The group of companies that derive significant revenue from environmental solutions, known as the green economy, has topped $10 trillion in market value, a new report found.
That milestone was tied to a 5.3 percent growth in green revenue last year, according to the London Stock Exchange Group’s
report, released Wednesday. Green companies—those with at least one-fifth of their revenue coming from environmentally focused activities—outperformed the broader market by around 12 percent over the past decade.
The report demonstrates green businesses’ resilience in the face of political and social pushback, particularly as major economies such as the United States
retreat from climate investment.
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at the Columbia Business School who independently reviewed the report, said market capitalization, or a company’s total value, is “what makes the world go round” by demonstrating profitability to investors.
“Market capitalization, if and when measured properly, is a sign that there are investors who have $10 trillion of capital sitting in the clean, green, low-carbon economy, expecting market returns—sizable returns, reasonable returns, average returns—and that’s a big deal,” Wagner said.
The London Stock Exchange Group analyzed how much of a company’s revenue is generated by environmental solutions, such as renewable energy, clean water and energy efficiency. If the green revenue of the 21,000 global companies LSEG assessed constituted a standalone industry, it would be the world’s third-largest, the researchers said.
The green economy’s “robust revenue growth” should signal market viability, said Lily Dai, green economy and regulatory solutions lead at LSEG.
“Revenue has been growing steadily, but in the last year, in 2025, we can really see the growth has been accelerated,” Dai said in an interview.
LSEG said the findings reflect the green economy’s strong performance despite global volatility, energy shocks and uncertainty. But Wagner said it has grown because of those issues, not in spite of them, demonstrating its “reliability and resiliency.”
“The green economy has surpassed $10 trillion because of fossil energy shocks, policy divergence and market volatility, and because of that we also see greater returns on the investments that make more sense in the current policy environment, energy shock environment, than the fossil investment,” Wagner said.
The report was geared toward investors, emphasizing high levels of mergers and acquisitions across green companies, a signal among financiers of growth potential and confidence.
As green companies either acquire other companies or are acquired themselves, they contribute to the “consolidation and scaling of green businesses,” the researchers wrote. That was driven by the utilities sector, such as NextEra Energy’s $67 million acquisition in May of Dominion Energy, which LSEG said promises to create a “green energy behemoth.”
Even so,
the deal focused on meeting demand driven by artificial intelligence. The combined company would top the nation for electricity powered by renewables, but it would also be No. 1 for electricity from gas-fired power plants, exemplifying the complexity behind the “green economy” label.
Green Money
For investors, the green economy has already paid off—with more to come, the report indicated.
Companies with at least 50 percent green activity outperformed non-green-sector peers by two to four percentage points, dispelling the myth of a trade-off between profit margins and environmentalism. Since 2008, when LSEG began this analysis, the green economy has outpaced global equities by 133 percent.
“We’re trying to capture the investment opportunities and growth opportunities while we are talking about climate transition,” Dai said.
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Jaakko Kooroshy, LSEG’s global head of sustainable investment research, added that investors use green revenue data to analyze future financial opportunities.
Governments have also recognized the competitive advantage of the green economy. Energy security and supply chain solidification goals drive officials’ interest in renewable energy as much as decarbonization, the report suggests. LSEG’s findings built off its
2023 report, which identified the “new geopolitics of green” as a way to escape fossil fuel dependence.
Even as the United States under the Trump administration “shifted to focus on domestic oil and gas production,” the report said the U.S. green economy remained the largest in the world by market capitalization.
The U.S. clean energy sector has already shown remarkable growth,
according to a BloombergNEF report in January. A record 79.7 gigawatts of clean power will come online in 2026 despite federal cancellations.
Wagner, the Columbia climate economist, said LSEG’s report is distinct from BloombergNEF’s because it underscores “how much money is actually sitting in those companies expecting returns,” which is attractive to future investors.
Corporate interest has largely driven that buoyancy, LSEG said, with U.S. companies leading in clean power purchase agreements, which obligate companies to purchase renewable energy.
Nearly half of those agreements came from four companies in 2025: Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. But Microsoft is
considering backpedaling on its clean-energy commitments as it races to power its data centers, many of which, in the broader industry, run on gas-fired electricity.
Still, renewables showed the strongest performance within the green economy, propelled by electrification and demand from some
data centers. LSEG said that indicates renewables’ “critical role” in the emerging green economy.
Wagner said the LSEG report is a positive signal for strategic investors interested in companies’ long-term viability.
“Those $10 trillion sitting in green economy market capitalization—those are what I would call ‘value investments,’” Wagner said. “They might already make a slightly higher return today; they really pay off in the long run, which, by the way, isn’t that far.”
He added: “While players might change, the overall demand trends are, I would say, pretty clear, pointing in one and only one direction—and that direction is up.”
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