We’re only four months into 2025, and if you’ve blinked, you might’ve missed half a dozen new climate regulations, a few game-changing discoveries, and a wildfire season that came way too early.
RBC Drops $500 Billion Sustainable Finance Target
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) announced that it has decided to drop its target to mobilize $500 billion in sustainable finance, and has held off on providing some climate finance-related disclosures, following changes to greenwashing regulations in Canada. The announcement, revealed in RBC’s 2024 Sustainability Report, follows the passage of amendments last year to Canada’s Competition Act, aimed at tackling…
FCA Halts Plan to Introduce Sustainability Disclosure Requirements and Investment Labels for Portfolio Managers
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the conduct regulator for financial services firms and financial markets in the UK, announced that it would not currently proceed with its proposal to extend its new Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) and sustainable investment labelling regime to portfolio managers, despite “broad support” for the rules, following industry feedback on the proposal. The proposal, announced in…
Companies Continuing to Increase Climate Ambitions Despite Headwinds: MSCI
Companies globally continued to increase the ambitions of their climate goals in 2024, despite policy headwinds, with a substantial increase in the year of listed companies with validated science-based emission reduction goals, and a continued decoupling in the correlation between revenue and GHG emissions growth, according to a new study released by investment data and research provider MSCI. For the…
Regulation and political polarisation: Why one step back could mean two steps forward
For those of us working in sustainability, the negative rhetoric of the past few months hasn’t been easy to ignore. Driven in large part by the changing political environment in the US, a whole spectrum of issues that had previously enjoyed near-unanimous consensus have become more divisive than we could possibly have imagined just a few years ago. This increasing…
US DEI rollbacks ‘likely to have meaningful impact in Europe’
A 73% majority of private equity fund investors have said moves pushing back against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the US could have a meaningful impact in Europe, according to Brackendale’s sixth private equity sentiment report: DEI: Progress, Policy or Pushback. The report explores the perspectives of European LPs on DEI and its long-term viability in European private markets,…
Fund rebranding activity accelerates ahead of ESMA naming guidelines
Fund rebranding activity accelerated in the first quarter of 2025, as the 21 May deadline for the European Securities and Markets Authority’s (ESMA) greenwashing rule rapidly approaches, according to Morningstar’s latest report: SFDR Article 8 and Article 9 funds: Q1 2025 in Review. At least 262 Article 8 and Article 9 funds with ESG-related terms in their names rebranded in…
DEI targets are gone – but that doesn’t mean we stop
So, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has officially paused its plans for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) targets. While no one wants overly burdensome regulations, this move risks undermining DEI’s importance, reducing it to a trend that can be ignored. Worse, it perpetuates the myth that DEI is an overhead rather than an opportunity. A particular bugbear of mine is…