Sustainability is the Top Predictor of Project Success, But Most Organizations Can’t Execute on it, New PMI® and GPM® Research Finds

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While executives express confidence, the teams responsible for delivery tell a different story, revealing why ambition alone is not enough.

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PHILADELPHIA — New research from Project Management Institute (PMI) and Green Project Management (GPM) shows that while sustainability has moved to the center of organizational strategy, many organizations are still not equipped to execute on it. The report points to a widening disconnect between strategic ambition and delivery reality.

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PMI research also found that sustainability is the number one predictor of project success – ranking ahead of project methodology, governance, and every traditional delivery factor. While sustainability drives innovation and boosts value realization, more than half of organizations (59%) do not fully integrate it at the project and function level, limiting its competitive impact.

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“Sustainability has often been a side agenda or a signaling exercise. But it is now increasingly tied to business resilience, competitiveness, and long-term value creation,”

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said Pierre Le Manh, President & CEO, PMI. “

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Our research shows that projects built around sustainability succeed at nearly twice the rate of those that are not. The challenge for leaders now, beyond embedding sustainability into strategy, is how to build the organizations to deliver on it.”

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The challenge is systemic rather than motivational

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The research, Executing Sustainability Strategy: When Ambition Meets Reality, is based on a global survey of nearly 1,600 professionals across 35 countries, and identifies six recurring friction points that weaken sustainability execution inside organizations.

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The six challenges or tensions are: difficulty quantifying sustainability benefits in business terms, weak integration into decision-making, inconsistent execution due to unclear goals, deprioritization under delivery pressure, limited visibility into how day-to-day actions drive impact, and the challenge of working against longer-term outcome horizons.

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Taken together, those friction points show why sustainability often remains visible in strategy decks and board materials but less prevalent in day-to-day delivery. The report also finds that 40% of respondents qualify as sustainability skeptics, doubting its impact, feasibility, or business relevance — a critical sign that weak execution capability can erode belief as well as performance.

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Closing the gap: clarity from the top, capability at the project level

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The research identifies two enablers that separate organizations that deliver on sustainability commitments from those that do not.

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On World Environment Day, Project Management Institute and Green Project Management launch the Certified Sustainable Project Professional (CSPP)™, a new certification and e-learning designed to turn corporate sustainability intent into resilient, future-ready delivery and successful business outcomes. The CSPP™ certification enables project professionals to assess sustainability dimensions early and embed them into real delivery decisions across project planning, execution and measurement. Through the PMI^® GPM^® P5™ methodology, the core of the CSPP™ certification, project teams will learn 260 ways to assess and manage sustainability-related risk, helping translate ambition into measurable impact and innovation.

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“Sustainability progress lives or dies at the project level,”

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said Joel Carboni, Chief Executive Officer of Green Project Management.

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“Every ton of emissions avoided, every resource conserved, every community made stronger by a project happens because a team had the skills, the standards and the will to deliver it. The CSPP

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™

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certification gives practitioners the rigor and the methods to make sustainability outcomes real rather than aspirational, and to do it at the scale this moment requires.”

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The CSPP™ certification comes at a critical moment, as the project-level stakes of sustainability continue to escalate. Today, 88% of companies view sustainability as a driver of value creation (Morgan Stanley Sustainable Signals: Corporates 2025). At the same time, climate-related disasters generated more than $200 billion in global economic losses in 2024 alone, underscoring the growing business and societal risks of inaction. Meanwhile, global data center electricity demand is projected to double to 945 TWh by 2030, placing complex tradeoffs around energy, water, and infrastructure directly in the hands of project teams (World Economic Forum; IEA Energy and AI Report). Regulatory expectations are also accelerating, with 90% of organizations planning to maintain full sustainability reporting practices, according to the PwC Global Sustainability Reporting Survey 2025.