Unmasking a deliberate retreat, ArcelorMittal Corporate Climate Assessment 2026 update

For three consecutive years, SteelWatch has analysed and scrutinised ArcelorMittal through its annual Corporate Climate Assessment, examining its reporting, its leadership statements, its earnings calls, its investor communications, and its interventions in public debates across the global steel sector. We engaged directly with the company, in good faith, on the assumption that it was willing to engage with civil society and respond to the urgency of the climate challenge.

Over those three years, our conclusions were consistent. The company was not delivering on its own strategy, set out in 20211. Progress was limited, uneven, and often delayed.

This is not just any steelmaker. It is a company whose roots stretch back over a century — to 1902, 1911 and 19482 — and whose global reach and influence remain unmatched. We assumed that such a company would recognise the weight of that history, and the responsibility that comes with it: to help lead the steel industry into its only viable future — a decarbonised one ‘for people and planet’, in the company’s own words.

Following the release of its Sustainability Report 2025 on 23 April 20263, we are forced to confront a far more profound reality. The direction outlined in that report is not a delay, not a recalibration, not even a step back. It is a decisive and deeply regressive shift. The report does not merely depart from the trajectory set in 2021 — it abandons it. More fundamentally, it removes the premise that the company itself has a responsibility to drive the transition.

The transition is no longer framed as something to be led, but as a risk to be managed; no longer as a pathway to be built, but as a set of conditions to be awaited.