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THIS WEEK AT A GLANCE
🗞 LEAD STORY
580 million children under 10 already face 20 or more extra heat-stress days a year from human-caused warming, new attribution study finds
A Vrije Universiteit Brussel-led team combined a large climate-model ensemble with gridded demographic data and found children under 10 face more attributable heat-stress days than any other age group, with South Asia, Southeast Asia and West Africa carrying the highest exposure.
The paper, published in Science Advances on 26 August, defines a heat-stress day as one with an indoor wet-bulb globe temperature above 28C (the accepted threshold for moderate heat stress), then compares the annual count in today’s 1.3C-warmed climate with a counterfactual pre-industrial simulation. Globally, 583 million children under 10 already live through at least 20 attributable heat-stress days a year, roughly 44% of the age cohort, versus 190 million (30%) among 60- to 69-year-olds.
Regional numbers land hard. Côte d’Ivoire records 112 heat-stress days a year, roughly half of them attributable; Germany sees none by this metric because wet-bulb thresholds are rarely crossed at European humidity levels, though the authors flag that their gridded data miss the urban heat-island component. At 2C warming, 23% of under-10s are exposed to 100 or more attributable heat-stress days annually, up from 11% today. Lead author Rosa Pietroiusti frames the finding as data for the climate-justice argument: the youngest cohorts in the countries that emitted least are absorbing the largest excess exposure.
Why it matters: attribution science is now producing the kind of asymmetric, generation- and geography-specific numbers regulators, insurers and adaptation planners need to price physical risk in ways CSRD-style disclosures currently do not capture.
Sources: Carbon Brief · Pietroiusti et al., Science Advances
⚖ REGULATORY AND POLICY WATCH
EFRAG puts the ESRS-40a exposure draft out to public consultation until 31 October, cost-benefit analysis released mid-August
EFRAG on 23 July published the exposure draft of ESRS-40a, the standard for non-EU groups previously labelled N-ESRS, opening a 100-day public consultation that closes on 31 October 2026. The mid-August 2026 release of the accompanying cost-benefit analysis quantifies expected preparer burden for the roughly 1,200 non-EU groups now in scope after the Omnibus simplification, down from around 10,000 in the pre-Omnibus baseline.
Scope trigger: a non-EU parent generating more than €450 million in EU net turnover across two consecutive financial years, with an EU subsidiary or branch clearing €200 million in net turnover. First reports would be due in 2029 covering financial year 2028. EFRAG is running field tests and educational webinars through the autumn and will accept written comment through the standard consultation portal until the October deadline.
Why it matters: the ESRS-40a consultation is where the July US Mission complaint about EU extraterritorial reach lands as a concrete comment-letter fight, and the drafting choices EFRAG makes in October will shape how CSRD interoperates with the US single-materiality standard in practice.
Sources: EFRAG · PwC Viewpoint
👀 SHORT ONES
Australia Treasury proposes narrowing scope, delaying reasonable assurance, and easing Scope 3 supplier requests on its climate reporting rules
Australia’s Treasury issued a consultation paper on 21 August proposing three simplifications to the country’s mandatory climate-related financial disclosure regime (in force for the largest reporting entities since FY24-25): keep limited assurance and push reasonable assurance to 2035 (or apply reasonable assurance only to mature metrics like Scope 1 and 2), tighten limits on Scope 3 data requests to reduce burden on suppliers and SMEs, and expand access to publicly available domestic emission factors as an alternative to bilateral data collection. Consultation is open until 2 October 2026. The direction mirrors the EU Omnibus and California’s Scope 3 scoping decision: mandate first, then trim once compliance costs land.
Sources: Australian Treasury consultations
Deloitte agrees to pay $21.5 million to settle a US Department of Justice False Claims Act case over its DEI practices
Deloitte confirmed on 26 August it will pay $21.5 million to settle a US Department of Justice False Claims Act case alleging its diversity, equity and inclusion practices failed to comply with federal antidiscrimination requirements. The DOJ said the conduct covered ran between 2017 and 2026 and included business-unit dashboards tracking “demographic goals” and remuneration tied to hitting those goals for roughly 150 senior partners and managing directors. Deloitte denies the allegations and does not admit liability. The settlement is the largest to date under the DOJ’s Civil Rights Fraud Initiative, launched in May 2025, and lands as European DEI reporting requirements under CSRD’s S1 standard continue to expand corporate obligations in the opposite direction.
