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While preparing this edition, I googled "sustainability" and, wow, I was not impressed. Same tired explanations. Unsexy, uninteresting, unappealing. The images are worse: endless green-and-blue palettes, some hands holding planet Earth, hopeful sprouts poking out of coins. Booooring. Ok, small rant over. Lately I have this itch to make sustainability cooler. No idea how yet, but I will figure it out, so follow for more (hehehe had to find a way to say that!). Enjoy your read! 😆

🌡 August 2026 was the joint-hottest month on record and the first month back above 1.5°C since November 2025

⚖️ Revised ESRS enter the final stretch of Parliament and Council scrutiny

🔋 Volvo Group plans a 70 MW / 260 MWh battery-storage plant next to its Mariestad battery-cell site in Sweden

💰 Green-bond issuance hits a record $193 billion in Q2 2026

👩🏻‍⚖️Brockovich Data Center Reporting: a US map plus community-reporting portal for AI infrastructure. Yep, that’s her, Erin Brockovich (no, not Julia Roberts)

The revised ESRS and the voluntary VSME standard, adopted by the Commission on 3 July 2026 under the Omnibus I framework, are in the closing days of the initial two-month Parliament and Council scrutiny window that began on their transmission in mid-July. Neither co-legislator has signalled a formal objection so far. Absent one, the delegated act enters into force after publication in the Official Journal and applies to financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2027, with early adoption for FY2026 permitted from entry into force. The revised text cuts the number of mandatory datapoints by more than 60% against the 2023 baseline, tightens the mandatory-versus-voluntary boundary, and rewrites the double-materiality guidance to reflect the EFRAG 2025 implementation review.

The scrutiny period can be extended by two months at either institution’s request; the practical read from Brussels is that no such extension is expected. The Commission has committed to adopting the delegated act by 17 September under the Omnibus deadline, and the revised ESRS then become the reference set for the ESRS-40a exposure draft (item below) and for ESMA’s ongoing sustainability-reporting supervisory work.

Why it matters: preparers now have a stable ESRS text to build to for FY2026 early-adoption and FY2027 mandatory reporting, but the datapoint reduction shifts the audit and vendor-implementation risk away from coverage and towards judgement calls on materiality and the retained voluntary datapoints.

EFRAG opened a 100-day public consultation on the ESRS-40a exposure draft on 23 July, closing 31 October 2026. The draft standard applies to third-country undertakings with significant activities in the EU that meet the reporting thresholds set out in Article 40a of the Accounting Directive: annual EU net turnover above €450 million, an EU subsidiary or branch above defined size thresholds, and no consolidation into an existing CSRD-scoped parent. Throughout September, EFRAG is running a series of outreach events, in parallel with a cost-benefit analysis launched mid-August, to test the datapoint set and the sector-neutral logic before final drafting.

Why it matters: this is the standard that will determine how US, UK, Swiss, Japanese and other large third-country groups actually report EU-scoped sustainability information without inheriting the full CSRD architecture, and the September outreach is the last chance for preparers to influence it before the exposure draft becomes final advice.

Volvo Group announced on 11 September that it intends to develop a 70 MW / 260 MWh grid-scale battery-storage facility on land adjacent to its planned battery-cell production site in Mariestad, in western Sweden. The company positions the plant as a co-located flexibility asset serving the cell plant’s own load, wholesale spot arbitrage and system-service revenue in the SE3 bidding zone, drawing on Nordic reserve markets that have opened up meaningful behind-the-meter and front-of-the-meter revenue stacks over the last two years. The build is expected to reach commercial operation together with the first phase of cell production.

Why it matters: co-location of battery storage with battery-cell manufacturing is the industrial-scale version of the “solar plus storage” premium BloombergNEF flagged in H1, and Volvo is one of the first industrial groups in Europe to plan the two on the same balance sheet from the outset.

The Joint Research Centre’s EDGAR 2025 report, published 7 September in cooperation with the IEA, puts human-caused GHG emissions (excluding LULUCF) at a record 54 Gt CO2e in 2025, up 0.7% on 2024. The six top emitters (China, the US, India, the EU, Russia and Indonesia) account for 62% of the total. Six of the sixteen largest-emitting economies cut emissions year-on-year, the EU among them at minus 0.2% and now 35.6% below 1990 levels excluding LULUCF. Coal emissions declined in China for the first time on the EDGAR record; power-sector emissions across the OECD kept falling.

Why it matters: the 2025 EDGAR release is the first authoritative full-year global emissions number practitioners can quote against NDCs and ISSB S2 transition-plan assumptions, and its EU minus-0.2% datapoint arrives days before the ESRS delegated act enters into force.

The UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero opened a call for evidence on 9 September, asking industry, academia and civil society how artificial intelligence should be deployed across generation, transmission, demand-side management, system operation and the longer-term shape of the electricity system. The consultation applies to England, Scotland and Wales and covers both the operational upside (grid balancing, connections queue triage, forecasting, distribution-level flexibility) and the downside (large opaque load additions, cyber-physical risk, market concentration).

Reporting compiled in early September indicates Microsoft and AWS have improved data-centre water-use efficiency by 25% and 37% respectively over 2022 to 2025, while absolute water use continues to climb with AI capacity additions; industry-wide, data centres consumed around 222 billion litres of cooling water in 2025. Nvidia says its DSX architecture can eliminate direct water consumption at some sites via closed-loop liquid cooling routed directly across servers. Community objections to siting continue, especially in water-stressed US and Iberian regions.

Fyffes published a Regenerative Agriculture Framework on 11 September, targeting regenerative practices across roughly 13,000 hectares of owned banana and pineapple farms by 2030, with proven approaches then extended across its supply chain by 2035. The framework covers soil-health baselining, cover cropping and rotation, agroforestry, integrated pest management and water stewardship on farms concentrated in Latin America, and commits Fyffes to co-develop verification with third-party auditors rather than to a bespoke internal claim. Independent trackers will want to see the baseline dataset, the outcome metrics and the audit protocol before the “regenerative” label lands anywhere on a product SKU.

Why it matters: Fyffes is one of the largest tropical-fruit majors, so a framework of this size becomes a de facto benchmark for peer sourcing groups (Chiquita, Del Monte, Dole) and for retailers writing regenerative sourcing clauses into their private-label contracts.

Researchers with the Argentine cetacean-conservation NGO Fundación Cethus photographed what is thought to be the first completely white Peale’s dolphin (Lagenorhynchus australis) in the scientific record on 9 September, from a shore-based observation point in Santa Cruz province, southern Patagonia. Five days later, the same individual was seen again, patrolling and actively hunting alongside two normally pigmented Peale’s dolphins for about 40 minutes, in what looked like typical cooperative-feeding behaviour. It is not yet clear whether the animal is a true albino or has a different leucistic condition; that it is foraging with a healthy social group at all is the reassuring part. Peale’s dolphins have a narrow range from central Chile to Tierra del Fuego, and are still poorly monitored despite decades of trawl-fishery pressure on the southern-cone shelf.

Terra.do Climate Jobs. Terra.do runs one of the better-curated climate-jobs boards for the European and remote-anywhere market, tagging roles by function (policy, engineering, finance, operations), stage (startup to corporate) and seniority, and pulling from a hiring pool weighted toward climate-native employers rather than legacy corporates rebadging existing roles. Worth a Friday scan even if you are not actively looking; you will notice which sub-sectors are hiring before it hits the recruiter emails. Free, no paywall, no account required to browse.

Our Living World (Netflix, 2024, four episodes, narrated by Cate Blanchett). A quietly uplifting nature series from the team behind Our Great National Parks that reframes the planet as a single hyper-connected social network: fungi wiring forests, whales fertilising phytoplankton, wolves rewilding wetlands. The finale, “Road to Recovery”, sits closest to this issue’s themes, tracking ecosystem-scale recovery stories including predator reintroduction restoring rodent-overrun wetlands and post-bushfire rebound in Australia. A more optimistic frame than the usual climate-doom register, without airbrushing the losses. Streaming globally on Netflix; the Tudum preview and trailer are free to watch.

“1.5-aligned” is the label a portfolio, corporate transition plan, sovereign NDC, or transition-finance instrument uses when it wants to describe itself as compatible with limiting warming to 1.5°C, without specifying which model, overshoot allowance, sector pathway, or delivery timeline it invokes. The phrasing was mainstreamed through the SBTi Corporate Near-Term Criteria (2020 to 2021), the Climate Bonds Initiative’s certification pathways and the IIGCC Net Zero Investment Framework, and has since become a house style for asset managers, ratings houses and sovereign issuers. Given the UNEP Limiting Overshoot conclusion and this issue’s Copernicus lead, the same label increasingly describes plans that price for an overshoot rather than a hold; the label persists because “overshoot-and-return-aligned” is a harder sell to a fund board than a headline number. ESMA’s fund-name work and the SFDR 2.0 review are where the ambiguity is most likely to be narrowed next.

Some more news available in the gallery version due to most inboxes’ length limits 😉

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