Green Project Management

Google committed to net-zero across its operations and value chain by 2030. The commitment was set in 2021. The 2025 environmental report shows total emissions up 51% against the 2019 baseline, and up 13% in the last year, driven by data center expansion and the hardware supply chain behind it.

Over the same year, data center energy emissions fell 12% and electricity consumption rose 27%.

Each data center is a capital decision that went through an approval process. None of those approvals required the build to clear the carbon commitment before proceeding. The commitment had a date and a public owner and no authority over the decisions that determined whether it would be met.

In the 2025 report the targets are described as moonshots and as ambition-based, terms the company did not use before.

The same pattern runs on ordinary projects: a sustainability requirement in the plan, a senior name attached, no gate it has to clear, marked complete while delivery does not match it. I wrote up the mechanism and what it takes to give a requirement authority at the point where money is committed.

Read the article here: https://gpm.org/perspectives/how-a-target-becomes-a-moonshot

The New Thought Leadership Report

It has been a busy week with the launch of the CSPP. We don't want this to be missed, since it is a joint-venture study!

This research found a significant gap between sustainability ambition and ex*****on. While 85% of sustainability leaders are confident their organizations will achieve their sustainability goals, only 43% of PMO leaders share that confidence. Just one out of every five project professionals say they are highly confident in their ability to deliver sustainability outcomes.

The findings reinforce a key message: the problem isn’t committing to sustainability practices—it’s executing them. This matters because sustainability is not separate from business performance; it is increasingly becoming a driver of resilience, innovation, stakeholder value, and long-term success.

Other PMI research shows that projects built around sustainability succeed at nearly twice the rate of those that do not, making sustainability one of the strongest levers organizations have to improve outcomes.

We have work to do!

Get the Report! https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/executing-sustainability-strategy

*****on

Today, on World Environment Day, we're proud to launch the Certified Sustainable Project Professional (CSPP™) — the evolution of the GPM-b™, now offered as a PMI + GPM certification.

The timing isn't incidental. Sustainability has moved from the margins of strategy to the center of delivery. PMI's Maximizing Project Success research, across more than 10,000 project professionals, found it to be the single highest predictor of project success — ahead of methodology, governance, and every traditional delivery factor. Yet most organizations still treat it as something added on after, rather than built in.

The CSPP™ exists to close that gap. It establishes sustainability as a core project management knowledge area: how to uncover hidden value, mitigate risk, build resilience, and turn enterprise goals into measurable project outcomes.

Join us today at 12:00 PM EDT for a live session — "From GPM-b™ to Certified Sustainable Project Professional (CSPP™)" — covering what the CSPP™ includes, how it's earned, how it compares to other certifications, and what the transition means for current GPM-b™ holders.

Webinar (today, 12 PM EDT): https://www.projectmanagement.com/webinars/1193987/from-gpm-b--to-certified-sustainable-project-professional--cspp---

The certification: https://www.pmi.org/certifications/sustainability-cspp

Tomorrow, the GPM-b becomes the CSPP — the Certified Sustainable Project Professional.

It's a meaningful step, and we didn't want it to pass without honoring how we got here. Since 2013, practitioners around the world have carried the GPM-b onto projects that had never once accounted for sustainability — and changed how that work gets done.

The credential has grown as the field has: from the green movement, to sustainability, to regeneration. The CSPP reflects what the profession demands now. What it does not do is leave anyone behind — everything our community has earned and built carries forward.

Ahead of tomorrow's launch, our founder, Dr. Joel Carboni, wrote a letter to every GPM-b holder — including the 25 pioneers who earned the very first credentials in 2013.

It's worth your time. Read the full letter below.🔗

https://gpm.org/perspectives/to-the-gpm-bs-with-love

Most project managers were trained for a world that no longer exists.

Stable supply chains. Predictable markets. Risks that could be identified, analyzed, and managed before they happened.

That world is gone.

Geopolitical instability, climate disruption, resource constraints, migration, regulatory volatility, and economic uncertainty are colliding in ways that traditional project management was never designed to address.

In our latest Perspectives article, Hasyimah Afandi explores why the polycrisis is changing the role of the project leader and what sustainable project leadership looks like when conditions can change faster than project plans.

