Yalmaz Siddiqui, CSO at The Walt Disney Co., has a bone to pick with sustainability professionals who declare their career goal is to make their job redundant.
The storyline that companies don’t need a CSO devalues the unique expertise about environmental risks and ESG jargon that sustainability professionals bring to their organization, said Siddiqui during keynote remarks last week at GreenBiz 26. His observation was prompted by a debate during the conference about the evolving role of chief sustainability officers.
While integrating environmental metrics across corporations is an important goal, he argued that companies need a sustainability leader with strong technical skills to keep them abreast of the perpetually evolving landscape for corporate climate action, including the many regulatory changes afoot.
Siddiqui said: “When we say we want to integrate good financial practice into the organization, does that mean we need to get rid of the CFO? No. When we say we should integrate good human resources practices and performance management, does it mean to get rid of the CHRO? No. I think there’s a strong argument for technical expertise in the center and integration with both technical expertise and functional expertise to move things forward.”
A sustainability veteran’s path
A Zambian native who grew up in a mining town, Siddiqui in 2026 celebrates his 20th anniversary as a corporate sustainability leader, at three very different companies. He spent 10 years at Office Depot, where he helped triple sales of greener product alternatives, to more than $3 billion. During his six years with MGM Resorts, he developed a donation strategy to reduce food waste that has cumulatively delivered more than 5 million meals.
Siddiqui’s job at Disney, which he joined six years ago, is to manage goals for emissions, water, waste, materials and sustainable design. The headline commitment is to reduce Disney’s greenhouse gas footprint by 46.2 percent for operations and electricity (Scope 1 and 2) by 2030; as of the 2024 fiscal year, Disney had reduced those direct emissions by 28 percent. Disney has pledged to cut emissions from purchase goods and services and other supplier relationships by 27.5 percent, but it didn’t report on progress in its FY2024 report.
Siddiqui’s complex job requires orchestrating strategy across a wide array of businesses, from streaming brands like Hulu to Disney’s theme parks and resorts to movie production studios. Each division employs a team of embedded environmental experts. Siddiqui’s group acts as the central coordinating team. There are more than 100 people across the company responsible for these functions.
The role of Siddiqui’s central team aligns with three priorities and phases, each handled with a different psychological approach to win support, he said. They are:
Initiate
Introducing new policies or processes that are outside the traditional functions of the business unit demands that the central team use “polite, patient persistence to keep going.”
Integrate
Helping environmental practices become the new normal requires sustainability teams to empathize, let go of decision-making authority and trust that line-of-business teams will do the right thing. “Rewarding them for those marginal things is actually helpful in the change journey,” he said.
Communicate
Sharing progress for both reputational and regulatory reasons in accessible, non-jargony terms. Different stakeholders need different messages. “I made the mistake once of making very financial arguments to a business resource group and they didn’t like to hear the economic arguments,” Siddiqui said. “They wanted the social and moral arguments.”
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