Hello hello! Your editor here. Thank you so much for reading TME! 🎈
I continue my endeavour to talk about sustainability and climate from a positive, intriguing, compelling place, rather than a gloomy one. My research has led me to something I honestly had no clue existed: climate comedy. Yep, comedians trying to convey a message while making people laugh instead of cry. It is a whole thing, not all funny, I must warn you, but not all bad. Anyone here considering putting together a stand-up show called global laughing? Well, clearly not me. 🤡
Enjoy!
LAST WEEK AT A GLANCE
🗞 LEAD STORY
Von der Leyen announces a Climate Insurance Alliance, a European Heatwave Plan and a European Water Initiative in her 2026 State of the Union address
The Commission president told the Parliament in Strasbourg on 16 September that only 25% of catastrophe losses in Europe are covered by private insurance, and set out four interlocking climate resilience instruments: a Climate Insurance Alliance, a Heatwave Plan, a European Water Initiative and a climate-resilience framework covering 100 vulnerable territories due in October.
The Climate Insurance Alliance will pull together insurers, investors, supervisors and reinsurance experts to close the protection gap that has quietly turned national budgets into the insurer of last resort after this summer's drought, wildfire and heatwave season. The Heatwave Plan focuses on early-warning systems, health preparedness, urban adaptation and cooling systems for the most vulnerable groups. The European Water Initiative addresses leakage (Europe loses about one litre of treated water in four to network faults), drought risk and cross-sectoral water security across agriculture, industry, energy and supply chains.
The four announcements sit alongside the Commission's earlier commitments on the CBAM strengthening package, the Omnibus simplification of the ESRS, and the 2040 climate target still working through Parliament. Read together with the CBAM entering the compliance phase on 1 January 2026 and the ESRS delegated act entering force on 17 September (below), the State of the Union positions climate resilience as the counterweight to the simplification push, and locates most of the fiscal load with member states and EIB rather than the Commission's balance sheet.
Why it matters: closing the protection gap is a prerequisite for private capital to price physical climate risk into infrastructure lending at scale, and a heatwave plan tied to health preparedness is the first EU-level acknowledgement that adaptation now sits alongside mitigation on the Commission's permanent workplan.
Sources: Green Central Banking · Euronews · FTI ESG+ Newsletter
⚖ REGULATORY AND POLICY WATCH
Revised ESRS clear scrutiny on 17 September and enter into force with a 60% datapoint cut for FY2027 reporting
The revised ESRS and voluntary VSME standard, adopted by the Commission on 3 July under the Omnibus I framework, cleared the two-month Parliament and Council scrutiny window on 17 September 2026 without objection. The delegated act now 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. The revised text cuts mandatory datapoints by more than 60% against the 2023 baseline, tightens the mandatory-versus-voluntary boundary, and rewrites the double-materiality guidance to reflect EFRAG's 2025 implementation review.
EFRAG has separately published the 2026 draft datapoint list reflecting the revised standards and is preparing a matching XBRL taxonomy so preparers can move to structured digital filing without waiting on further guidance. Preparers now have a stable ESRS text to build against, and vendors, assurance providers and audit committees can lock the FY2026 early-adoption or FY2027 mandatory-reporting scope with materially less risk of another design change.
Why it matters: the datapoint reduction shifts the audit and vendor-implementation risk away from coverage and towards judgement calls on materiality and the retained voluntary datapoints, and closes six months of “wait and see” that had been holding up FY2026 early-adoption decisions.
Parliament adopts a wider CBAM by 464 to 50 and backs a Temporary Decarbonisation Fund from 2027
MEPs adopted the Parliament's negotiating position on the CBAM expansion in mid-September, 464 to 50 with 159 abstentions, backing the Commission's move to extend the levy to around 180 additional downstream goods (steel and aluminium wire, fasteners, springs, household articles) and pushing the ENVI committee ambition to as many as 457 categories.
Why it matters: a substantially wider CBAM plus an earlier and broader Decarbonisation Fund closes the two most obvious circumvention routes (downstream product imports, uncompensated fertiliser exposure) and gives EU manufacturers something closer to a level playing field before 2027 final compliance, at the cost of significantly more third-country administrative reach.
