This month’s sustainable finance roundup traces the shift from ambition to enforcement, as climate and nature risks become financial, regulatory and legal realities. It covers Australia’s environmental law reforms, the embedding of climate and nature risk through prudential supervision, disclosure and shareholder pressure, and insurer warnings on the limits of insurability. It also highlights how markets are responding to deforestation and biodiversity risk, and how litigation and regulation are reshaping governance and long-term financial resilience.

This ESCAP policy brief examines climate finance options for scaling low-carbon transport in Asia–Pacific. It assesses funding gaps, barriers, and mechanisms—including subsidies, carbon pricing, green bonds, PPPs, and international finance—and recommends policy alignment, capacity building, investor matching, and diversified financing to accelerate investment.

This guide outlines how investors can integrate physical climate risks into listed equity and debt portfolios, strengthen portfolio resilience, and mobilise capital for adaptation through asset allocation, due diligence, engagement, and collaboration across policy, finance and the real economy.

ICMA’s DLT Bonds Reference Guide outlines practical considerations across the lifecycle of distributed ledger technology-based debt securities. It addresses legal, regulatory, operational, trading, settlement and investor issues, aiming to support consistent market practice and wider adoption while reducing fragmentation in global bond markets.

This report synthesises interviews with global thinkers to diagnose structural flaws in dominant economic systems. It argues that extractive capitalism, growth imperatives, inequality and ecological overshoot underpin a planetary predicament, and frames the challenge as navigation towards regenerative, responsibility-based economies rather than problem-solving.

ERM’s Transformation Survey analyses global corporate progress in operationalising sustainability goals. It finds stronger performance on social issues than climate or nature, identifies weak sustainability-linked incentives as the main barrier, and highlights underinvestment in training, incentives, and ESG data systems.

The ICMA Guidance Handbook (November 2024) consolidates interpretative guidance on Green, Social, Sustainability and Sustainability-Linked Bond Principles, covering use of proceeds, reporting, verification, secured bonds and market issues. It supports consistent application and market integrity across sustainable debt markets.

This conceptual paper examines corporate sustainability reporting, distinguishing investor-focused sustainability-related financial disclosure from broader impact reporting. It argues investor interests are imperfectly aligned with societal goals and concludes that complementary financial and impact reporting standards are needed to support accountability, capital allocation and sustainability transition.

The report analyses global listed firms from 2010–2022 and finds that stronger alignment with UN Sustainable Development Goals is associated with fewer, less severe corporate scandals, especially in highly scrutinised sectors such as energy and utilities, offering investors predictive insight beyond conventional ESG ratings.

The report outlines data requirements for assessing physical climate risks, highlighting gaps in hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and adaptation information. It reviews emerging tools, stresses limitations in insurance and asset-level data, and recommends capacity building, collaboration, and improved data systems to enhance financial sector climate-risk analysis.

The report outlines bipartisan US federal policy recommendations to mobilise private capital for shared prosperity. It focuses on strengthening economic competitiveness, scaling community investing, and improving impact transparency to support inclusive growth, underinvested communities, and long-term economic resilience.

This educational material explains how entities identify and disclose material sustainability-related risks and opportunities under IFRS S1 and S2, focusing on impacts on cash flows, access to finance and cost of capital, and applying consistent, entity-specific materiality judgements.

This report synthesises discussions from an international round table on financing city-level climate action, highlighting how local governments overcome fiscal constraints through tailored funding scales, partnerships, innovative revenue mechanisms, and long-term approaches to deliver major decarbonisation programmes across Europe and North America.

The handbook provides a harmonised framework for issuers to report social bond impacts, outlining core reporting principles, target population disclosure, and preferred quantitative indicators. It introduces sector guidance—initially affordable housing—and offers templates to support consistent, transparent, and comparable impact reporting across social project categories.

The report assesses biodiversity impacts and ecosystem service dependencies of 2,369 globally listed companies using multiple footprinting tools. It finds impacts highly concentrated among few firms, driven mainly by climate change, pollution and land use, with food, energy and chemicals sectors prioritised for investor engagement.

This case study explains how the Royal Bank of Canada piloted and expanded a financial access programme for survivors of human trafficking, using a risk based approach to customer identification and verification. It shows how regulated banks can advance financial inclusion while meeting compliance requirements through partnerships with support organisations.