Corporations are in a period of profound transition. Regulations are evolving unevenly across jurisdictions. Internal sustainability teams are being reorganized. Capital markets are redefining what counts as material. AI is reshaping how sustainability data is measured and audited. The federal regulatory tailwinds many companies counted on a few years ago have shifted or stalled.

That was the premise of this year’s Berkeley Corporate + Climate Summit, co-hosted by Berkeley Law’s Center for Law and Business (BCLB) and Berkeley Haas’s Sustainable & Impact Finance Initiative (SAIF). The day was structured as a working session: how do corporations actually do this — not in theory, but on the ground, in a polarized world where the easy answers have run out.

Susan Mac Cormac, Partner at Morrison & Foerster and the summit’s anchor sponsor, set the global frame: the U.S. is moving backwards, Europe sideways, Asia leading the charge. The action is at the state level — and California is the state that matters most.

Susan Mac Cormac greets the crowd as the conference begins.

Stavros Gadinis, Faculty Director of BCLB, opened with the move that set up the whole summit. While the public conversation focuses on regulation and enforcement, he observed, the real work happens within corporations. That is where the effort needs to be, and where the authority to solve the problem actually lies. The science is largely clear. “The problem is not science,” he said. “The problem is governance.” Shareholders, stakeholders, employees, communities — all of them have to come together, and the way they come together is through institutions that deliberate, decide, and take initiatives.

Panos N. Patatoukas, Co-Director of SAIF, framed the stakes. With the SEC having rolled back federal climate rules, California is filling the vacuum: SB 253 requires full-scope emissions disclosure, with first reports due August 10, 2026. “The decisions we make today about climate, disclosure, and accountability will shape the world the next generations inherit. Focusing on the long term and transcending the moment is critical.” The summit’s premise, in his framing, was “intellectual arbitrage” — breaking academic silos across disciplines.

The summit drew nearly 400 participants, split roughly evenly between in-person and online attendees. The conference was made possible by sponsors Morrison & Foerster, Freshfields, Weil, and KPMG.

The Regulatory Landscape

The opening panel — moderated by William Tarantino of Morrison & Foerster, with Catherine Atkin (Stanford CodeX, chief legal advisor for SB 253), Janine Guillot (BCG, former CEO of SASB), and Ashley Walter (Orrick) — mapped the global terrain. ISSB has now absorbed TCFD and SASB into a global baseline; IFRS S1 and S2 are the standards investors should be tracking. California law SB 253 applies to companies with over $1 billion in revenue doing business in the state; SB 261, covering companies above $500 million, remains enjoined pending Ninth Circuit review. Scope 3 — roughly 90 percent of most corporate footprints — is the contested frontier, and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) is still finalizing how to phase it in. Walter’s subtext: we’re at “the trough of ESG, or the apex of anti-ESG,” and yet his firm’s responsible-business practice had its busiest year on record. Guillot’s closing line: the direction of travel is clear; the smart move is to advocate for convergence, not retreat.

Inside Companies

The second panel, with Dominique Alepin (Salesforce), Sam Houshower (Freshfields), Erika Schiller (ClimeCo), and Thom Wetzer (Oxford), complicated the retreat narrative. Alepin’s diagnostic was the sharpest: many companies’ double materiality assessments were done by separate consultants and never reconciled with enterprise risk management, leaving climate work invisible to the audit and risk committees where capital actually gets allocated. The opportunity is using risk-management language to bring climate into the conversations that drive board decisions. Wetzer brought the European perspective: the EU’s omnibus rollback cut the meaningful actions while leaving much of the paperwork in place. The collective observation: companies have gone quieter on climate communications, not because the issue is less material, but because the legal and reputational risks of overclaiming have risen sharply. Quiet is not the same as inactive.

Hybrid Governance and the GHG Protocol

Judy Samuelson of the Aspen Institute moderated the “where hope resides” panel with Anne Sheehan (PJT Partners, formerly CalSTRS), Mark Surman (Mozilla), and Mac Cormac. Surman walked through Mozilla’s structure as a live case study; Mac Cormac, who co-led the drafting of California’s Social Purpose Corporation statute, mapped the toolkit of PBCs, perpetual purpose trusts, and sidecar charities. Anthropic and Patagonia came up as live examples.