📬 MARKET & CORPORATE MOVES
Google contracts 2 million tonnes of methane cuts and enhanced-rock-weathering removal from Terradot across Brazilian rice farms
Google announced on 16 September its largest carbon-removal purchase to date: a Terradot deal covering more than 200,000 hectares of rice farms in southern Brazil. The agreement is engineered as two stacked contracts. Alternate Wetting and Drying irrigation on the rice paddies is expected to deliver 1 million tonnes of methane-elimination credits by 2030, while crushed volcanic rock spread across the same fields (enhanced rock weathering) is projected to generate 1 million tonnes of permanent CO2 removal by 2040. Terradot describes it as the largest ERW project undertaken to date and the first to pair near-term methane elimination with durable removal at this scale.
The stacked structure lets Google buy short-duration and long-duration credits from the same land base, and the farmer benefits from lower water use and improved soil health. The deal drops into a market where corporate carbon-removal contracts have been the fastest-moving line item in voluntary-carbon markets since 2024, and lands on the eve of Climate Week NYC, where the TNFD 2026 Status Report will discuss how nature-related credits are being priced into transition plans.
Why it matters: combining methane abatement and permanent CO2 removal in a single Brazilian rice-farm deal is the first commercial demonstration that hyperscalers can buy climate impact on the same balance sheet across two different tonnage regimes, and it puts pressure on peer buyers to close their own dual-vector removal contracts before COP30 pricing conversations firm up.
Sources: Google · Terradot (Business Wire)
👀 SHORT ONES
NOVVA Group signed a binding framework agreement on 16 September to acquire a 3.17 GW renewables development portfolio in Argentina from ABO Energy, positioned explicitly as long-term renewable supply for AI data-centre customers.
Bain publishes its 2026 Visionary CEO's Guide to Sustainability with a decarbonisation-ROI gap analysis. The report tracks how CEO rhetoric shifted from compliance-and-morality framing to a business-value frame across 35,000 statements from 150 companies in 2018, 2022 and 2024.
Sources: Bain hub page
🤖 AI & SUSTAINABILITY
Yes, interesting, but where can I find a “dealt with” stamp?!
Emerald AI, Google and Nvidia launch a 20-firm coalition to make AI data centres price-responsive to the grid
Emerald AI announced on 16 September a 20-firm coalition, backed by Google and Nvidia and joined by Anthropic, utilities National Grid and AES, generators Constellation, NRG and RWE, and grid operators, to develop the software and market protocols that would let AI data centres flex their electricity demand in response to grid stress and wholesale prices. The stated goal is to keep AI capacity growth from lifting retail electricity prices for households and small businesses, and to accelerate connection approvals by giving grid operators a firm demand-response signal from the largest new loads. Both companies frame the coalition as complementary to the direct-PPA and 24/7 CFE contracts already in place.
The launch lands the same week as the UK DESNZ call for evidence on AI in the electricity system, and roughly a fortnight after the UNECE flagged AI-driven grid stress as a global policy problem. Community advocates flagged that a demand-response coalition does not by itself solve siting concerns in water-stressed regions or the transmission-queue backlog, but for utilities and independent generators it changes what a merchant data-centre load actually looks like on a control-room screen.
Why it matters: a signed flexibility coalition led by two of the largest AI compute buyers turns AI data centres from “always-on baseload risk” into a schedulable, price-responsive load, which is the single largest structural shift utilities have been waiting on to unlock 2027 to 2030 connection queues.
Sources: NVIDIA Blog (16 September) · Axios · Unite.AI
🌳 NATURE, BIODIVERSITY & REGENERATIVE ECONOMY
Kunming Biodiversity Fund closes Stage 1 of its 2026 call on 15 September ahead of CBD COP17 announcements
The Kunming Biodiversity Fund closed the Stage 1 window of its 2026 call for proposals on 15 September. The KBF is the operational finance vehicle supporting developing countries in implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, with single-country projects capped at USD 500,000 and regional projects up to USD 800,000, projects lasting 12 to 24 months, and thematic priorities covering ecosystem restoration, biodiversity mainstreaming, resource mobilisation, and benefit-sharing from genetic resources and digital sequence information. Stage 2 submissions close 15 November. Approved projects will be announced during CBD COP17 in Yerevan later this year.
