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"Lisa is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, and she delivers some much-needed reality checks on sustainable finance.

If you’ve been following Lisa’s sharp LinkedIn articles, you know she doesn’t pull punches. Lisa and I talk through her challenges for a rethink on how we approach sustainability planning and finance.

Hear Lisa talk about:

• How a positive impact vision of laws and governance could shape finance, investment flows and practices, and renew positive multilateralism.
• Why sustainability reporting has become a frustrating ‘end’, rather than a means, due in part to the risk focus of Mark Carney’s Tragedy of the Horizon’s speech 10 years ago.
• The challenge of bringing scientists, engineers and financiers together for co-ordinated planning for public goods.
• Why sustainable finance is like trying to pilot a broken plane through turbulence, and why it’s painful to watch failed radar for climate finance now being applied with gusto to biodiversity!"

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• Access via Apple
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A common criticism of ESG ratings by providers such as Refinitiv, Bloomberg and MSCI is that they tend to disagree, leading to confusion among asset owners and investors. For instance, provider A may give Tesla a high ESG score but provider B may rate Tesla poorly if it doesn’t like the company’s governance approach.

This is a problem for fund managers with a mandate to maximise a fund’s sustainability impact: whose ratings should they trust?

A recent paper published by Rosella Giacometti, Gabriele Torri, Marco Bonomelli and Davide Lauria from Italy’s University of Bergamo explores a novel approach to score companies based on sustainable funds’ holdings data.

... read full blogpost on Substack ...

... go direct to research paper: Market-Implied Sustainability: Insights from Funds’ Portfolio Holdings

From volume to value: Read this Q3 summary update to learn how the 'flight to quality' is reshaping the carbon market and other key developments to follow.

Business assets see 22% jump in exposure to conflict

Understanding complex global conflict dynamics in today’s geopolitically fractured world is crucial for multinational companies, investors, and insurance firms. Our Asset Risk Exposure Analytics (AREA) data measures the exposure of over 4 million assets of publicly listed companies to political, human rights, climate and environmental risks, including conflict.

The overall exposure of corporate assets to conflict remains low, amounting to less than 1% of the assets of publicly listed firms. That said, the data shows that 36,045 assets are now located in conflict zones, up from 29,515 in 2021-Q1 – a 22% uplift in five years. This uptick in exposure to conflict is starker when you zoom in on certain sectors. For example, the extractive & mineral processing, technology & communications, and infrastructure sectors have all seen the number of assets located in conflict-affected areas increase by over 60% since 2021.

Beyond this trend of rising physical security risks linked to armed fighting, there are a myriad of indirect consequences that business leaders need to grapple with. Wars can disrupt global supply chains, lead to markets becoming inaccessible, elevate expropriation risks or trigger consumer boycotts targeted at corporate entities. The rise of grey zone warfare is also seeing companies themselves become targets of hostile states, for example via cyber-attacks, sabotage or disinformation campaigns, for the perceived transgressions of their host governments.

Event Details
09 December 2025

2 - 3pm GMT / 9 - 10am EST / 3 - 4pm CET

Many companies in the Food and Beverage sector have set ambitious net-zero targets, but key challenges remain:

Moving from targets and roadmaps to real implementation — turning plans into concrete projects that improve actual energy and carbon performance.

Making decarbonisation a source of business value — ensuring initiatives strengthen competitiveness, resilience, and economic performance.

Join SLR experts for an online briefing that will share practical advice and global case studies from leading companies that have successfully bridged the gap between strategy and execution. Learn how they are achieving CO₂ reductions, driving business value, and building long-term resilience across their value chains.

Drawing on proven project examples and the latest market insights, we’ll explore:

Innovative financing models that overcome CAPEX barriers and accelerate implementation.
Turning biowaste into strategic assets through circular energy solutions.

Bridging the gap between strategy and execution to actually deliver carbon reductions and capture the associated business value.This session is designed for sustainability leaders, operations and energy managers, finance and procurement professionals, with actionable insights applicable to anyone involved in delivering decarbonisation in the Food & Beverage sector.

"It began with high hopes and the promise of a new way of doing things, a Global Mutirão, but ended with a deal that failed to mention fossil fuels or deliver a promised deforestation roadmap. But with a strong presence by Indigenous peoples and the launch of a new mechanism to halt and reverse deforestation, there were still positive moves. Here are our essential takeaways from a COP in the Amazon."

The Sustainable Debt Global State of the Market Q3 2025 report is here. A comprehensive guide to the third quarter's key market updates, trends and issuances. Find out all the big numbers in the green, social, sustainability and sustainability-linked (GSS+) space here. 

Methane abatement is crucial to safeguarding climate goals and near-term meaningful climate action. Methane’s high global warming potential and short atmospheric lifespan make it uniquely positioned to deliver rapid climate benefits if addressed effectively. Achieving the 1.5°C temperature goal requires a 45% reduction in global methane emissions by 2030.

