Each month, we gather standout sustainable finance articles from our favourite writers. This curated selection brings together the most engaging ideas, timely analyses, and fresh perspectives published over the past month, so you can catch up on what mattered most.

Photo by Fabian Kleiser on Unsplash

Top 10 Sustainability Markers – December 2025

By Terence Jeyaretnam

In his latest monthly analysis, Terence Jeyaretnam highlights how environmental, climate and sustainability issues are rapidly hardening into enforceable financial, regulatory and litigation risks. Key developments include Australia’s landmark overhaul of the EPBC Act, which introduces a new independent regulator and legally binding National Environmental Standards alongside escalating warnings from Allianz that physical climate impacts threaten the insurability underpinning modern capitalism. The piece tracks the continued mainstreaming of sustainability as a growth driver (via HSBC survey data), the expansion of nature-related financial disclosure through TNFD-aligned reporting, and rising investor pressure on deforestation risk, evidenced by record AGM votes at major Australian banks. Regulatory clarity is also increasing, with updated ACCC guidance enabling sustainability collaboration and the UK PRA reinforcing climate risk as a core prudential concern.

Taken together, the BHP dam ruling and the scrutiny of corporate-backed climate education show how quickly environmental and nature risks are crystallising into real accountability, forcing boards and investors to treat them as core drivers of financial stability and not optional sustainability overlays.

Healthcare Intervention or Tech Moonshot? – A Few Thoughts on Sustainability…

By Simon Rebbechi

In his latest roundup, Simon Rebbechi surveys a rapidly hardening climate and political landscape, arguing that sustainable finance must adapt to realism rather than idealism. The piece highlights regulatory volatility under a renewed Trump administration, such as rolled-back fuel economy standards and the politicisation of climate risk disclosure in housing markets, showing how policy whiplash and information suppression ultimately shift financial risk. Against this backdrop, Rebbechi points to constructive developments: pragmatic reform in Europe via SFDR 2.0’s disclosure-first approach, strategic public investment to secure critical minerals amid geopolitical tension with China, and accelerating climate tech advances across low-carbon materials, geothermal energy, batteries, and autonomous EVs. He contends that the failure to constrain fossil fuel production makes overshoot of 1.5°C unavoidable, elevating adaptation spending, climate resilience, and even geoengineering from taboo to necessity, albeit with serious governance risks.

At its core, the article makes clear that capital allocation, risk assessment, and stewardship strategies must now be grounded in geopolitical realism, physical climate impacts, and scalable technologies, rather than assumptions of smooth policy alignment or rapid decarbonisation.