Why it matters: KBF stage decisions surface which national biodiversity strategies are attracting international finance and which are not, giving corporate nature-team leads and TNFD adopters an early signal on which sovereign counterparties are moving from framework rhetoric to funded implementation.
🥳 EXCELLENT NEWS
A 50 kWp solar mini-grid switches on in Bela Conquista, unlocking a community-owned açaí processing facility in the Brazilian Amazon
The Sustainable Amazon Foundation (FAS), the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) and Brazil's Ministry of Mines and Energy switched on a 50 kWp solar-and-battery mini-grid (165 kWh storage) in Bela Conquista, in the Catuá-Ipixuna Extractive Reserve. It unlocks a community-owned açaí processing facility that unstable diesel supply had kept idle, and is the first proof point for a 25-community rollout targeting up to 1 GWh of solar generation and 680 tonnes of avoided CO2 a year across the network. Sources: GEAPP · FAS / GEAPP (PR Newswire, 11 September) · ESS News (14 September)
🤔 PROMISE KEPT?
Google's 2020 pledge: run on 24/7 carbon-free energy across every operation, every hour, everywhere by 2030
In September 2020, Sundar Pichai committed Google to being 24/7 carbon-free by 2030 across every data centre and every campus, hour by hour. The 2026 Environmental Report shows a global carbon-free-energy match at 66% on a 24/7 basis in 2025, up from 64% the year before, but with wide regional variation and datacentre-hour matching in Asia-Pacific still under 30%. Total operational emissions have risen sharply since 2020 as AI-driven load has scaled ahead of new firm clean-energy capacity, and the company has quietly reframed the 2030 milestone as a “stretch goal” while adding large enhanced-rock-weathering and methane-abatement contracts (see Terradot deal, this issue) to bridge the gap.
🔴 Verdict: missed and restated.
🔧 TOOL OF THE WEEK
AI Impact Calculator: per-prompt and per-year energy, CO2 and water for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama and autonomous agents
A free browser tool that puts numbers on the environmental footprint of an actual AI usage pattern. Pick a model (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, or an autonomous agent), enter how it is used, and get the electricity, CO2-e and cooling water estimated per prompt and per year. Methodology draws on the open-source EcoLogits Python library, which estimates operational and embodied emissions from token counts, model architecture and grid factors.
The Monday ECO-nomics is not affiliated with, does not endorse and is not paid by the operator of this tool.
··· This Week’s Specials ···
🤞 CAREERS
Acre & SLR 2026/27 Sustainability Census is an open salary and career benchmark, drawing on 10,000-plus responses across 70-plus countries over 18 years and broken down by seniority, sector, region and functional specialism.
🤙 RECS
How to Live on Earth. A documentary series-cum-project examining what actually living well on this planet looks like, aimed at practitioners tired of both doom-scrolling and technocratic optimism.
🖐 FIVE MINUTES WELL WASTED
Breakdown Today - how good are you at estimating?!
🤌 THE JARGON WATCH
“Avoided emissions” are the tonnes of CO2e a company claims did not happen because a customer chose its greener option, benchmarked against a self-defined counterfactual. Formalised through the WBCSD 2023 guidance and cousin to Scope 4, the number sells climate-solutions funds and transition-finance instruments but never nets against Scope 1, 2 or 3 in any GHG Protocol boundary, because the baseline is inside the reporter's own model. Sources below for the mechanics.
Relevant: WBCSD Guidance on Avoided Emissions
Some more short news available in the gallery version due to most inboxes’ length limits 😉
👍 Did you love it?! Yay! Please do share! 🤓
👎 Not so much? Oh, please hit reply and do tell us why so we can work on it. And by “us” and “we”, I mean me! 😁