What's Happening in Sustainability & ESG (Week Recap 09.12 - 15.12) 🌎

This week’s read time: 8 minutes

Welcome to this edition of Green Digest, where you will get updated about everything happening in the Sustainability & ESG space in less than 10 minutes. 🌎

We go through tons of articles and data from the most reliable sources, filter & simplify them, and serve them to you in bite-sized chunks every week. 🍀

PRESENTED BY COOLSET

In this edition, we’ll cover:

• New York finalized mandatory GHG emissions reporting rules & California released draft regulations for the state’s climate disclosure laws 🇺🇸

• EU lawmakers agreed on a provisional update to the European Climate Law, setting a binding 90% GHG emissions cut by 2040 from 1990 levels 🇪🇺

• The ISSB proposed targeted amendments to IFRS S2 to ease and clarify Scope 3 financed emissions disclosures 📑

• The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) released new exposure drafts updating its labor-related sustainability standards 📑

• and other news 🌍

PRESENTED BY TERRA REPORTING

From Fragmented ESG Data to a Unified, Audit-Ready CSRD Foundation

As CSRD continues to evolve, organisations must standardise ESG data, reduce manual work, and build reliable, automated reporting processes.

Fedrus International, a leading building materials group operating across many countries and business units, faced the same challenge: ESG data scattered across systems, formats, and spreadsheets, creating gaps in traceability and slowing validation.

To solve this, Fedrus International turned to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, powered by the Terra ESG Platform, to consolidate ESG data across all entities and build a scalable data foundation for CSRD-aligned reporting.

In this story, you’ll learn how Fedrus International:

• Unified ESG data from multiple countries, business units, suppliers, and systems

• Eliminated inconsistencies and reduced manual consolidation

• Established a structured, auditable ESG dataset ready for CSRD

• Automated reporting workflows that deliver more frequent, actionable insights

THIS WEEK’S TOP NEWS

Regulatory Oversight & Industry Insights

🇺🇸 New York finalized mandatory GHG emissions reporting rules for carbon-intensive sectors, with annual disclosures starting in 2027, positioning the state as a counterweight to recent federal rollbacks on climate transparency. The regulations, announced by DEC Commissioner Amanda Lefton, require facilities and entities emitting or supplying more than 10,000 metric tons of CO₂e per year to report emissions data to the state, with large sources subject to third-party verification, and cover sectors including power generation, fuel suppliers, waste management, and certain agricultural inputs.

The rules follow a directive from Governor Kathy Hochul and aim to support emissions reduction policies, assess compliance, and guide investment decisions, even as the Trump administration moves to scale back federal programs such as the EPA’s GHG Reporting Program and the SEC’s climate disclosure rules.

📑 California’s Air Resources Board also released draft regulations for the state’s climate disclosure laws SB 253 and SB 261, setting August 10, 2026, as the deadline for large companies to report Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions under SB 253. The proposal opens a public comment period through Feb. 9, 2026, with final approval expected in late February, while enforcement of SB 261 climate risk disclosures remains paused amid ongoing legal challenges and regulatory delays.

⚖️ In other news, a US federal court struck down President Trump’s executive order freezing new wind energy approvals, ruling it unlawful, arbitrary, and beyond presidential authority. The judge agreed with a coalition of 18 state attorneys general that the administration failed to justify its abrupt reversal of long-standing federal support for wind power, vacating the order in full and reopening the path for federal permitting of wind projects.

MORE INTERESTING NEWS

Latest developments, reports, insights, and trends

🇪🇺 EU lawmakers reached a provisional agreement to amend the European Climate Law with a new binding target to cut GHG emissions by 90% by 2040 compared to 1990 levels. The deal introduces added flexibility through a larger role for international carbon credits, biennial reviews of the target, use of permanent carbon removals, and a one-year delay to the ETS expansion to buildings and road transport, balancing climate ambition with competitiveness concerns, and now awaits formal approval by the European Parliament and Council.

The EU is also moving ahead with its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the world’s first carbon tariff, which will take effect on January 1, 2026, requiring importers of key carbon-intensive products to pay a carbon price aligned with the EU ETS. Designed to protect EU producers and push global decarbonization in hard-to-abate sectors like steel and cement, CBAM is already prompting responses from trading partners despite opposition from major exporters, and the EU is preparing to expand the mechanism to additional products to close loopholes, though some industry groups warn against moving too quickly.

📑 The ISSB announced targeted amendments to its IFRS S2 climate standard to ease and clarify GHG disclosure requirements, particularly for financial institutions’ Scope 3 financed emissions. The updates allow firms to limit reporting to loans, investments, or assets under management, exclude facilitated, insurance-associated, and derivatives-related emissions, and provide flexibility on classification systems and measurement methods, addressing implementation challenges while preserving investor-relevant information.

