2025: Uncertainty Redefines Material Strategy

Uncertainty as the new operating condition

The beginning of 2025 demonstrated how quickly global value chains can be affected by external changes. Adjustments in trade conditions led to immediate market reactions, shifting cost structures, and delayed sourcing decisions. Even without physical shortages, companies experienced rising volatility. This phase reinforced a broader realization: uncertainty is no longer an exception. It has become the baseline operating condition.  

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Efficiency reaches its limits under permanent volatility

In 2025 Organizations had to operate in an environment where availability, costs, and access to materials could change with little notice. Operating models optimized primarily for efficiency and stability showed clear limitations when volatility became persistent rather than temporary.

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The CSRD reality check on material dependencies

At the same time, 2025 highlighted the limits of established sustainability and resilience approaches. As organizations progressed with CSRD preparation and material-related regulations, many discovered gaps in their understanding of material dependencies and exposure points. Sustainability targets and risk narratives existed, but decision-ready insight into alternatives, recovery options, and material flexibility was often missing.  

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Material strategy moves to the center

This convergence marked 2025 as an inflection point. Material strategy, regulatory compliance, and economic resilience could no longer be treated as separate topics. They merged into one central question: how robust is a company’s access to critical materials under continuous uncertainty?

As a result, executive focus shifted. Instead of short-term optimization, attention moved toward structural control. Sourcing diversity, regionalization, secondary materials, and residual value became relevant inputs for procurement, product architecture, and investment decisions.

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Circularity as a strategic lever

In this context, circularity gained a pragmatic role. Recovery, reuse, and secondary material strategies were increasingly evaluated based on their ability to:

• Secure material availability
• Stabilize cost structures
• Reduce strategic dependencies

Circular value chains evolved from sustainability initiatives into active instruments for managing material risk and increasing control over critical inputs in volatile markets.

What this means for Chief Sustainability Managers

This shift also changed how sustainability functions contribute to business decisions. In 2025, Sustainability Managers increasingly operated at the intersection of regulation, material availability strategy, and operational decision-making. Rather than focusing on targets alone, their contribution centered on shaping options, prioritizing actions, and supporting strategic trade-offs to secure material access under conditions of ongoing uncertainty.  

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Outlook 2026: From reacting to designing for uncertainty

Looking ahead to 2026, these dynamics will intensify. Volatility will remain the baseline, regulatory expectations will continue to rise, and competition for critical materials will further increase. Companies that systematically anchor strategic material management and circular value logic in their core decision-making will be better positioned to maintain control in an increasingly unstable environment.

In 2026, competitive advantage will increasingly depend on how deliberately organizations design, manage, and secure material availability under conditions of permanent uncertainty.

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Supporting sustainability leaders in developing these capabilities will be a decisive factor in enabling organizations to manage material availability strategically in 2026 and beyond.  

If you want to strengthen your capabilities, our Chief Sustainability Manager course is the ideal next step.

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