Setting The Tone (ESG Summit 2025 Debrief) … 6-Step Pathway Towards Bioregionalism And Regeneration … The ESRS Betrayal (A Drama In Two Acts) …
The Lighthouse Keeper Edition 33 | December 2025
As we are reaching the festive season and attention will slow down by mid-month, it’s time for the last Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter of 2025. I look back at 5 earlier editions this year, it’s been quite a year again, lots of light and shadow. Most promising has been the halo effects around bioregionalism, our renewed source code for humanity in a collapsing economic and eco-social collapse, and how we at r3.0 support and build community. Most devastating were political, lobbying and industry reactions to our predicament, they all move squarely in the wrong direction, so that all aspects of the polycrisis become one big metacrisis, and much quicker than we thought. One example is the betrayal orchestrated by European politics and its EFRAG apparatchiks regarding the E’S’RS, a drama in two acts, both on content and process. I completed an assessment in preparation of the 4th season of our r3.0 UNSDPI Training Standards Deep Dive Module, and the clarity of what happened in the last two years is stunningly obvious. Sustainability, the ‘S’ in the ESRS was completely demolished and became toxic, so that the ESRS are now a complete greenwash with a 92-94% reduced target group of companies. They ride into the sunset towards nothingness.
Setting The Tone (ESG Summit 2025 Debrief)
I have to admit: I don’t go to ESG conferences anymore. I hate the hooray song-sheet of incrementalism, the repeat-mode of old stereotypes, all the tools that deliver data cemeteries for incremental indicators and statistics, the hectic sophistication of all those that pretend to having invented the next holy grail (mostly AI-based nowadays), the glorification of ‘small steps in the right direction’, and all of this without the sustainability context that clearly tells: too little, too late! But who cares, let’s just rumble on with more incrementalism as long as someone pays for it and the lemming effect works. The denial of what’s necessary is stunning, the techno-lovers with all their functionality updates and upgrades, it all reminds me of middle age markets of jugglers and fire-eaters. It’s #ESGLaLaLand Circus right there.
Believe me, I was surprised when the organizers of the ESG Summit 2024, the fantasticJens Mürke and his team at EUPD Research ESGcame to us at r3.0, became an Advocation Partner immediately, and told me: please come and present your findings in the closing keynote of the day, your voice needs to be heard. I accepted, as I was able to say what I wanted to say without a need for diplomacy or tinkering around the edges. And as I was thanked by so many for the rest of the evening I thought, ‘well, something resonated here and today’, but maybe it was just a one-off, Ralph came and did his thing, thank you.
Earlier this year, the team reached out to me again and said that they’d like to invite me to hold he Opening Keynote of the 2025 edition of the Summit, plus a Breakout Session. That sounded interesting and a step-up from a year earlier. As I also realized that the interest in context-based sustainability (or authentic sustainability) seemed to have grown during this past year (I posted Sunday Thoughts about this, see below), I agreed and was also happy to see that Robert Habeck, Vice Chancellor and Minister of the Economy and Climate Protection of Germany 2021-2025, would take over the baton for the Closing Keynote. He was in my view the best Minister of Economics we ever had, but never wanted by the keepers of the status quo.
Having now returned from the Petersberg near Bonn (what a venue!) I am very happy that I said yes. The notion of last year that the ESG field needs to ‘transform or die’ in our economic system collapse was omnipresent, and references to my keynote were made throughout the day, as Philipp Bächstädt, moderator of the day, was telling me during dinner. I had countless good talks, was invited to do a podcast and filmed a statement for EUPD Research.
6-Step Pathway Towards Bioregionalism And Regeneration
I realized that I held one of my most personal talks, reflecting outcomes of my mourning process from hospicing ‘sustainability-as-is’ towards midwifing ‘regeneration-as-needed’, and finally offered a ‘six-step-pathway’ for ESG experts and practitioners of how to transcend from pure ESG towards bioregionalism and regeneration. I’d like to offer three slides in this Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter as excerpts, but also offer the full keynote and breakout links below as well.
These were animated slides that built up over time. But I knew that people would ask me for my slide decks, and by experience I know that they don’t want one-word bullet points, but appreciate full sentences, that’s why I chose that format.
While uncomfortable for many that followed after me and sang the ESG hooray song without context, often falling back into today’s realities and relativities, technicalities and functionalities, and seeing bioregionalism and regeneration as ‚far down the road‘ or ‚nice, but with little chance for success‘, one could feel a certain degree of insecurity, helplessness, discomfort or deep-sitting frustration. Well, I just told them that the economic system design will implode (and gave them all the data supporting that view). There was this inherent tension for many that collapse is too uncomfortable to even think about it. But the gut tells a different story. You could literally feel it.
