Riding the sustainability waves losing your mind (or your career)

In the early 2000s, John Elkington and his team mapped what they described as “waves” of public and media interest in sustainability.

Tracking coverage from the early 1990s back to the 1960s, they found a repeating pattern of peaks and troughs, moments of intense attention followed by periods of fatigue, backlash, or indifference. Sustainability, they argued, moves in cycles, not lines

Two decades later, the data is even clearer: the waves never stopped, they accelerated.

From 2004 onwards, each peak grew higher and each drop sharper, driven by faster media cycles and more politicised attention. The sustainability boom years between 2019 and 2022 were exceptional: ESG flooded markets, universities trained thousands of sustainability professionals, and public interest surged. Then, just as predictably, the downturn arrived. By 2023, coverage fell. By 2024 and 2025, investor confidence thinned, greenhushing proliferated, and sustainability slipped from the centre of public conversation.

Even though I’ve known about these waves since I started working in sustainability in the late 1990’s, I too believed that the most recent upwave was the final win of the business case, of demographic change, of a collective understanding of the necessity of climate action.

Then the downwave came, and I remembered that no ‘win’ is ever permanent. And that the maxim that ‘this too will pass’ applies to the good as well as bad.

And downwaves suck.

Downwaves feel like failure and regression. Like being told that something you built your identity, values, and career around is suddenly unfashionable, inconvenient or even dangerous. That emotional impact is rarely acknowledged, and yet it shapes everything: our mental health, career decisions, and community cohesion.

So, the question is not whether we can stop the waves, because the evidence suggests we cannot. The real question is how, as sustainability professionals, we learn to live well inside them.

Mental Health & Pattern Literacy

Downwaves are psychologically damaging because they scramble meaning. The work becomes harder, slower, and less celebrated. Impact takes more effort and even the language of ESG becomes contested.

All this makes careers feel precarious.

It’s important in times like this to remember that the first and most important act of self-care is understanding that this is not personal.

Our Ride the Waves analysis shows that every major sustainability advance was followed by a contraction. The post-2008 financial crash led to nearly a decade of slowed progress. Yet many of the frameworks we now take for granted, from CSR integration to early climate disclosure norms, were forged during those years of apparent stagnation.

When you understand that downwaves are systemic, not moral verdicts, the emotional temperature drops. You stop mistaking silence for rejection or reading temporary disinterest as permanent defeat.

This does not make the moment pleasant, but it makes it survivable.

Mental resilience in sustainability is about temporal perspective. Knowing that attention will return allows you to decouple your sense of worth from the news cycle. It also allows you to pace yourself, because no movement can be run at sprint speed indefinitely.

Careers Are Built In Troughs, Not Peaks

Boom waves reward visibility, but downwaves reward substance.

During the peaks, sustainability careers expand rapidly. New roles appear and job titles proliferate. Language becomes exuberant and visionary. But during troughs, those same roles are scrutinised, consolidated, or even removed. This is where panic sets in, and where people might abandon the field entirely.

Historically, this is a mistake.

The Ride the Waves data shows that down waves are the periods when sustainability quietly embeds itself into systems. It’s also where new ideas have space to breath once all the old certainties, and urgencies, start to crack open.

This is the time to deepen skills that outlast fashion cycles: understanding financial trade-offs, navigating governance, translating environmental risk into business language, and managing change without applause. It is also the moment when credibility is built. When sustainability is no longer popular, those who can explain why it still matters become trusted rather than trendy.

Many of the senior sustainability leaders I work with today built their careers in previous downturns. They learned to argue calmly, give evidence patiently, and operate without external validation. Those capacities compound.

Community As Shock Absorber

One of the quiet dangers of down waves is isolation.

As institutional enthusiasm wanes, conferences thin out (or cost too much), funding contracts, and public affirmation disappears, we can begin to feel exposed, defensive, or alone. Yet historically, this is when informal communities matter most.

During previous downturns, peer networks sustained the movement as practitioners shared tools, sanity-checked ideas, and preserved institutional memory. We all reminded one another that the last time this happened, it also felt terminal.

Community is the mechanism by which continuity is maintained across cycles.

If you are feeling discouraged now, that is a signal to invest sideways rather than upwards. Build your relationships. Downwaves are when trust deepens, because fewer people are watching.

The final, counterintuitive truth in the Ride the Waves report is this: the most transformative ideas often emerge during periods of contraction.

Down waves strip away group think and soften the edges of compliance. Many of the changes that defined subsequent peaks began as quiet resets during unpopular years. Sustainability mutates in the quiet years so new paradigms are ready for the next uplift.

The report’s long-term projections suggest that the current downturn may last at least another 18 months if not longer, with the next major upswing accelerating towards the late 2020s.

Ask different questions now. What needs to be stronger next time? What failed during the last boom? What foundations must be rebuilt quietly so that the next peak is more resilient, more credible, and more human?

The waves will rise again as they always do.

The task, as individuals, is not to mistake the ebb for the end. It is to learn how to stand, think, and care in the water between crests.

In part two of Ride the Waves, we’ll set out exactly what might spark that next uplift, what will be left behind and what all that means for you!

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