Burberry has quietly knocked a decade off the urgency of its climate plan, becoming the latest FTSE 100 heavyweight to soften the green pledges that defined corporate Britain at the start of the decade.
In its 2025-26 annual report, the trench coat maker confirmed it now expects to hit net zero emissions “no later than” the 2049-50 financial year, a full ten years later than the 2039-40 deadline it set with great fanfare in 2021. Back then, the Riccardo Tisci-era management team promised to go further still, declaring Burberry would be “climate positive” by 2040 and insisting it was “helping protect our planet for generations to come”.
Four years on, the language is markedly more sober. The Macclesfield-based group described the rewritten target as a “pragmatic response to external factors”, while arguing the new timetable still reflected its view of climate change as “a principal risk” to the business. Translation: the City wants margin recovery, the supply chain is not decarbonising as quickly as anyone hoped, and Washington has stopped pretending to care.
From outlier to the herd
Burberry is hardly alone. Unilever, owner of Dove and Marmite, used its 2024 strategic reset to dilute a string of ethical commitments, including the pace at which it weans itself off virgin plastic. Nestlé walked away from the Dairy Methane Action Alliance last year, taking the air out of one of the food sector’s more ambitious decarbonisation coalitions. And the two London-listed oil majors, BP and Shell, have spent the past eighteen months unpicking renewable energy targets in favour of a frank return to barrels and cubic feet.
The political weather, of course, has shifted with them. President Trump’s return to the White House has emboldened US-listed peers to pare back ESG disclosures, and stock market investors – tired of paying a “virtue premium” on shares that have lagged the index – are pushing UK boards in the same direction. As I argued recently in my column on why UK businesses must not retreat from net zero in 2026, the danger is that short-term capitulation in the boardroom papers over a hard cost when capital markets, customers and regulators inevitably swing back.
Support authors and subscribe to content
This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.
