In 2026, companies that can effectively meet the challenge of doing business more sustainably and achieve outstanding environmental and financial performance, while backing it up with numbers, will come to the fore. In electricity generation, renewable sources are set to replace coal as the largest source of electricity, and the mood around ESG is becoming more selective. Why? Let’s look at the data together.
Sustainability leaders for 2026
The new year has new favorites in the field of sustainability. TIME and Statista have compiled a ranking called World’s Best Companies in Sustainable Growth 2026. It is led by JYP Entertainment from South Korea, which was the first in the domestic entertainment industry to achieve RE100, i.e., 100 percent renewable energy. Sixth place went to Nvidia, which was named the fastest-growing company in the US. According to the company’s sustainability announcement for fiscal year 2025, the offices and data centers it directly operates run on 100 percent renewable electricity, and the Blackwell platform is 25 times more energy-efficient at processing large language model outputs than the previous Hopper generation. It may come as a surprise to many investors that Inditex, the parent company of the well-known fast fashion chain Zara, ranked 88th in the ranking, thanks to its relatively low emissions, waste production, and water consumption compared to the industry.
Will coal lose its primacy?
According to the IEA, global electricity demand is expected to grow by 3.7 percent in 2026, which is faster than the 2015-2023 average of 2.6 percent. According to its Electricity Mid-Year Update 2025 report, the IEA expects the combined share of wind and solar energy in global electricity generation to rise above 19 percent. By comparison, in 2024 it accounted for 15 percent. Wind and solar energy together are expected to generate nearly an additional 1,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of production, which is roughly equivalent to Japan’s annual consumption. At the same time, it predicts that renewable sources may surpass coal as the largest source of electricity and that COâ‚‚ emissions from electricity generation should decline slightly.
The market is cleaning up and the rules are tightening
While renewables are gaining momentum in the electricity sector, investment sentiment around ESG is becoming more selective. Morningstar reports that global sustainable funds saw net outflows of approximately $55 billion in the third quarter of 2025, after inflows of $5.8 billion in the previous quarter. A key moment was the $49 billion redemption from four BlackRock European funds, although total sustainable fund assets still rose to $3.7 trillion thanks to market developments. On top of this comes the tightening of definitions. In its draft amendments to the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) in the second half of November 2025, the European Commission stated that categorized products will have to ensure that 70 percent of the portfolio supports the chosen strategy, and it wants to link ESG claims in names and marketing to these categories. The accompanying document to the proposal also states that Europe accounts for up to 84 percent of global sustainable fund assets.
Green bond volume exceeds milestone
One of the most concrete bridges between sustainability and capital are green and sustainable bonds. The LSEG said that by the end of the third quarter of 2025, green bond issuance had reached $467 billion, up 1 percent year-on-year, with a record for the full year 2024 of $572 billion. The share of green bonds in global debt issuance fell only slightly from 4.5 percent to 4.3 percent, with the total outstanding volume of green bonds exceeding $3 trillion for the first time at the end of the third quarter of 2025. At the same time, LSEG reports an average annual growth rate of approximately 30 percent over the past five years.*
Facts, not feelings, must follow
The outlook for 2026 looks less like a competition for the greenest label and more like a practical selection of winners in electrification, infrastructure, and transparency. The IEA points to investments in clean technologies, Morningstar documents a more selective approach to capital, and the European Commission is tightening rules to make sustainability comparable across products. Add to that green bonds, which according to LSEG have exceeded $3 trillion in outstanding volume, and you have a picture of a market where it will pay off in the new year to look at the numbers, not the slogans.
OlÃvia Lacenová, Analyst Wonderinterest Trading Ltd.
* Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
*Paid collaboration
