Shaken Not Burned

Highlighting changemakers and solutions

What we’ve been reading this week

• Record breaking heat drives focus on declaration of a planetary emergency. Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported that global temperatures continue to shatter records, emphasising the urgency for global action to address extreme heat, which is increasingly linked to severe economic and health impacts, such as rising poverty and heat-related deaths​. This underpins calls by the Climate Governance Commission for the UN General Assembly to declare a Planetary Emergency to address the triple crisis of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.

• Australian Senate approves mandatory disclosure law. While there are open questions as to the extent to which such mandates result in corporate action, the shift towards mandatory reporting of such risks is changing the operating environment for many businesses. With California’s Climate Related Financial Risk Act in the US, CSRD in Europe, TCFD in the UK, and reports of growing support for the federal US SEC rules, the addition of Australia means that more jurisdictions are demanding large companies and multinationals report on such risks. Increased scrutiny has a cascading impact, as smaller companies will have to provide relevant data to their large clients; this suggests that understanding sustainability and ESG impacts is an unstoppable shift.

• 60% of global investors are seeing higher performance yields with ESG investing. Commercial real estate services group Cushman and Wakefield have released their Sustainability Megatrends report which argues seven key trends are driving the integration of ESG across industries. These are: institutional investment in ESG; building performance standards; mandatory ESG reporting requirements; energy transition and decarbonisation; partnering with tenants through ESG leasing; digital transformation; and the assessment and mitigation of climate risk.

• South Africa finds Total’s sustainability claims misleading. The court’s finding highlights a crackdown on greenwashing around the world. France has long had anti-greenwashing legislation, the US has its Green Guides, Germany protects consumers and regulates the financial sector, and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and Competition and Markets Authority have their own guidelines. In a similar way to climate risk transparency, expectations of corporate communications are beginning to shift.

• Bacteria could help extracting of critical minerals. The importance of critical minerals for renewable energy, batteries and EVs has been used as an argument that they cannot be rolled out at scale (despite an expectation of massive demand growth in semiconductor chips, mobile phones and e-devices, which require critical minerals too). While experts argue as to whether there’s enough, where they can be found and the most cost-effective way to extract them and manage their life in the supply chain, a team at Edinburgh University have found a way to use microbes to extract such minerals from e-waste – tackling pollutants at the same time as sourcing much needed materials.