A timely read for anyone responsible for delivering outcomes in an increasingly unpredictable world.

https://gpm.org/perspectives/why-todays-chaotic-world-needs-a-new-kind-of-project-leader

The transition from GPM-b™ to CSPP™ officially begins on June 5th!

To help project professionals prepare, GPM has launched the new CSPP™ Readiness Assessment.

✔ 24 questions
✔ 8 competence areas
✔ Just a few minutes to complete

The result?

A personalized competence radar aligned to the CSPP™ benchmark — helping you identify:
• where you’re strong
• where gaps exist
• what closing those gaps looks like

Pathways to the CSPP include:

🔹 Current GPM-b™ holders → eligible for a no-cost opt-in
🔹 PMP® and CAPM® holders (as well as others) → shorter pathway
🔹 New entrants → full pathway, No prior certification needed

So… how do you match up to a CSPP™?

Take the assessment 👉
https://gpm.org/certification-assessment

‼️ Update for GPM-b® Certified Professionals
As we move toward the June 5 launch of the CSPP™ (Certified Sustainable Project Practitioner) certification, we want to clarify what happens next regarding the PMI and GPM registry integration.

If you already completed the opt-in process earlier this year, you do not need to do anything else. We have your information and your record is already queued for processing.

Because of GDPR and privacy requirements, all active GPM-b holders who filled out the form, will receive a formal opt-in email on June 5 from PMI before records are transferred into the PMI ecosystem and updated to CSPP status.

If you have NOT yet submitted your consent form (and we sent several reminders over the past few months), or if you recently took the exam from GPM please do so now here: https://gpm.org/registry-merge

This registry alignment allows GPM-bs to:
• Prepare for visibility within the PMI ecosystem as integration milestones are completed (in June)
• Transition from GPM-b to CSPP (or not, up to you but we recommend it because it is cool and are all doing it.)

For more information about the evolution from GPM-b to CSPP click here:
https://gpm.org/for-individuals/certification/gpm-b/gpm-b-to-cssp

For the FAQ on anything you could be curious about click here: https://gpm.org/for-individuals/certification/gpm-b/gpm-b-to-cssp-faq

We will note that this is more than a name change. It reflects the continued evolution of sustainability as a recognized professional competence in project delivery and organizational governance.

We will post more as it is available.

CDP just disclosed that companies anticipate $901 billion in losses from extreme weather, with nearly half landing inside the next two years.

The number will get cited. The structural problem underneath it will not.

62% of subnational governments report being hit by extreme weather. Only 35% of disclosing companies treat the same weather as financially material. CDP frames this as a perception problem. It is not. Local governments own the assets that fail first — roads, drainage, utilities, transit. Companies do not own most of that infrastructure, so the cost reaches them later, through delayed shipments and lost production hours.

The disclosure regime asks each company to assess its own materiality in isolation. The layer most exposed to cascade failure is the layer least equipped to report it.

And the two-year timeline puts this inside the operating plan, not the strategic plan. The people who can respond often don't hold the authority. The people who hold the authority are working from a different timetable.

Reporting cycles don't fix that. Decision rights do.

Our Latest Perspective: https://gpm.org/perspectives/901-billion-in-climate-risk-and-no-decision-rights-to-match

The GCC has set the sustainability commitments. The question now is whether the governance architecture exists to carry them into project delivery.

Arab News spoke with our Founder and CEO, Dr. Joel Carboni, on this for their Green & Blue series. The short version: sustainability is not a cost driver when integrated at project initiation. It becomes a cost driver when it is retrofitted after key decisions have already been made. Organisations that build sustainability governance into standard project processes will meet future regulatory requirements without disruption. Those that treat it as a reporting exercise will struggle.

Full piece below, with case examples from Expo City Dubai, the Neom water program and SAWACO.

https://www.arabnews.com/node/2643726/saudi-arabia

Project impacts are business activity.

That sentence is going to cost some companies tens of millions of euros but it can be avoided.

Here is why. 👇

https://gpm.org/perspectives/when-the-reporting-floor-moves-projects-must-move-with-it