Introducing Trellis Impact 25 to usher in the next phase of sustainability

The profession of sustainability is changing. It always has been, though this moment feels more fraught than any before it.

Sustainability professionals are being buffeted by countervailing forces: On the one hand, to accelerate progress in reducing emissions and in restoring or regenerating despoiled resources and ecosystems; on the other, to stand down, or at least communicate less, mindful that the political winds are blowing fiercely against corporate climate action and other sustainability initiatives. All this while delivering tangible benefits — financial and otherwise — to their companies.

This is hardly the first challenging moment in sustainable business. I’ve been watching the profession evolve for more than 35 years, the last quarter-century with Trellis Group and its predecessor, GreenBiz. (For the preceding decade, I’d written and published “The Green Business Letter,” a monthly print subscription newsletter.) Indeed, this June marks 25 years since the website GreenBiz.com went live, a moment for us to reflect on all that’s been — and all that’s yet to come.

The 25-year roller coaster

During that time all of us have weathered three recessions, multiple political swings, countless technological breakthroughs, various global conflicts, fickle consumers, impatient investors and a global pandemic. Not to mention continually evolving language we use to describe who we are and what we do, from environmental responsibility and ESG to regeneration and resilience.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride: lots of ups — and more than a few frightening downs.

At Trellis, the runup to our 25th anniversary has been a time to recalibrate our products and services to meet this moment, with all its promise and peril. Last year, for example, we rebranded the company as Trellis Group and launched a vastly improved website. We transformed our seven weekly newsletters into a single daily offering: Trellis Briefing. We also recast our 17-year-old membership group for sustainability executives into Trellis Network, opening its various communities to anyone in a member company who wants to participate.

Now we’re reimagining our events, too.

Starting this fall, three of our events — GreenFin, Bloom and VERGE — will come together as a single, multifaceted event: Trellis Impact, in San Jose, Calif., Oct. 28-30. Starting next year, Trellis Impact will add Circularity to the mix and the event will relocate to San Francisco’s Moscone Center in early summer — June 23-25, 2026. GreenBiz, our flagship event, remains as is, back in Phoenix on Feb. 17-19, 2026.

It’s a big change for us — and for you — and reflects a number of trends.

First and foremost is the realization that the focus of these four event brands — decarbonization, the circular economy, biodiversity, and the finance to pay for it all — can no longer be seen as discrete topics but as inextricably linked. Addressing them in a single, integrated event will enable our community to increase both individual and collective impact.

Moreover, we’ve heard from our community that sustainability professionals need fewer events, not more, given the vicissitudes of travel budgets and time away from home — and, of course, one’s carbon footprint. And that by bringing four events under one roof we will enable their teams to more easily learn and share together about topics, trends and technologies that cut across multiple departments and remits.

We believe that Trellis Impact will be fit for purpose for the years ahead, a more holistic view of the sustainability solutions we all need to go further, faster during this decisive decade to cut carbon emissions.

Make it bigger: Addressing sustainability challenges in concert

It all brings to mind something called the Eisenhower Principle.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th U.S. president, decorated five-star general and World War II hero, considered himself an expert problem solver. He once explained, “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”

That’s a fitting prescription for today’s world, which has been variously described as a “polycrisis” (crises that interact so that the whole is more overwhelming than the sum of its parts) or “permacrisis” (a world lurching from one unprecedented event to another) — or, most likely, both. Rather than tackle each sustainability challenge individually, we believe it can be more impactful to “make it bigger,” addressing them in concert.

And that by doing so we can help unlock newfound synergies and new business opportunities for companies and their customers, accelerating the positive impacts we all seek.

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