Sources: HR Dive · Accounting Today
📬 MARKET & CORPORATE MOVES
Philips issues its first EuGB-aligned green bond, a marker for the EU Green Bond Standard reaching mainstream corporate treasuries
Philips priced a €650 million EU Green Bond on 24 August, aligned with the EU Green Bond Standard under Regulation (EU) 2023/2631, with settlement on 28 August. The tranche is a 7.8-year bond with a 4.0% fixed coupon, oversubscribed by 2.7 times. Use of proceeds finances Taxonomy-aligned economic activities as set out in Philips’s European Green Bond Factsheet, primarily energy-efficient medical imaging and circular product programmes supporting the group’s 2030 Impact Ambition.
This is the first EuGB issuance from the healthcare sector since the Standard became applicable in December 2024. Corporate EuGB volumes have lagged sovereign and SSA issuance to date. Philips’s decision to price under the EuGB label rather than a plain ICMA-Principles framework signals that the Taxonomy technical screening criteria and disclosure requirements are workable for a diversified multinational, and hands European corporate treasuries a live comparable when structuring their next transaction.
Why it matters: if a handful of blue-chip European corporates follow Philips through the EuGB label over the next two quarters, the Regulation’s use-of-proceeds discipline stops being a sovereign/SSA convention and starts shaping how Taxonomy-aligned CapEx is priced in mainstream corporate credit.
Sources: Philips press release · Regulation (EU) 2023/2631 · GlobeNewswire
🌳 GREEN TECH & CLEANTECH
Aker Solutions and Microsoft partner to accelerate maturity, bankability and delivery of global CCS and CDR projects
Aker Solutions signed an agreement with Microsoft at the ONS conference in Stavanger on 25 August to advance the maturity, bankability and delivery of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects globally. The deal pairs Microsoft’s expertise in digital, AI, and monitoring-reporting-verification tooling with Aker Solutions’s techno-economic advisory and EPC capabilities, and is aimed at helping developers reach final investment decisions faster, including on projects that could generate CDR credits.
Why it matters: the Aker Solutions deal is another marker of Microsoft using its balance sheet and AI-adjacent MRV tooling to underwrite CCS-and-removal supply that pure market signals have not yet pulled through, one small offset to the emissions-trajectory picture in this issue’s “Promise Kept?”.
Sources: Aker Solutions · Chemical Engineering
🥳 EXCELLENT NEWS
Amazon deforestation alerts fall 36% year-on-year, lowest since Brazil’s DETER monitoring system began
Brazil’s DETER system logged 2,874 square kilometres of Amazon deforestation alerts between August 2025 and July 2026, down 36% on the previous year and the lowest reading since the near-real-time series began. If confirmed by the higher-resolution PRODES annual system in November, Brazil would record its lowest official Amazon deforestation rate since monitoring started in 1988. Alerts also fell across the Cerrado, Caatinga, Atlantic Forest and Pampa biomes, with the Cerrado at a five-year low, on the back of stronger federal enforcement under the Lula government. Illegal gold mining, drought and fire remain material threats that do not always show up in the clear-cutting statistics, and the tipping-point argument for the wider Amazon is not off the table, but the trend line is where it needs to be.
Explore to learn more about this precious forest-
🤔 PROMISE KEPT?
Microsoft’s 2020 pledge: carbon negative by 2030, water positive by 2030, all historical emissions removed by 2050
In January 2020, then-President Brad Smith committed Microsoft to being carbon negative by 2030, water positive by 2030, zero waste by 2030, and to removing from the atmosphere by 2050 the equivalent of every ton of CO2 the company has emitted since 1975. Six years in, Microsoft’s own 2024 environmental sustainability report shows total Scope 1 to 3 emissions up around 29% to 30% against the 2020 baseline, driven by data-centre buildout and embodied carbon in new AI infrastructure. The company has publicly restated the 2030 target as of its 2025 update and has not walked it back, but the trajectory now requires an aggressive combination of durable removals, materials substitution and grid decarbonisation on a horizon most independent trackers see as strained.
