Hello hello! Your editor here (yes, really a human 😄).
Thank you so much for reading TME! 🎈
I personally write this little opening section of the TME as a way of keeping this newsletter personal, human, and to try and connect with the readers. Normally, it is easy to come up with stuff to say (or write). A thought, a recommendation, an insight. But today, I typed 4980 different versions of this and never managed to find any of them interesting or relevant. So instead of boring you to sleep with my rant about LinkedIn, or how workation can be confusing, I will just shut up and let you go through today’s news.
Ok, it took me a whole paragraph to say that I had nothing to say 😅. Sorry about that, and enjoy your read! 🪴
LAST WEEK AT A GLANCE
🗞 LEAD STORY
The first global review of the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework tells 196 Parties the half-time score ahead of COP17 opening in Yerevan
The CBD Secretariat is launching the State of Biodiversity Action report as the first global stocktake of the 23 targets agreed in Kunming-Montreal in December 2022, under embargo until 16:30 Yerevan time at the press conference. The report draws on 129 national reports, more than 160 sets of national targets and more than 80 updated national biodiversity strategies and action plans. It is the evidence base for the first global review of implementation that COP17 opens with, and the proposed “Yerevan Pathway” the Parties will negotiate from.
The structure the Secretariat and Executive Secretary Astrid Schomaker are leaning on is a halfway-point assessment: where action is advancing, where implementation is thin, and what needs to shift between now and 2030. Reporting rates are themselves a signal, with 125 of 196 Parties submitting Seventh National Reports and 129 of 173 Parties reporting under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety; the content of those reports is what the launch finally makes public. A “Leaders for Nature” Summit in Yerevan, convened by the Government of Armenia, is designed to politically anchor the ambition that follows, and the ministerial High-Level Segment lands at the end of October.
The report's evidence base will feed directly into the Yerevan Pathway text under negotiation, which the Parties intend to use as the operational wedge between the 2030 targets as drafted in 2022 and what the next three years of implementation have to deliver. The input is as much institutional as scientific: more than 160 sets of national targets and more than 80 updated national biodiversity strategies and action plans give the review tangible evidence of where gaps live. For large-cap sustainability teams working against TNFD methods and the Nature Restoration Regulation's urban targets, this is the first time the global halfway-point data is on the record publicly, and the shortfalls it names are the ones the next quarter of corporate nature-strategy work has to catch up with.
Why it matters: the Kunming-Montreal review is the first time the halfway-point evidence is on the record globally, and corporate nature-strategy teams working to TNFD and the EU Nature Restoration Regulation should treat the 15 October report as the operational baseline their 2027 to 2030 nature targets have to meet against.
Sources: CBD Secretariat · CBD COP17 High-Level Segment
⚖ REGULATORY AND POLICY WATCH
Pre-COP31 closes in Fiji with the Pacific-led Taku Pakasoa declaration and Australia's Global Rooftop Solar Pledge targeting 300 million rooftop panels worldwide by 2030
The four-day Pre-COP31 in Fiji closed on 8 October with roughly 4,000 attendees from more than 100 nations setting the political texture of the Antalya conference. Tuvalu's Minister for Climate Change Maina Talia announced the Taku Pakasoa leaders' declaration, adopted on 6 October by Pacific heads of government and now open for other Parties to associate with before COP31, naming ocean warming, acidification and sea-level rise as frontline realities and keeping 1.5°C explicitly in reach. Australia used the closing day to launch the Global Rooftop Solar Pledge, with a target of 300 million rooftop solar panels installed worldwide by 2030, flanked by an Access to Finance Statement and Action Plan that other countries can join under the broader Action Agenda; Australia's own figures include around one in three Australian households already running rooftop solar and more than 500,000 home batteries installed. Türkiye signalled it will work toward an “Antalya Ocean Declaration” at COP31. Fiji's Lynda Tabuya was blunt that “Pre-COP does not adopt decisions”; the pledges carry only as far as Antalya in November 2026 ratifies them.
UNFCCC - Government of Australia.