Pankaj Bhatia, Director of the GHG Protocol, took the lunch keynote with what he framed as the most consequential update in two decades. Three changes matter most: Scope 3 is becoming required, not optional; a new Category 16 covers other value chain activities not captured in categories 1-15, such as  e-commerce intermediaries; and a new “third ledger” framework will let companies account for market instruments across all three scopes — potentially mobilizing substantial investment into hard-to-abate sectors. His parting advice: don’t let imperfect standards become an excuse for inaction.

Capital, Action, and the Carbon Stack

Stavros Gadinis moderated an afternoon keynote conversation with Anne Simpson (OMFIF, Berkeley, formerly Franklin Templeton, inaugural chair of Climate Action 100+) and Ramaswamy Variankaval (Global Head of Corporate Advisory, J.P. Morgan). Simpson reached for Akerlof: “We want a market for peaches, but we actually have a market for lemons.” Without verified emissions data, investors cannot price climate risk. But information alone is not enough — quarterly reporting cycles, executive comp, and fund manager mandates all push capital toward the wrong horizon. “If you pay peanuts,” she said, “you get monkeys.” Variankaval offered the counterweight: at J.P. Morgan, climate sits inside the investment bank because financing, business, and climate strategy can’t be decoupled. The disagreement on emphasis — information first vs. action first — ran through the rest of the day.

Anne Simpson during her panel.

The assurance panel — Andrew Behar (As You Sow), Julio Friedmann (Carbon Direct), Matt Pelton (Deloitte) — turned to disclosure-as-liability, the EEOC’s subpoena of Nike over a sustainability-report DEI statement, and the seventeen states that have made it effectively illegal for fiduciaries to consider ESG risk. Behar’s line: companies do it anyway, because no competent board ignores material risk. The AI panel — Matthew Potts moderating Logan Goldie-Scot (Generate Capital) and Allison Wolff (Vibrant Planet) — took on the sharpest live tension: AI is simultaneously one of the fastest-growing sources of energy demand and one of the most powerful tools for siting, grid optimization, and risk modeling. The interconnection bottleneck — seven-plus-year queue times that push developers toward on-site gas — is the live problem. Bring-your-own-generation and proximate storage offer a path to two-year energization, if utilities and grid operators are willing to model it.

Keynote: California as a Laboratory

The day closed with Patatoukas in conversation with Sydney Vergis, Assistant Division Chief of CARB’s Industrial Strategies Division. With the SEC having rolled back federal climate rules, SB 253 is filling the vacuum: full-scope emissions disclosure, Scopes 1 and 2 this year, Scope 3 in 2027, assurance ramping to reasonable for Scopes 1 and 2 and limited for Scope 3 by 2030. The $1 billion threshold catches almost any large company, public or private, doing business in California.

Why mandate when voluntary reporting has expanded for a decade? Vergis’s answer: only mandates produce data comparable across companies and reliable enough for capital allocation. SB 253 runs parallel to the EU’s CSRD; Australia, Brazil, China, Singapore, and the UK are moving in the same direction under the ISSB framework. The risk is fragmentation. The work is convergence.

Are full-scope emissions disclosure mandates material to investors? Patatoukas’s research published recently in Nature Communications Sustainability shows that such mandates can change how investors evaluate companies and allocate capital. Shifting from partial (Scopes 1–2) to full-scope (Scopes 1–3) intensity metrics would substantially reorder sector-peer rankings. For example, Apple’s and Tesla’s carbon intensity rankings shift materially once Scope 3 is included in relative performance evaluation against sector peers.

Full-scope emissions disclosure mandates could trigger systematic capital reallocation within sectors by reshuffling sector-peer comparisons. If disclosure changes how capital gets allocated, the case for full-scope reporting gets a lot stronger.

Even as the mandates take shape, companies are moving on their own. More than 140 have already filed climate-related financial risk reports on CARB’s voluntary docket, with SB 261 still enjoined. CARB’s role is to be the statewide clearinghouse where that data lives.

Anne Simpson, from the audience, offered the closing line: if California gets this right, it may become the Chardonnay of global climate reporting.

Three years in, the conference keeps growing because the work it convenes is still being done.