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 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 report analyses how investment professionals use AI and big data, noting moderate but rising adoption, multihoming across tools, and key challenges including skills gaps, data quality, and model opacity. It highlights organisational priorities such as upskilling and workflow automation to enhance efficiency and decision making.

The report surveys senior leaders on AI adoption in anti-financial crime, finding limited current use but rapid expected uptake. It highlights technology shortcomings, emerging AI use-cases, leadership awareness, and barriers including cost, skills and regulatory uncertainty, outlining opportunities for more efficient, integrated and adaptive AFC capabilities.

The report outlines a framework for a Responsible Digital Finance Ecosystem, urging holistic, collaborative consumer protection amid rising digital finance risks. It defines ecosystem actors and four pillars—customer centricity, collaboration, capability, and commitment—to strengthen regulation, improve outcomes, and reduce harms in rapidly evolving digital financial services.

The paper models how misaligned sustainable finance taxonomies can cause cross-border capital leakage, reducing alignment with developed-market standards. It identifies four ratios determining whether endorsing common ground improves outcomes and shows leakage can be significant without regulatory measures to differentiate and prioritise higher-quality green bonds.

The report examines how business and human rights measures affect emerging-market suppliers, highlighting benefits such as market access and worker protections, alongside major compliance burdens and unintended consequences. It recommends bottom-up design, fairer contracting, capacity support and collaborative implementation to improve outcomes.

The report reviews how businesses can better respect and support human rights defenders by strengthening policies, due diligence, and accountability. It outlines emerging frameworks, examples of company action, implementation challenges, and recommendations for companies, investors, multistakeholder initiatives, and States to safeguard civic freedoms and address risks linked to business activities.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s maritime sector faces rising decarbonisation pressures. The report outlines emissions-reduction pathways, alternative fuel options, green corridor opportunities, and economic risks of inaction. It recommends coordinated planning, trans-Tasman collaboration, and enabling regulation to maintain trade competitiveness and support a lower-emissions shipping system.

The report outlines climate change risks and opportunities for New Zealand’s agriculture sector, presenting shared scenarios and an adaptation roadmap. It identifies key challenges, drivers of change and priority actions to strengthen resilience, guide investment, support innovation and enable a coordinated, sector-wide response.

This month’s sustainable-finance roundup highlights faster transition momentum, rising physical risks and a tightening focus on accountability. COP30 reinforced expectations for stronger 2035 targets, while national actions underscored diverging paths toward decarbonisation. Markets continued shifting toward clean energy and resilience, and new science made climate harms more visible. With regulatory scrutiny and litigation increasing, transition credibility and real-economy resilience are becoming core drivers of financial risk and investment decisions.

The ESG and the Sustainable Economy Handbook series is a multi-part research and guidance series that explains how environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations intersect with legal, operational and investment practices across global markets, supporting finance professionals and corporate actors to understand and integrate ESG into business and investment decision-making.

The report analyses how legal frameworks across major jurisdictions shape investors’ ability to pursue sustainability impact. It clarifies when impact-focused approaches are permitted or required and outlines policy options to support them. It provides guidance for aligning investment decisions with sustainability goals while maintaining financial objectives.

The article explores the paradox in which institutional investors focus heavily on climate-risk disclosure, an area of comfort and perceived legitimacy, while underinvesting in real-economy climate policy that could meaningfully reduce systemic risk. It argues that meaningful climate action requires shifting from technocratic “managing tons” approaches toward politically challenging asset revaluation and more robust policy engagement.

This report analyses how cities can decarbonise buildings by mapping the interdependencies between policy and financial instruments and the barriers they address. It highlights priority actions for cooling, embodied carbon, adaptation and a just transition, outlining pathways that help cities sequence measures to accelerate net zero building outcomes.

China’s transition finance market is expanding to support the decarbonisation of high-emitting industries. The report outlines growth in green and sustainability-linked bonds, emerging transition frameworks, and ongoing debates on coal and gas inclusion, highlighting the need for clearer standards and broader financing tools to meet China’s 2060 climate goals.