I talked to someone who felt deeply annoyed by his talks with owners of SMEs that are relieved that all that ‘bureaucratic CSRD/CSDDD reporting shit‘ is now gone, totally forgetting that sustainability is still valuable and could be a competitive edge. How to get them back on track? How to even re-start a sensible discussion and not being brushed off right away?
I spoke to people that told me about the cuts in staffing and budgets because ‚the market demand‘ has plummeted due to the political insecurities in almost every country within Europe (and internationally anyway, being harassed by Trump and other autocrats). What could they do now in this 180-degree flip situation of sustainability now being woke, a burden, a disadvantage?
Others were saying the competitive edge of the European Green Deal got total demolished and the war industry now eats up all the attention, same with the uber-focus on AI. Nothing is left from the idea that the European Green Deal and its components was created to actually constitute the future competitiveness of Europe. All it needed was a war, a couple of autocrats and changed voting percentages in the EU Parliament. And off went their business model as ESG consultant!
But all of them came to say thank you for allowing the grumbling stomach to relieve a bit, that there is a different vision as well, a setup for all life on Planet Earth, and that well-being isn’t forgotten. Re-membering around indigenous wisdom isn’t forgotten. That THEY are not forgotten. That their kids and grandkids are not forgotten. That intra- and intergenerational equity principles are still leading when it comes to defining sustainability. And that ESG isn’t lost, but just not sufficient for reaching sustainability through regeneration. That there are ways to heal the gut feelings by accepting collapse and moving towards collapse resilience.
It is important to note, and talking from my own experience here, many in the ESG world are completely unprepared for their very own inner work to hospice and midwife, to let go and walk towards, simply because they never understood sustainability context. This for me is the biggest loss of the sustainability field of the last 20 years, at a time where sustainability was a promising shift in economic system design, preparing it for a max. 1.5 degrees global warming world, when human rights was for the first time properly embraced globally.
If you like to have a look at the complete decks, you can find them here below. And let’s see, I know the talk was recorded, so maybe there’s a chance I get a recorded version anytime soon as well. Stay tuned for that.
The keynote: https://www.r3-0.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Ralph-Thurm-ESG-Summit-2025-Keynote-English-Condensed.pdf
The breakout session: https://www.r3-0.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Ralph-Thurm-ESG-Summit-2025-Breakout-English-Condensed.pdf
The ESRS Betrayal (A Drama In Two Acts)
The last couple of months were dominated by the devastating acting of the EU Parliament process players to finalize the CSRD, CSDDD and EU FD (Forestation Directive). More than enough has been written about this turmoil into impact nothingness (also by me), so I won’t repeat the ‘Omnibus’ drama here, just a couple of thoughts at the end of this chapter. Instead, I’d like to focus on the fact that the ‘betrayal’ on the content side actually happened all along the multi-year process, more or less right from the start. I’d call this a drama in two acts:
Act 1: The Sustainability Context Brush
You all know my stance that performance measurement without thresholds and allocation says nothing about sustainability, and that ESG Performance Measurement needs this addition to finally carry a message about the level of sustainability, also crossing the fine line about knowing ‘when good is good enough.’ This is what sustainability context is all about! How did that play out in the ESRS deliberations? Let’s see, I’m comparing the 2022 Draft ESRS, the 2023 Final ESRS (through a Delegated Act), and the 2025 Draft ESRS. We need to become granular here to detect the betrayal.
The 2022 Draft ESRS 1 had the following text to connect to sustainability context:
This was a hopeful start, but of course needed to materialize in the various topic-specific standards. What we saw was the following in E2-E5, here’s the pollution example of ESRS E2:
On the one hand we were happy to see this Disclosure Requirement in the Environmental ESRS, but were astonished that none of the social or governance ESRS carried something similar for social caring capacity thresholds. These were already only compliance standards, completely missing sustainability context activation.
Fast forward one year to the 2023 Annex 1 of the EU Delegated Act that carried the Final ESRS, and now have a look at the corresponding text there:
Would you agree that something is missing? Yes, the reference to sustainability context disappeared. How on Earth did this happen? Was it explained somewhere? No! At r3.0 we had written a very concise Public Comment Letter that emphasized the need for sustainability context, but instead it was taken out, and we never received a response to our letter. EFRAG installed a Sustainability Standards Board, so we can only document a willful erasure of sustainability context from the 2022 Draft ESRS to the 2023 Final ESRS.
Funny enough, the ESRS E2 – E5 text remained, with the slight – but important change – that the organization now ‘may’ report instead of ‘shall’ report. A very important change in wording!
What this represents is the frictional relationship between the different organs of EFRAG in their level of agreement. We know of countless hick-ups during this time. The fact that we had sustainability context mentioned in the 2022 Draft ESRS has to be thanked to individuals like the relentless Philippe Diaz Philippe Diaz and a couple of others.
