Hello hello! Your editor here (yes, really the human behind the whole thing 😄). Thank you so much for reading TME! 🎈
This past week, a video of Jay Lipman talking about Tenzin Seldon on Instagram, and her bombastic talk at the Nat Gala in New York, spread across all bubbles and reached several million views. If I am honest, I had never heard of Tenzin Seldon, Jay Lipman, or this Nat Gala before. And now I not only heard about it everywhere, but I just went reeeeally far down the GDR rabbit hole, reading everything I could find. Kate Raworth and her book had already made me think about GDP more than I could ever expect, and I am sure there are more people out there questioning WTF we are doing. So if you also got curious with all the acronyms and are gonna have to look into all this, sorry about that. 🥸
Enjoy your read!
LAST WEEK AT A GLANCE
🗞 LEAD STORY
IEA unveils a global electrification blueprint at UNGA, targeting a jump from 23% to 35% of final energy by 2035 to keep COP31 on track
Commissioned by Türkiye and Australia to inform COP31, the IEA's Special Report on Global Electrification released on 22 September during Climate Week NYC sets a “35 by 35” ambition and finds that the cost-competitive potential alone would already carry the world to 33%, provided countries build the grid, storage and market rules to move first.
The IEA report is the first Tier 1 diagnosis to translate the post-Baku “triple renewables, double efficiency” commitments into a single measurable dial: electricity's share of global final energy consumption. Today it sits at around 23%. Getting to 35% by 2035 (roughly a doubling of the historical rate of increase) would deliver the emissions cuts implied by the Paris trajectory, drive down household and industrial energy bills through higher-efficiency end-use, and lower fossil-import dependence in Europe, Japan and Korea. Crucially, the IEA finds that today's cost-competitive electrification options (heat pumps, industrial electrification of low-temperature heat, EVs across most segments, electric two- and three-wheelers) would already lift the electrification rate to 33% even without new subsidies, if grid capacity, permitting and market design catch up.
Alongside the ambition, the report calls for structured grid-and-storage expansion, targeted market-design reform to reward flexibility, and consumer incentives that make the switch attractive at the household and SME level. The AI-datacentre demand surge and the Commission's new proposed data-centre energy-labelling scheme (see AI & Sustainability, this issue) sit on top of that baseline load and reinforce the case for grid investment rather than replacing it.
Why it matters: the 35-by-35 target gives negotiators heading into COP31 a single, verifiable success metric that plugs into national NDC updates, EU 2040 target discussions and corporate transition plans alike, and reframes electrification from a green nice-to-have into a core cost-competitiveness lever.
Sources: WRI · Down To Earth · WebWire release
📬 MARKET & CORPORATE MOVES
Euronext 2026 ESG Trends Report finds consistent CSRD reporters cut Scope 1 and 2 by 7% over three years; Scope 3 remains the gap
Euronext's 2026 ESG Trends Report, published on 17 September and covering more than 1,680 listed issuers across its European markets, finds that companies reporting consistently over the past three years achieved an average 7% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions. The gap is not on climate ambition but on measurement quality: coverage of Scope 3 remains partial and inconsistent, with fewer than half of large issuers reporting all 15 categories at the level ESRS E1 will require. Governance metrics have improved (board oversight of climate is now near-universal), but only a minority of issuers disclose transition-plan capex against an implicit or explicit internal carbon price.
The report lands in the same week ESMA logged its 109th ESG-rating authorisation application, and the Commission put data-centre energy labels out to consultation, which sharpens the audit and vendor conversation about which datapoints in the revised ESRS actually move the needle for investors.
Why it matters: the 7% Scope 1 and 2 cut across consistent reporters is real progress, but the Scope 3 measurement gap is exactly what will make or break FY2027 ESRS filings and the credibility of any transition plan built on financed or value-chain emissions.
Sources: FTI ESG+ Newsletter · Euronext press room
🤖 AI & SUSTAINABILITY
European Commission puts an A-to-G energy label for data centres out to public consultation, targeting a legislative proposal in Q2 2027
DG ENER launched a 12-week public consultation on 21 September on minimum performance standards and a common EU rating scheme for data centres. The Commission is proposing an A-to-G efficiency label akin to those familiar from household appliances, covering energy, cooling water, waste-heat re-use and grid interactivity, with a legislative proposal targeted for Q2 2027. The consultation is explicit that AI-driven compute is the reason the labelling package is needed: the largest new loads on the EU grid have moved from steel and aluminium smelters to hyperscaler campuses in a handful of years, and the connection queue in some member states now stretches beyond the useful life of the underlying servers.
