Written by Clément Collignon, CEO of Sustaain
2026: The year nothing happens, yet everything shifts.
When politics stalls, trust migrates, from institutions to systems. The advantage will belong to those who can measure, prove, and explain reality when narratives start to wobble.
In Davos, the future is being reassembled (again) out of well-tailored phrases. On our screens, young people film burning roofs, as if documenting catastrophe were the last form of agency left. In France, there is the familiar theatre of leadership – a head of state auditioning for an action film while the plot is written by constraints. And then a small, revealing detail: a proper winter, yet no proper cold snap. Everything is there. Not a rupture, but a drift.
I wonder: how do we protect ourselves from the present age—reflective, over-informed, briefly enthusiastic, then sliding back into inertia? The answer is not more commentary. It is a better stance: widen the lens, narrow the priorities, and ship.
The age of drift
America heads into midterms with institutions primed for trench warfare; France approaches its presidential horizon with policy increasingly performed rather than built. The net effect is not paralysis, exactly, but a thinning of ambition. Decisions that require patience, trade-offs, and political capital are postponed. Meanwhile, the world’s old “rule-based” comfort continues to fray. Not replaced by a new doctrine, but by a patchwork of coalitions, bargains, and temporary alignments.
Europe, in particular, has a choice to make. It is often described as a “power of measure”, but that should be read in the older sense too—measure as moderation. Aristotle would have recognised the instinct: not regulation for its own sake, but the disciplined insistence that rules apply, contracts hold, and standards are predictable. In a world drifting away from the rule-based order, Europe’s advantage is not necessarily to add layers of bureaucracy, but to double down on what it can uniquely offer: the rule of law as infrastructure.
The machinery of accountability keeps moving. In years when politics slows, measurement accelerates. Standards are refined. Reporting expectations harden. Due diligence becomes less a slogan than a checklist. The centre of gravity shifts away from speeches and towards systems that can withstand scrutiny. That is why Europe may find itself unusually well-positioned. It is not the loudest player, nor the most forceful. But it can be the author of the grammar: what counts, what can be compared, what can be verified. In a world of drift, proof becomes a form of power.
Food refuses to negotiate
If 2026 has a single, unavoidable reality, it is food. Agriculture sits at the junction of climate risk, trade friction, and social stability, where the costs of wishful thinking are immediate. This is not a sector that tolerates long debates about values; it rewards operational competence and punishes fragility. Supply chains that feed the world are being asked to deliver more resilience, more traceability, and more sustainability, often while margins remain tight and volatility remains the norm.
Soft commodities are the stress test in plain sight. Their markets oscillate between fatigue and sudden spikes; their supply chains run through regions where data is sparse and verification is hard; their stakeholders face simultaneous pressure from climate variability, regulatory scrutiny, and shifting consumer expectations. In such conditions, vague commitments are not merely insufficient, they are dangerous. “Sustainability” is becoming operational not because the world has become more virtuous, but because the times are less forgiving.
The questions are no longer philosophical. They are practical, sometimes brutal: Where did it come from? Under what conditions? Can you prove it? The decade is turning from declarations to verification, from narrative to evidence.
Sustaain 2026: boring, on purpose
If 2026 is an interlude for politics, it is not an interlude for us. It is a year of construction, quietly ambitious, deliberately unglamorous. We have chosen discipline over spectacle. While hype cycles tempt companies to promise shortcuts, we are building what endures: the infrastructure that makes proof possible when incentives shift and scrutiny tightens.
Our work sits where complexity is real: between geospatial observation, documentary evidence, and field data. The aim is not to produce prettier reporting. It is to create systems that hold under pressure, systems capable of making sense of fragmented realities, detecting inconsistencies, and delivering defensible answers in the places where the world is hardest to model. That is what it means to de-risk technology for real food systems: not rushing to the loudest product, but hardening the foundation.
We are unapologetically focused on soft commodities and the sustainability of food systems, because this is where the future will be decided. Not in abstract ESG rhetoric, but in supply chains that feed billions, where verification is costly, and resilience is no longer optional.
A year in which “nothing happens” is often the year in which foundations shift. The loud events come later. The quiet rearrangements come first. 2026 will reward those who do not confuse motion with progress. Those who understand that, in a fragmented world, proof is not a constraint. It is the advantage.