📑 The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) released new exposure drafts updating its labor-related sustainability standards to strengthen disclosures on issues such as forced labor, child labor, and workers’ rights across company value chains. The proposed revisions expand requirements on due diligence, incident reporting, grievance mechanisms, and remediation, form part of a broader overhaul of eight labor standards due from mid-2026, and are open for public consultation until March 9, 2026.

📑 A new HSBC survey finds that sustainability has shifted from a risk-management exercise to a core growth and value-creation strategy for both companies and investors, with climate transition increasingly driven by financial and competitive considerations. 95% of business leaders see the climate transition as a commercial opportunity and 99% expect it to strengthen competitive advantage within three years, while investors largely agree, with 96% prioritizing climate factors in investment strategies and 79% linking sustainability integration to stronger long-term financial performance.

WHAT ARE COMPANIES DOING?

Corporate sustainability, new tools and services & companies in the news

🟢 Microsoft signed a long-term deal with renewable fuels developer C2X to supply 3.6 million tons of carbon removal units from a planned bio-methanol BECCS project in Louisiana. The $2.5 billion Beaver Lake project will capture and permanently store around 1 million tons of CO₂ per year while producing low-carbon methanol.

🌊 Google signed a new offtake agreement with marine carbon removal startup Ebb Carbon to remove 3,500 tons of CO₂ using its ocean alkalinity enhancement technology deployed at a Saudi desalination facility. Integrated with Saudi Water Authority operations, Ebb’s electrochemical system converts desalination waste brine into alkaline solutions that enable oceans to absorb more CO₂ while generating additional freshwater and valuable byproducts.

🟢 Holcim and carbon removal startup 44.01 launched a pilot project in the UAE to capture and permanently mineralize CO₂ from cement production. The Fujairah-based pilot will capture around five tons of CO₂ per day from a cement plant and store it underground in local rock formations, marking the first industrial deployment combining cement-derived CO₂ with in-situ mineralization.

📑 Munich Re announced new 2030 emissions reduction and climate investment targets under its Ambition 2030 strategy, reaffirming its commitment to reach net zero across insurance and investment portfolios by 2050 despite exiting several climate alliances earlier this year. The reinsurer set absolute and intensity-based emissions cuts across coal, oil and gas, insurance underwriting, listed and private investments, real estate, and infrastructure, and committed to no expansion of its remaining oil and gas exposure, and accelerated the phaseout of thermal coal investments to 2030.

📑 Neste revised its climate targets, delaying ambitions due to financial constraints and a streamlined investment portfolio, and replaced its carbon-neutral-by-2035 goal with an 80% Scope 1 and 2 emissions reduction target by 2040. While interim operational targets were pushed back, the company reaffirmed its product-related decarbonization goals and commitment to renewable fuels, citing market conditions and the delayed transformation of its Porvoo refinery as key factors.

🛢️ ExxonMobil said it will cut planned low-carbon investment by about one-third to $20 billion, citing weaker customer demand and less supportive government policies, while raising its 2030 earnings and cash-flow targets. The move reflects a broader pullback by major oil companies from decarbonization efforts, with hydrogen projects paused across the sector and peers like Shell and BP scaling back green ambitions amid investor pressure.

EVERYTHING FINANCE

Sustainable finance, funding rounds, acquisitions & private equity deals

🇺🇸 President Trump issued an executive order directing US agencies to increase oversight of proxy advisory firms Glass Lewis and ISS, accusing them of using their market dominance to advance ESG and DEI agendas. The order instructs the SEC, FTC, and Department of Labor to investigate the firms for potential antitrust, fiduciary, and disclosure violations, consider stricter registration and transparency requirements, and reassess their role in advising investors and pension plans, marking a further escalation in the US political pushback against ESG-related shareholder influence.

📈 Eiffel Investment Group raised €1.2 billion for its Eiffel Energy Transition III infrastructure debt fund. The fund will provide flexible short-term financing for renewable energy projects across Europe and is expected to deploy up to €3 billion over its eight-year life.

⚡️ BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners acquired a minority stake in Aditya Birla Renewables for $225 million The deal will support ABREN’s expansion from its current 4.3 GW portfolio toward a 10 GW-plus target, reflecting strong investor confidence in India’s fast-growing renewable energy market and decarbonization push.

Acquisitions

🤝🏻 Sustainability software provider osapiens acquired Berlin-based agentic AI startup Lucent AI to strengthen its capabilities in financial risk management, compliance automation, and AI-driven decision support. The deal will integrate Lucent AI’s risk quantification and early-warning tools into the osapiens HUB, with the first combined modules expected in Q2 2026.

Startup funding rounds

⚡️ Enhanced geothermal developer Fervo Energy raised $462 million in a Series E round to scale its carbon-free power projects, adding Google as a new investor alongside returning backer Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The funding will support development of Fervo’s Cape Station geothermal project in Utah, expected to deliver 100 MW by 2026 and scale to 500 MW by 2028, as demand for always-on clean energy accelerates.

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