Why it matters: distributed solar at household scale is now being pitched as a diplomatic lever rather than a residential story, and corporate transition plans whose Scope 2 pathway depends on utility-scale PPAs should expect the rooftop share of regulatory and finance attention to rise sharply across the twelve months to and through Antalya.
The ISSB opens a 120-day consultation on an IFRS Practice Statement for nature-related disclosures, drawing on TNFD and timed to run through COP17
The IFRS Foundation's International Sustainability Standards Board published an Exposure Draft for public consultation proposing a Practice Statement on nature-related disclosures. The Practice Statement is designed to help companies applying IFRS S1 identify, assess and communicate material nature-related risks and opportunities, including dependencies and impacts across upstream and downstream value-chain nodes. The draft draws on the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and keeps the proposals non-mandatory in form, framed as proportionate implementation guidance rather than a new standard. Consultation runs 120 days to 19 February 2027, and the ISSB has scheduled a Live-from-COP17 webinar on 22 October (16:00 CEST / 18:00 Yerevan time) with Sue Lloyd and Himani Phadke walking preparers through the proposals while COP17 is in session.
Why it matters: the ISSB has effectively plugged the nature gap in the global baseline through a Practice Statement rather than a new S-series standard, which lowers political friction for jurisdictional adopters while still giving CSRD, EU Taxonomy and SFDR preparers a reference text to triangulate TNFD application against, and the February 2027 window is the moment to shape the operational guidance that will outlast this cycle.
Sources: IFRS Foundation · ISSB Proposed Way Forward for Nature · BDO
🧪 SCIENCE & DATA SIGNALS
IPCC 65 ends without agreeing on an AR7 delivery timeline, splitting Parties between a 2028 landing to feed the Paris Second Global Stocktake and a 2029 fallback to protect report quality
The IISD Earth Negotiations Bulletin's daily highlights across the week record an IPCC-65 Session whose two linked structural decisions, the delivery timeline for the three Working Group reports in the Seventh Assessment Report and the 2026 to 2029 budget that follows from it, remained unresolved. One camp wants all three Working Group reports delivered in 2028 to feed into the Second Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement; another wants Working Group II (impacts, adaptation and vulnerability) and Working Group III (mitigation) delayed to 2029 to protect report quality under a tighter research pipeline. Small island developing states and least developed countries argued publicly, through IISD's coverage, that a 2029 delivery would disadvantage the most climate-vulnerable Parties by sidelining the AR7 evidence from the first review of 2030 ambition. Side items that did close during the week include the Scholarship Programme (18 PhD scholarships to date from 16 countries), progress reports on the two methodology reports and the Special Report on Cities and Climate Change (both with approval sessions in 2027), and the Panel's continuing deliberation on the role of artificial intelligence in IPCC processes.
Why it matters: whether the AR7 Working Group reports land in 2028 or 2029 is the question that determines what evidence the next five years of EU climate policy, corporate transition planning and NDC updates get to draw on, and the longer this is unresolved, the more the 2030 review runs on IPCC AR6 vintage data rather than fresh work.
Sources: IISD ENB IPCC-65 highlights · IISD ENB IPCC-65 midweek highlights · IISD ENB IPCC-65 session page
🔆 IN THE SPOTLIGHT 🔆
Each issue, one purpose-driven project that deserves more visibility.
Today featuring: Not one, but two initiatives!
The Footprintcalc and Footprintdata are both developed and made freely available by The Footprinters, founded by Merel Segers and Jasper van den Herik.
The Footprintdata is a list of open-access data and tools that can be used to calculate products’ and companies’ footprints.
The Footprintcalc is an easy-to-use, freely accessible footprint calculator for product carbon footprint (PCF) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). It includes suggested educational resources and a tutorial for use.
Great resources for learning, identifying hotspots and making better decisions! Check them out!
·· Your turn! ··
Know a startup, community, tool or initiative that deserves the spotlight? Hit reply with the name, a link and one line on why it’s awesome.