Despite this urgency, methane remains underrepresented in global climate discussions, climate policy frameworks, and financial flows. Methane must be treated as a distinct climate challenge, not merely bundled into CO₂-equivalent metrics, to ensure appropriate prioritisation in policy and finance. Specific policy is needed to make finance flow at scale to fund methane abatement.

While every country’s methane abatement policy approach will be different, there are commonalities that allow for peer learning to accelerate abatement efforts. This report identifies five archetypes of specific national sectors with policy lessons applicable for national sectors across the globe. The five archetypes are the coal sector in China, the agricultural sector in India and in Brazil, the waste sector in Indonesia, and the oil and gas (O&G) sector for any O&G exporter.

Behind-the-meter (BTM) energy systems, from onsite gas turbines to fuel cells and geothermal plants, could help provide the additional power demand from data centers, according to Goldman Sachs Research.
 
BTM systems are expected to provide a quarter to a third of the incremental electricity demand from data centers that’s anticipated through 2030.
 
Modular fuel cell systems can be deployed in less than a year, are 10-30% more efficient than gas turbines, and produce fewer emissions than some other energy systems.
 
Goldman Sachs Research estimates that 6-15% of incremental data center power demand could ultimately be provided through fuel cells.

Below are the key takeaways from the fourth publication in the ISS STOXX Research Institute’s series on critical minerals. To download a copy of the full report, please click here.

• Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are foundational to the global shift toward a low-carbon economy, playing a critical role in enabling clean energy technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs), wind turbines, solar panels, and advanced electronics.  

• Although REEs have proven to be essential to the energy transition, the value chain faces a variety of risks ranging from geopolitical risks to nature- and climate-related physical and transition risks. 

• ISS STOXX data shows that REE mining companies’ main sustainability considerations include nature-related risks connected to water use, land use, climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss; and societal risks related to human rights violations such as forced and/or child labor and disregard for Indigenous and Local Communities. 

• Investors can use a blend of nature and social data, from companies’ sustainability performance to geographical designation of human rights risks, to inform their risk management strategies as they relate to REE companies.  

The world has entered a new era of industrial transformation — one defined by the global retooling of economies for a low-carbon future.

This isn’t a niche investment theme; it’s a reallocation of capital, resources, and innovation on a scale unseen since the mid-20th century industrial boom.  The opportunities are vast: cleaner power, efficient grids, low-carbon fuels, sustainable materials, and circular manufacturing systems.

Together, these sectors are projected to attract more than $150 trillion in cumulative investment by 2050. But beyond the numbers lies something more fundamental — a convergence of energy security, industrial strategy, and climate action ambition that’s defining the next decade of global growth.

The Paris Agreement set out to keep the global temperature rise well below 2°C by 2050, ideally 1.5°C, to reduce the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. To achieve this, it introduced the concept of net zero: balancing greenhouse gas emissions with removals [1]. This flexibility was designed to help countries and industries decarbonise while developing new technologies to remove emissions.  

Achieving net zero is difficult in a fragmented world. Particularly when countries’ own plans, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), vary widely in ambition, scope and timing, transitions can be challenging both economically and technologically. As a result, reaching net zero is proving more complex than could have been hoped under the Paris Agreement.

Infrastructure, once seen as an investment option reserved for institutional and private markets investors, is becoming a central theme in public portfolios. The broadening seems fitting, as infrastructure itself is central to everyday life ― from the utilities providing fuel to heat our homes, to the towers transmitting data for our mobile devices and the data centers powering the proliferation of AI.

Balfe Morrison, head of listed infrastructure strategies within BlackRock Fundamental Equities, recently joined The Bid podcast to explore the growing reach and relevance of infrastructure investments. The conversation was broad, but one area of particular interest: the intersection of infrastructure and AI.

Climate solutions are multifaceted, ranging from breakthrough technologies across sectors to energy and resilient infrastructure. In public and private markets, we believe both mitigation and adaptation solutions strategies are ever more compelling.

From larger public companies with the scale to tackle global challenges to growth-stage private firms driving the next generation of products and services, climate solution providers can create significant economic value through cost savings, efficiency gains, and enhanced durability — solving real-world problems.

Their “green” benefits are typically a bonus, not the primary fundamental investment driver. Digital innovation remains a key focus today — including software, data-driven platforms, and software-enabled hardware — but while the past 15 years have centered on digital transformation, we believe the next decade and beyond will be defined by physical transformation.

Technologies such as AI, robotics, and automation will increasingly be applied to real-world systems in energy, housing, and infrastructure to enhance efficiency, reliability, and resilience — the very attributes that climate solutions companies across public and private markets are designed to deliver. 

Sales taxes are a crucial revenue source for state and local governments, funding education, health care, public safety and infrastructure.

Forty-five states collect statewide sales taxes, with local sales taxes in 38 states. These taxes generate 30% of state tax revenues and 13% of local collections, making them the second-largest state revenue source after personal income taxes