Sustainability-linked executive pay schemes are delivering ESG targets at 128% attainment rates while the world tracks toward breaching the seventh of nine planetary boundaries. That is the core failure Scott Lane, founder and CEO of compliance consultancy Speeki, lays out in a critique of the pay structures Fortune 500 companies adopted in the early 2020s, when public green commitments began feeding directly into CEO year-end bonuses.

Lane's diagnosis starts with the numbers. Companies overachieve against their ESG targets — regularly, and by wide margins — yet planetary outcomes keep deteriorating. If the targets were meaningful, he argues, that divergence could not exist. So where did the system go wrong?

Generic targets, trivial weight

The first problem is target design. In an effort to make ESG goals applicable across industries, standard-setters watered them into a generic checklist. The result: a professional services firm and an oil company often work to the same guidelines despite vastly different environmental footprints. For a materials-intensive operator, that uniformity makes the targets trivially easy to hit — Lane suggests some were effectively designed to be achieved without effort. His example is training completion: employees sit through a set number of PowerPoint decks, and the business chalks the annual ESG target off as a success.

The second problem is incentive weight. According to WTW data Lane cites, the ESG component typically pays out at around 5% of the total bonus pool — and that figure sits at the high end. An incentive that small does not shift capital allocation, procurement strategy or plant-level decisions. HEC Paris research reached the same conclusion: when ESG metrics carry trivial weighting, they exert little influence on executives' short-term incentive pay.

Return on Planet

Lane's proposed fix is a new metric he calls Return on Planet, or ROP. The architecture borrows deliberately from finance. Where ROI measures how effectively invested capital generates a return, ROP would measure how effectively a company converts its environmental footprint into positive planetary impact.

The design intent is twofold. First, recognisability: executives already build strategy around financial ratios, so a comparable environmental ratio gives them a framework they can operationalise. Second, auditability: ROP would convert what Lane calls fluffy, easy-to-hit pledges into auditable, verifiable numbers — a shift with direct implications for how sustainability claims are reported and assured.

ROP would also let companies tailor targets to their own material impacts. The professional services firm no longer chases the same checklist as the oil company; it directs effort where its footprint actually sits. Lane argues this raises the stakes for executives, because the targets now connect to strategic priorities rather than a compliance annex.

He is explicit that ROP targets would be harder to meet, and that the bonus weighting must rise accordingly — to 15% to 25% of the total bonus, against the current standard of 3% to 5%. His logic is blunt: if CEOs are expected to reorder priorities, ESG performance has to matter financially.

The business case and the window

Lane frames ROP adoption as a net positive beyond the C-suite. Stricter guidelines and higher targets would push companies to diversify supply chains, raise resource-use efficiency and strengthen climate resilience — resilience he counts as bottom-line protection.

The timing argument rests on WTW incentive-plan data: even as companies ditch the ESG label, adoption of long-term sustainability goals in incentive plans grew from 64% to 70% across European firms between 2024 and 2025. Appetite for the mechanism persists, in other words, even as the branding retreats. Lane reads that as a second chance to rebuild the scheme on harder numbers.

His closing position: ESG targets have played second fiddle because they were never rooted in hard numbers that move planetary outcomes. The system can be redesigned — and, in his view, companies and their boards should grab the opportunity.

What to watch next

The test for any ROP-style metric is standardisation and assurance. Without a recognized measurement methodology and third-party verification, a bespoke environmental ratio risks replicating the auditability gap that undermined the first generation of ESG-linked pay. Watch whether compensation committees weight sustainability metrics above 10% in the 2026 proxy cycle, and whether European incentive-plan adoption — now at 70% and climbing — survives the ongoing rebranding of ESG itself.