🥳 EXCELLENT NEWS
Twenty years of wind and solar build-out kept roughly 23 billion tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere between 2006 and 2025, a counterfactual by Zeke Hausfather finds
Zeke Hausfather's 9 October counterfactual at The Climate Brink models what the global power system would have emitted had wind and solar deployment stalled at 2005 levels, and lands at roughly 23 billion tonnes of CO2 avoided across 2006 to 2025. The number sits inside the shorthand that renewables have “only displaced coal at the margins” and reads it against the actual counterfactual, giving transition-plan writers a defensible aggregate figure to anchor the next phase of grid-decarbonisation arguments against the AI-infrastructure load headlines.
Sources: The Climate Brink
🤔 PROMISE KEPT?
Amazon's 2019 Climate Pledge: net-zero carbon by 2040, 100% renewable electricity by 2030, ten years ahead of Paris
In September 2019, Jeff Bezos co-founded The Climate Pledge, committing Amazon to net-zero carbon across its operations by 2040 and to 100% renewable electricity by 2030. The 2025 Sustainability Report disclosed that Amazon's absolute greenhouse-gas emissions rose 16% year-on-year in 2025, with Scope 1 up 2%, Scope 2 up 34% and Scope 3 up 20%; carbon intensity rose 3% year-on-year but remains 38% below the 2019 baseline, with revenue 156% higher since 2019. AWS and AI build-out are named as the dominant drivers of the Scope 2 surge, and Amazon's renewable-energy portfolio stands at around 42 GW contracted. ESG Dive summarised Amazon's own framing as “we recognise that the path to being a more sustainable company is not a straight line.” The 2040 destination is still on the page; the 2030 100%-renewable milestone has become visibly harder to defend without more clarity on how AI compute will be powered.
🟡 Verdict: missed and restated
🔧 TOOL OF THE WEEK
ENCORE, the Natural Capital Finance Alliance's open explorer mapping economic activities to nature dependencies and impacts
ENCORE (Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure) is a free, in-browser tool built by UNEP Finance Initiative, UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre and Global Canopy. It lets analysts map 167 economic sub-industries against 21 ecosystem services they depend on and 11 impact drivers they generate, with materiality ratings calibrated against the primary ecology literature. No account, no payment, no install. Covers portfolio-screening, value-chain dependency mapping and TNFD LEAP-aligned risk assessment workflows.
·· This Week’s Specials ··
🤞 CAREERS
Women in Sustainability. A free-to-join global community for women and non-binary people working on sustainability, with local hubs across the UK, Ireland and continental Europe, free monthly events, a mentoring programme, and an active members' forum for peer support on practice areas including TNFD, biodiversity assessment and natural-capital accounting.
🤙 RECS
The Serviceberry. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Scribner, 2024, 128 pages. A short, essay-length book from the author of Braiding Sweetgrass that reframes the economy as a gift economy modelled on the reciprocity of a berry bush with the birds that disperse its seeds. Kimmerer uses the serviceberry as a bridge between Indigenous and ecological economics, with illustrations by John Burgoyne.
🖐 FIVE MINUTES WELL WASTED
HOT Tasking Manager. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team's open coordination platform where volunteers map unmapped places so disaster responders, public-health teams and climate-adaptation planners can work from a basemap that actually exists. Pick a project, trace a few buildings or roads in the browser-based iD editor, and your five minutes land directly in OpenStreetMap for anyone to use. No install, no account barrier beyond a free OSM login, no dark patterns.
🤌 THE JARGON WATCH
“Science-based” is the label companies put on a climate target they want read as unimpeachable, usually because the SBTi has validated it against a 1.5°C or well-below-2°C pathway. The slack lives in which pathway, which base year, which scopes, and whether the “near-term” validation covers Scope 3 at the level the business actually emits it. With the SBTi past 12,000 validated companies and the first Kunming-Montreal review opening this week, the term is about to stretch over nature targets whose own evidence base is still being pulled together. Treat it as a prompt to read the technical annex, not a verdict.
Hey! Before you go!
My team and I (which is composed of me and myself) would love to hear your feedback! Here’s what some people have been writing:
- I learned that Jane Goodall passed over a year ago because of your newsletter. That was very sad. - (To think that my goal was to spread hope 😢 )
- Nice! - (The shortest feedback ever, but thanks!!)