Now finally fast-forwarding to the 2025 DRAFT ESRS. Two things are insightful to look at. The first explains what happened to all ‘may’ disclosure language. This is what you find in ESRS1: ‘All the “may” disclosures have been either eliminated or redrafted as application requirement (which do not include separate datapoints but methodology content)’.
The impact materiality assessment has now been worded as follows:
Nothing changed there, the erasure of sustainability context remained. Now what do the corresponding ESRS E2 to E5 say:
What we see here is the final demise of the idea of thresholds. They got replaced by other references that themselves are mostly free of sustainability context. It’s the same model that GRI chose to water down its sustainability context principle in 2020 with the revision of the universal standards. Words like thresholds, allocations, performance now don’t exist any longer. That’s the safeguard that sustainability performance can’t be measured when using the GRI, ESRS or ISSB.
Factually, the ESRS are now the biggest greenwashing act EU politics is responsible for and I sincerely hope we won’t let the EU get away with it. There are already question if the Omnibus was ‘unlawful.’ We’ll see, the trialogue now underway in some dark meeting rooms in Brussels will go to vote on December 16. But that won’t change anything around the complete betrayal on sustainability.
Act 2: The Process Brush
How on Earth can it be that a competitive advantage changed into a toxic competitive disadvantage with about a year? Well, it didn’t, but the views of EU Parliamentarians changed, given the last EU elections and the changes in voting percentages. The increase of authoritarianism, the changed focus towards war-based industries, changes in national governments majorities, and simply the idea Europe might be better off by letting go of overly bureaucratic requirements. While the whole ESRS process was overly complicated and the outcomes could have been much shorter, clearer and focused, this whole brew opened the floodgates to let the Omnibus in. In the end, simplification turned to castration, deregulation and nothingness. The fact that 92-94% of the reporting organization are now exempted throws us backwards to the time before we had any regulation, when a couple of thousand companies did ESG reporting already. Whatever the trialogue now comes up with, the pile of shards is a fact. My interpretation is that what happened is just another part of the collapsology playbook 101. And let’s be clear, many more Omnisbus dramas will follow. We have just seen the beginning of this. The right-wing Euro-haters in the EU Parliament already rub their hands.
UN SDPI Training
What’s standing like a rock is the alternative to all that turmoil: the ‘Authentic Sustainability Assessment’ of the UNSDPI. We at r3.0 started into season 4 of the training and have updated the curriculum once more to catch up with the current developments. Our November 2025 Training was received with enthusiasm. Here are (slightly shortened) testimonials of 3 participants:
Next Trainings are planned and can be booked here:
· 03 + 04 of February 2026 (only for Australia and/or New Zealand) (2 pm – 6 pm AEST)
· 24 + 25 of March 2026 (1.30 pm UTC – 5.30 pm UTC)
· 30 June + 01 July 2026 (12.30 pm UTC – 4:30 pm UTC)
There is still a chance to be on the right side of history. And there still is a chance to get real about the level of ‘unsustainability’, as there is no company that’s sustainable, as the recent Patagonia Report clearly says:
Sunday Thoughts
As always here’s a listing of all my Sunday Thoughts that got published since the last Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter:
A Sunday Thought (#165): ‚Trusting One’s Gut Instincts‘ – Difficulties in Accepting Collapse (November 30, 2025)
A Sunday Thought (#164): ‚Political Endgames‘ – The Impossibility To Find Solutions (November 23, 2025)
A Sunday Thought (#163): ‚Brussels Drift-sand‘ – A Monumental Betrayal & A Glimpse of Light (November 16, 2025)
A Sunday Thought (#162): ‚The State Of The Climate Report 2025‘ – A Planet On The Brink (November 9, 2025)
A Sunday Thought (#161): ‘Happy Plastic Halloween’ – A Spooky Reality (November 2, 2025)
A Sunday Thought (#160): ‚Is ESGLaLaLand waking up?‘- Signs of Arousal (October 26, 2025)
A Sunday Thought (#159): ‘Betrayal’ – the EU Commission’s Omnibus Process (October 19, 2025)
A Sunday Thought (#158): ‘Social Media Detox’ – Turning To My Inner Work(September 21, 2025)
Bioregional Nomads On The Road
Here’s one new post in the Bioregional Nomads on the Road Series:
Bioregional Nomads On The Road (#15): Becoming Visible (October 17, 2025)
Finally, …
What a year it was…again! We are closing the most successful year of @r3.0’s history and head with full throttle into 2026. Lots more on our bioregional pathway, another Conference (September 8-10, 2025), more Confluences, at least one new Seeds Report, maybe even two, finalizing our new intellectual basis for the second decade of our existence.
As all is winding down for the festive season soon, I’ll publish this last Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter early in the month. I wish us all time to reflect, time to re-member and to reassess priorities so that future generations can look back at us with pride. The next Lighthouse Keeper will come out early February 2026.