Environmental businesses have reached a milestone that would have seemed distant just a decade ago. According to a new report from the London Stock Exchange Group, the global green economy now commands more than $10 trillion in market value — and if counted as a standalone industry, it would rank third in the world, behind only technology and industrial goods and services.
At a glance
- Green economy growth: Green revenues grew 5.3% in 2025 C.E., the fastest pace since 2022 C.E., according to the LSEG report, which analyzed more than 21,000 publicly listed companies worldwide.
- Market outperformance: Green equities were 12.4% above the broader market over the past 12 months, and since 2008 C.E., the green economy has outperformed global equities by 133%.
- Green mergers and acquisitions: Green M&A activity reached $308 billion in 2025 C.E., making up 12.6% of total global deal value — part of roughly $4.1 trillion in green deals over the past decade.
Why $10 trillion matters
Market value — what investors collectively say a set of companies is worth on public exchanges — is one of the clearest signals of where capital is flowing. Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, has described it as “what makes the world go round,” because it reflects where investors believe future returns will come from.
For most of the past two decades, green investment was treated as a values-driven niche. The LSEG report suggests something different is now happening. Clean technologies — renewable energy, energy-efficient buildings, clean water systems, electric transport, recycling infrastructure — have become mainstream financial assets.
The report found that companies with more than half of their revenue from green activities had profit margins two to four percentage points higher than non-green peers in their sectors. That directly challenges the long-standing assumption that doing business more cleanly means accepting thinner returns. These are part of a growing list of clean energy milestones reshaping how investors and governments think about the energy transition.
Energy security is now part of the argument
Climate goals alone are no longer the main driver. The LSEG report ties the green economy’s growth to volatility — specifically, the oil and gas price shocks and surging electricity demand that have made clean, stable power look less like an environmental preference and more like a practical hedge.
A store owner watching utility bills spike through a hot summer, or a data center operator needing to lock in power for artificial intelligence workloads, faces a business decision as much as an environmental one. The report found that Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft together accounted for nearly half of U.S. clean power purchase agreement deals in 2025 C.E., as their data centers sought large, reliable electricity supplies.
That surge in corporate demand is accelerating build-out. A separate analysis from the Environmental Defense Fund and Atlas Public Policy found that the United States had 471.1 gigawatts of operational clean power capacity in the first quarter of 2026 C.E., with an additional 79.7 gigawatts expected to come online during the year.
The United States leads, with complications
Even as federal policy shifted toward domestic oil and gas production, the United States remained the world’s largest green economy by market value in 2026 C.E. That reflects both the scale of U.S. capital markets and the depth of corporate energy procurement. LSEG measured green activity by how much of a company’s revenue comes from environmental products and services — not by labeling whole companies as green or not — which captures hybrid businesses that operate in both clean and conventional energy.
That nuance matters. A company can rank among the world’s largest clean electricity producers while also running significant gas-fired generation. Green M&A, data-center power demand, and clean capacity growth all tell a story with contradictions built in. The Environmental Defense Fund data, for instance, also noted that developers canceled more than 8 gigawatts of clean power projects in the first quarter of 2026 C.E. alone — a sign that permitting, financing, and grid connection remain real obstacles.
A market force, not just a movement
The $10 trillion threshold does not mark the end of the fossil fuel era. Global oil, coal, and gas consumption remains enormous, and the green economy still faces supply-chain constraints, political headwinds, and the slow work of building out transmission lines and storage. Renewable energy costs have already fallen sharply enough to beat fossil fuels across much of the world, and renewables now account for nearly half of global power capacity — but translating installed capacity into a fully transformed energy system still takes years.
What the LSEG report captures is a shift in how the financial system categorizes clean technology. Lily Dai, one of the report’s lead authors, pointed to the sector’s “robust revenue growth” as evidence of real market strength — not projection, not subsidy dependence, but companies selling products people and businesses are buying.
A decade ago, the green economy was often described in the language of promise and potential. The numbers in this report describe something that has already arrived. Whether it scales fast enough to meet climate timelines is a different, harder question — and one the $10 trillion figure alone cannot answer.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Ecoticias — Green economy surpasses $10 trillion
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Renewable energy costs have fallen 91% and now beat fossil fuels
- Renewables hit nearly half of global power capacity in 2025
- The Good News for Humankind archive on clean energy
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