Future capitalism must be planet-friendly

In a planetary context increasingly dominated by geopolitical conflicts, social and environmental sustainability have for some time now seemed to have moved out of the zone of interest and into oblivion.

In the United States (and elsewhere), anti-woke movements are increasingly developing, and BlackRock itself - for years a champion of sustainability strategies (e.g. through the letters sent annually by Larry Fink to the CEOs of the world's leading companies) - declared in January 2025 that it would abandon (along with other financial firms) the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative (a sort of international club that brings together the main asset management players committed to containing global warming). While the European Union has long been characterised by the so-called Green Deal and legislation significantly anchored to climate and social sustainability, the omnibus package presented by the European Commission on 26 February 2025 and the so-called 'stop-the-clock' directive 2025/794 have given a clear signal that something is changing. And in this context one must ask oneself whether the legislative cornerstones of EU sustainability (e.g. Directive 2024/1760 on companies' duty of care for sustainability purposes; Directive 2022/2464 on corporate sustainability reporting, already implemented in Italy with Legislative Decree no. 125 of 2024) are still glimmers of the future or just waves of the past destined to break against new value priorities.

But do we really have to resign ourselves to these radical changes in scenarios and above all in values?

The new pontificate of Leo XIV placed the care of the 'common home' and social justice at the centre, in full continuity with the line drawn by Pope Francis on the issues of environmental and social sustainability (as two sides of the same coin). In the 2015 Encyclical Letter Laudato sì, the pontiff - starting from the "current context, in what is unprecedented for the history of humanity - recalled that -climate change is a global problem with serious environmental, social, economic, distributive and political implications, and constitutes one of the main current challenges for humanity... Never have we mistreated and offended our common home as in the last two centuries.... It is imperative to create a regulatory system that includes inviolable limits and ensures the protection of ecosystems, before the new forms of power derived from the techno-economic paradigm end up destroying not only politics but also freedom and justice... The principle of profit maximisation, which tends to isolate itself from all other considerations, is a conceptual distortion of economics'. And a few years later - in the Apostolic Exhortation Laudate Deum of 2023 - Pope Francis did not hesitate to state that "we are not reacting enough, since the world that welcomes us is crumbling and perhaps approaching a breaking point... There is no doubt that the impact of climate change will increasingly damage the lives of many individuals and families.... This is a global social problem that is intimately linked to the dignity of human life... The human - anthropogenic - origin of climate change can no longer be questioned'.

Well, these lessons and related courses of action remain central and difficult to question, with inevitable reflections on the issues of corporate purpose and the future of capitalism more generally.