framing was the problem all along.
Have you had to fight for climate education budget?
Where did it eventually sit — L&D, sustainability, somewhere else entirely?
