Library | ESG issues
Long-termism
Long-termism prioritises enduring strategies over immediate gains, ensuring sustainable development and resource availability for future generations. Corporations and investors are encouraged to consider the long-term consequences of their decisions, moving beyond short-term profit motives to incorporate sustainability and intergenerational impacts. A long-term approach can enhance financial resilience, mitigate risks, and generate more stable and sustainable returns over time.
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The slow forces behind this year’s fast crises
The article argues that today’s rapid global crises (political, ecological, and social) are the visible outcomes of long-building systemic pressures. Using complexity science and systemic risk analysis, it highlights how understanding these deep drivers can help societies both anticipate crises and accelerate positive, transformative change.
PerilScope: Strategic Deep Dive Copernicus Global Climate Highlights 2025 — From Records to Operating Conditions in the 3°C World SRP® Frame
The article interprets Copernicus’s Global Climate Highlights 2025 as a shift from episodic extremes to a structurally warmer, more volatile baseline. It argues that persistent temperature exceedances, ocean heat, cryosphere decline, and overlapping hazards demand a move from climate risk awareness to disciplined adaptation and continuity planning.
The Three Horizons of Decarbonisation
This article presents the Three Horizons of Decarbonisation framework, helping companies distinguish between short-term efficiency measures, operational transformation, and fundamental business model shifts. It explains how clear horizon identification improves capital allocation, stakeholder engagement, and the likelihood that net zero plans translate into meaningful action.
Systems-informed stewardship part III: Reimagining stewardship for a sustainable future
This article presents systems-informed stewardship as a new approach to advancing sustainability across the finance sector. It outlines two interdependent lenses and three practical shifts, embedding responsibility, designing for complexity, and managing adaptively to improve stewardship effectiveness.
Systems-informed stewardship part II: Bringing a systems perspective to stewardship
This article applies a systems lens to stewardship, arguing that fragmented intermediation and entrenched short-term time horizons undermine sustainability outcomes. It calls for recognising these structural barriers as a critical step toward more effective, systems-informed stewardship.
Climate fiduciaries: part III – mind the model gap
The article explores how pension funds rely on imperfect climate models to assess financial risk and whether fiduciary duty requires deeper scrutiny of their assumptions. It highlights emerging legal challenges, model limitations, and the shift toward richer scenarios and climate narratives in investment decision-making.
Mobilising investment for climate adaptation
This report assesses Australia’s escalating climate risks and argues for scaling adaptation investment. It recommends improved valuation methods, a nationally coordinated adaptation investment framework, and diversified public-private financing mechanisms to reduce long-term economic damage and enhance resilience.
Climate and catastrophe insight series
The Climate and Catastrophe Insight is an annual research series that provides a consistent global view of natural disaster activity and climate-related catastrophe trends. It examines impacts on people, assets and economies to support risk assessment, resilience planning and long-term decision-making.
The visionary CEO’s guide to sustainability series
The Visionary CEO’s Guide to Sustainability is a series of annual research reports examining how senior executives integrate sustainability into core strategy, operations, and decision-making. The series explores leadership responses to evolving environmental, regulatory, technological, and market pressures, with a focus on practical execution and long-term business resilience.
Sustainable Finance Roundup January 2026: Geopolitics, Energy Transitions, and Systemic Risk
This month’s sustainable finance article roundup examines a landscape increasingly shaped by geopolitics and climate risk, as near-term fragmentation, energy security, and affordability pressures collide with intensifying long-term threats from climate change, biodiversity loss, and water stress. The works featured analyse how these dynamics are reshaping capital allocation, disclosure, and resilience planning, demonstrating the growing need for sustainable finance to integrate geopolitical risk with real-economy transition.
Climate fiduciaries: part II – the duty of even-handedness
This article explores the fiduciary duty of even-handedness and its implications for climate-aware pension fund investing, focusing on emerging legal challenges in Australia and Canada. It argues that unmanaged climate risk may breach trustees’ obligations to act equitably across generations, particularly where younger members bear disproportionate long-term harm.
Systems-informed stewardship part I: Reshaping sustainable and impact finance through systems thinking
This article introduces systems thinking and explains how it is reshaping sustainable and impact finance by addressing interconnected systemic risks like climate change and inequality. It outlines four emerging applications; from systemic risk management to systems-informed stewardship, highlighting the implications for investors’ roles, tools, and decision-making.
Climate fiduciaries: part I – the climate prisoner’s dilemma
This article explores how climate change is reshaping fiduciary duty for pension funds, through court cases, legal analysis, and the concept of systemic risk. It introduces the “climate prisoner’s dilemma,” arguing that climate-aware investment may be shifting from discretionary to obligatory for long-term fiduciaries.
Nature Enters the Boardroom: Why Directors Are Paying Attention
Drawing on Australia’s first national study of board-level engagement with nature, this article shows how directors are treating nature as a material governance and financial issue. It highlights how boards are extending climate governance systems to manage nature-related risks, adopt frameworks like TNFD, and build resilience and long-term value despite policy uncertainty.
Can you be the change you’d like to see? Three US philosophers aim to offer hope
This review examines Somebody Should Do Something, a timely book arguing that individuals can spark meaningful social change by acting collectively rather than alone. It assesses the authors’ hopeful framework alongside contemporary political realities, questioning whether grassroots agency is sufficient amid concentrated power and rising authoritarianism.
Still or sparkling?: Approaches to changing portfolio compositions in long-term stress-tests and scenario analyses
The report reviews approaches to modelling portfolio changes in long-term climate stress tests, comparing static portfolios with macro, ex ante, and ex post adjustments. It outlines trade-offs, shows results are sensitive to assumptions, and argues approach choice should match supervisory objectives.