The Climate Change Consulting Market Has Matured: Insights From The 2025 Green Quadrant

The Climate Change Consulting Market Has Matured: Insights From The 2025 Green Quadrant

Verdantix recently released the Green Quadrant: Climate Change Consulting (2025) report. Two years on from the inaugural 2023 report, our analysis captures the state of play in a market that is no longer nascent, in which competition is fierce and customer needs are well established. The report provides deep analysis of the functionality and market momentum of 12 leading vendors in the space – Arcadis, Capgemini, Deloitte, dss+, ERM, EY, KPMG, PwC, Ramboll, Schneider Electric, SLR and WSP – based on extensive questionnaires, live briefings and customer interviewers. The Green Quadrant reveals that:

• The market has consolidated, and global services giants dominate.
  In the early 2020s, the climate change consulting market was highly heterogeneous, with regional boutiques competing with established consulting titans. During this early stage of market evolution, smaller firms benefited from experience, pre-existing client relationships and attractive pricing models to win coveted strategy work. But ESG and climate leaders no longer need help setting generic net zero targets – they need in-depth transition plans, industry-specific expertise and support to get funding from the board. In this new landscape, the added resources, global footprints and reputation of the titans have given them the competitive edge.
  
  
• Digital services are a major focus area for climate change consultants.
  Digital services for climate once largely consisted of software platform selection and implementation, with the end goal being to support core processes such as climate reporting. In 2025 – driven by the emergence of AI, and continued climate-specific software evolution – customer demands for climate digital services are far broader. In some areas, for example, climate risk and nature analysis, organizations lack critical in-house resources to deploy and manage digital tools – and thus work with consultants to get the most out of projects such as physical risk analysis. Although AI for climate use cases is immature from a market penetration perspective, consultants are testing use cases, developing point solutions and building capabilities to support the first wave of AI for climate adopters.
  
  
• The battle continues to rage between implementation- and strategy-focused providers.
  The emergence of new focus areas for organizations – notably nature and biodiversity – has brought the competition between implementation and strategy leaders into sharp focus (see Verdantix Market Insight: The Nature Consulting Services Market). An arm wrestle is underway between providers with extensive implementation experience in nature and biodiversity (for example, Arcadis, Ramboll, SLR and WSP), and those that have gained a reputation for delivering strategy-focused nature projects. This division is symptomatic of the market as a whole and thus complicates vendor selection processes. Which providers are best placed to cross the implementation and strategy divide?
  
  

Please follow the link to access the full Green Quadrant benchmark report. For additional relevant research, visit the research portal.