Summary

The article discusses key takeaways from the 2024 New York Climate Week, a global climate event that brought together experts, influencers, and changemakers. The author highlights five key themes: growing regulatory pressure on corporations to report their climate and sustainability performance, a shift towards more practical and realistic climate goals, the emergence of Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCMs) as a vital component of global decarbonization strategies, maturing reporting frameworks for measuring and disclosing climate and social impacts, and the challenges posed by geopolitical unrest to international climate cooperation.

Today we talk about the increasing adoption of sustainability reporting standards, particularly in the aviation and financial sectors. This includes details of a large-scale agreement between Air France-KLM and Total Energies to significantly increase the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in the coming years.

Next we discus Hong Kong's plans to implement IFRS-aligned sustainability reporting standards for companies, which will improve transparency and comparability of environmental and social data across businesses. Both pieces highlight the growing importance of sustainability in global markets.

A deep dive into the Australian ESG regulatory environment and some recent cases of greenwashing and the outcomes.