🟡 Verdict: too early to tell, but the trajectory is not moving in the right direction.
🔧 TOOL OF THE WEEK
PCAF Global GHG Accounting and Reporting Standard (Parts A and B)
The reference financed-emissions methodology used by most European banks and asset managers computing portfolio emissions for CSRD/ESRS E1, ISSB S2 and the SBTi Finance Sector Framework. Part A covers financed emissions across loans and investments; Part B covers facilitated emissions from capital-markets activities. The 2024 update aligned methodological choices with ISSB S2 and clarified data-quality scoring conventions across asset classes. Useful this week for anyone running the numbers behind Philips’s EuGB use-of-proceeds framework.
Sources: PCAF Global Standard · PCAF site
⏱ UPCOMING
1 September 2026. EFRAG ESRS-40a public consultation continues, cost-benefit analysis now available; feedback deadline 31 October 2026.
15 September 2026. UN General Assembly’s 81st session opens in New York; sustainability side-events start the following weekend.
21 to 28 September 2026. Climate Week NYC 2026, running alongside UNGA 81; expect corporate CDR, transition finance and Article 6 announcements.
This Week’s Specials
🤞 CAREERS
SDG Academy free MOOCs. The SDG Academy, run by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, keeps a rolling free catalogue of open online courses aligned with the 2030 Agenda, taught by SDSN academic faculty. Currently open enrolments include Climate Change: The Science and Global Impact, Circular Economy: An Introduction, and Sustainable Cities. Certificates are optional and paid; the courses themselves are free. A cheaper autumn upskilling option than the paid climate bootcamps flooding LinkedIn, and better calibrated for practitioners who need conceptual depth rather than another sprint of tool acronyms.
🤙 RECS
“What should state policymakers do about data centers?” (Volts, David Roberts with Saleem Chapman, 5 August 2026). A 60-minute conversation with Climate Cabinet’s Saleem Chapman on the Taming Data Center Turmoil series, walking through Georgia’s regulated utility, PJM’s capacity market and ERCOT’s competitive market, and what state-level requirements (siting, transmission access, curtailment, cost allocation) actually stop new data-centre demand landing on residential ratepayers. Pairs directly with this issue’s Emerald AI raise and the wider AI-versus-grid tension the sector is still not pricing correctly.
🫱 SUPPORT A CAUSE
ClientEarth uses environmental law to challenge greenwashing and force enforcement of EU environmental rules, with active cases against misleading corporate climate claims and in defence of the Białowieża Forest. Donate or explore volunteering.
🖐 FIVE MINUTES WELL WASTED
Worldle. Daily geography-guessing game: identify the country from its silhouette, with distance and direction feedback after each attempt. It regularly cycles through small-island states, biodiversity hotspots and non-Anglo geographies most Anglophone climate coverage skips, and a five-minute run is a low-key way to fix mental gaps on where the Comoros, Kiribati or Sao Tome actually are on the map. Free, no account, works in any browser.
🤌 THE JARGON WATCH
“Nature positive” describes a state where nature (measured across biodiversity, ecosystem extent and integrity) is on a net improvement path from a stated baseline year, typically 2020. The term was pushed into common usage by the Nature Positive Initiative from 2020 to 2023, folded into the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s 2030 mission to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, and taken up in TNFD’s language on corporate nature transition plans. Because the baseline year, the measurement basket and the accounting boundaries are all still contested (compared with the year, sector and boundary conventions established for decarbonisation), corporates and financials benefit from the ambiguity: a 2030 “nature positive” claim can be made without agreement on what would count as failure. IUCN and TNFD are pushing standardisation, and CBD COP17 in October is where that fight comes to a head.
Relevant: Nature Positive Initiative · TNFD · CBD Kunming-Montreal GBF
See you next Monday! 🙌