As net zero targets have become lightning rods in culture wars and boardrooms alike, many companies are going quiet. Even firms with strong climate credentials have scrubbed climate language from annual reports or delayed decarbonization plans, in a move known as green-hushing.
But while politics dominate the headlines, a quieter shift is underway. After more than a decade in which net zero served as the lingua franca of corporate climate ambition, the landscape has fractured. Conflicting claims, shifting methodologies, and rising accusations of greenwashing have eroded trust.
Companies now face competing definitions and fragmented reporting systems, with little assurance that anyone will believe their progress. For business this uncertainty isn’t just reputational, it carries financial consequences. Investors, insurers, and lenders are increasingly tying cost of capital to credible emissions data, turning the absence of clear standards into a direct business risk.
Amid this confusion, the power to define net zero is beginning to move away from politics and voluntary pledges toward the technical standards that shape regulation and markets. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is now finalizing what could become the first international, independently verifiable net zero standard for organizations — a blueprint intended to bring credibility, comparability, and legal safety to a space long clouded by confusion.
When Voluntary Pledges Need A Stronger Backbone
The fragility of voluntary alliances has become increasingly clear. The Net Zero Banking Alliance, once a flagship of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, ceased operating in October 2025 following disputes over antitrust risk and political scrutiny in the United States. The Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative (NZAM), once covering over $57 trillion in AUM, was forced to recalibrate after the exit of BlackRock. It recently released new guidance, removing references to 2050 as the net zero goal.
Similar tensions have chilled participation in other cross-sector coalitions. While voluntary cooperation can catalyze ambition, it struggles to sustain consistency, comparability or even legal defensibility once political or market pressures rise. The message is that voluntary cooperation alone may not be enough to sustain momentum. ISO’s effort to codify a single, verifiable framework could help to depoliticize progress, setting rules through technical consensus rather than moral persuasion.
Turning Ambition Into Infrastructure
Investors are also struggling to distinguish marketing from measurable performance, a distinction that increasingly influences capital allocation, risk ratings, and insurance underwriting. ISO’s forthcoming net zero standard (technically ISO 14060 – Net Zero Aligned Organizations) is an attempt to transform the chaos of voluntary climate pledges into a common operational language, the technical grammar that could underpin regulation, trade, and finance. For executives, this shift matters because a common definition of net zero will eventually influence procurement rules, supply-chain requirements, and how auditors verify climate claims.
In an interview, Noelia Garcia-Nebra, ISO’s head of sustainability and partnerships, described international standards as “the tools that turn intention into real action.” She oversees ISO’s sustainability strategy and its partnerships with organizations such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which recently entered a formal collaboration with ISO to harmonize emissions accounting.
“We’re introducing the net zero angle into systems companies already understand,” she explained. The idea is to integrate decarbonization into the management systems that already govern quality, environment, and safety, rather than treating climate commitments as separate, optional programs.
A System Built On Credibility
ISO’s credibility rests on its history, as well as its process. The same architecture that underpins ISO 9001 for quality management and ISO 14001 for environmental management has been guiding companies for decades. These frameworks are process-based: they set out how to improve performance across operations, supply chains, and governance, with independent verification to ensure consistency.
The new net zero standard applies the same logic to carbon emissions. It defines what net zero actually means, how progress is measured, and how results are verified by accredited third parties using the same criteria everywhere. It has built this through a consensus-based negotiation of hundreds of international experts from the 170+ government-recognized National Standards Bodies that make up ISO’s membership.
Scholars and standards bodies alike flag a recurring hazard with voluntary regimes: public comment dynamics and consensus processes can bias toward minimum effort, lowest common denominator outcomes unless science-based guardrails and enforcement are added. Critics also warn that the process may move too slowly for the pace of climate change, or that consensus-based standards can favor industry incumbents, but supporters argue that this is precisely what gives ISO its staying power.
By building rules that thousands of organizations can adopt and regulators can later embed, standards create a durable foundation that survives election cycles and policy swings. The process may be painstaking, but once agreed, it locks in a common language for action, one that markets, auditors, and governments can all trust.
Soft Law That Hardens Over Time
Behind the technical language lies a major shift in how policy takes shape. As Thomas Hale notes in The Net-Zero Governance Conveyor Belt, voluntary initiatives often mature into formal regulation over time, and the ISO sits in the middle of that process. Its standards remain voluntary, but they are recognized by the World Trade Organization as legitimate reference points for governments, allowing regulators to use them without creating barriers to trade.
In practice, a single document developed by technical experts from up to 170 countries can become the foundation for future national or regional regulation. It is soft law that hardens over time.
From Silence To Certainty
This process matters because it offers something politics currently cannot: a neutral, globally recognized definition of credible action. Clear rules and third-party verification reduce legal and reputational risks, which could make it safer for executives to talk publicly about what they are doing. They also give investors and lenders the assurance they need to price climate risk accurately, narrowing the credibility gap that has kept many companies quiet.
Garcia-Nebra believes that clarity can help reverse the trend toward silence. “The clarity it will bring — setting clear rules, reducing legal and reputational risks — can motivate organizations to show what they are doing,” she said. Instead of vague promises, companies will be able to point to verifiable progress through a recognized certification.
The Business Case For Comparable Climate Data
That clarity also builds a business case. Comparable, audited data on emissions could influence access to credit, insurance, and capital markets. In a world where the cost of capital is increasingly tied to climate performance, trustworthy measurement becomes financial infrastructure. “Taking action on net zero makes business sense,” Garcia-Nebra said. “It’s about managing risks, staying resilient, and remaining profitable in a changing world.”
Beyond Carbon, Toward Coherence
The implications extend beyond carbon. ISO recently launched its first biodiversity standard, establishing general principles for how organizations should assess their dependence on nature, set targets, and design governance. The next step is to connect these standards, integrating climate, nature, and circular economy into one coherent framework. This is how the world begins to measure not just emissions but the health of the broader systems on which economies depend.
Building A Truly Global Standard
ISO’s inclusive process may be as important as the technical outcome. Experts from regulators, academia, the private sector, and civil society are all involved, ensuring that the resulting guidance reflects both scientific integrity and practical usability. A specific annex for small and medium-sized enterprises will offer proportionate guidance, acknowledging that 80% of global businesses employ fewer than ten people. By giving all participants a shared language, ISO hopes to extend the benefits of credible climate action beyond large corporations to the vast majority of the economy.
A Quiet Revolution At COP 30
The standard is scheduled for a public consultation stage in 2026, soon after the climate conference of COP 30 in Belém, Brazil. That means any references to the standard’s uptake, recognitions or government alignment discussed in Belém could serve as early proof points of its emerging global relevance.
The Brazilian presidency has positioned the event as more than a negotiation over declarations: it aims to serve as a launchpad for the next decade of implementation, spanning mitigation, forests, just transition, nature and climate finance. Critical items on the agenda include the ramp-up of climate financing, especially the roadmap for the $1.3 trillion New Collective Quantified Goal agreed at COP29, and strengthening the role of the Amazon region in global climate architecture.
In short, while the headlines may still focus on high-level commitments and political theatre, the true inflection point may be found in the technical annexes, procedure language and standard-recognition systems that will be formally debated in Belém.
Although the forthcoming ISO standard is not a headline-grabbing announcement or a corporate pledge, it is the architecture for determining which climate claims can be trusted and which will quietly disappear. In the long run, that quiet precision may do more to secure the future of net zero than any speech, summit, or campaign.