The consultation runs to 14 December, feeds into DG CLIMA and DG CNECT's parallel work on cloud sustainability, and lands in the same week as the launch of the Emerald AI / NVIDIA-backed AI-energy management alliance and the UK DESNZ call for evidence on AI in the electricity system.
Why it matters: if the EU adopts a household-appliance-style visible energy label for compute, it changes procurement conversations for every large cloud buyer in Europe and gives national regulators a tractable lever they currently lack for constraining the worst-in-class operators.
·· IN THE SPOTLIGHT 🔆 ··
A new section: each issue, one purpose-driven project that deserves more visibility.
The People's University, by Anna Trojak: free and affordable sustainability learning, curated.
First up: frustrated by how hard it was to find good sustainability learning material, Anna Trojak started curating it herself. The People's University now holds around 4,600 free and affordable sources, from courses to tools and communities, all built in her spare time.
The first 1,000 go public soon. Meanwhile, her daily Mini Curriculum posts on LinkedIn are well worth following.
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.
🌳 NATURE, BIODIVERSITY & REGENERATIVE ECONOMY
Iceland's government confirms it will introduce a permanent commercial whaling ban, leaving Norway and Japan increasingly isolated
Iceland's government confirmed in a 19 September follow-up dispatch that its bill to permanently ban commercial whaling will be introduced when parliament returns in February 2027. The move follows a decade of shrinking domestic whaling activity, cratering export demand from Japan, and mounting evidence that whaling is now a niche legacy trade rather than a real economic sector. Once passed, Iceland becomes the third traditional whaling nation to walk away from commercial hunts, following Australia (1979) and the Netherlands (1986), and leaves Norway and Japan alone in defending a permitted commercial catch.
For the ocean-nature agenda specifically, the ban squares Iceland's position with its earlier commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity and the emerging BBNJ Agreement, and removes one of the awkward carve-outs that have complicated marine-protected-area negotiations for the North Atlantic.
Why it matters: a permanent Icelandic ban clears the diplomatic space for the North Atlantic marine-protected-area work programme and further isolates Norway and Japan on commercial whaling, which changes the calculus for the 2027 International Whaling Commission meeting.
🥳 EXCELLENT NEWS
The High Seas Treaty crosses 100 ratifications on 23 September, cementing entry into force on 17 January 2026 and setting up its first Conference of the Parties
The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement, known as the High Seas Treaty, reached 100 ratifications on 23 September during UNGA, with Germany, Canada, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Papua New Guinea and Zimbabwe depositing their instruments together. It delivers the first comprehensive legal framework for protecting ocean life across nearly half of Earth's surface that lies outside national jurisdiction, and clears the political ground for its first Conference of the Parties in January 2027, which will define marine protected areas, environmental impact assessment standards, and the treaty's operating rules.
Sources: High Seas Alliance · UNESCO IOC
🤔 PROMISE KEPT?
BP's February 2020 pledge: net-zero by 2050 across operations and production, with oil and gas output cut 40% by 2030
In February 2020, then-CEO Bernard Looney announced BP would reimagine energy for people and our planet, targeting net-zero across operations, production and value chain by 2050 and cutting oil and gas output 40% by 2030 alongside 50 GW of renewables by then. In February 2023, the 40% cut was quietly trimmed to 25%. In February 2025, the strategy was reset again: renewables spending was cut, hydrocarbon investment increased, and the 2030 production-cut milestone was effectively dropped in favour of “disciplined growth” language. The 2050 net-zero framing survives on paper; the concrete milestone that gave it credibility does not.
🔴 Verdict: quietly walked back.
🔧 TOOL OF THE WEEK
The Equal Earth projection, endorsed by the UN General Assembly on 4 September
By 164 votes to one, on 4 September, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending the Equal Earth projection as the standard world map, replacing the Mercator projection that visually enlarges high-latitude regions and shrinks Africa, Latin America and other equatorial areas. Equal Earth is an open, equal-area projection released in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny, and is supported natively by the major GIS packages and plotting libraries. The United States cast the sole vote against, dismissing the initiative as part of a “radical ideological project.” Six countries – Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine – abstained.
·· This Week’s Specials ··
🤞 CAREERS
ClimateJobsList.com. An alternative climate and sustainability job board that skews toward smaller organisations, NGOs, city and regional public-sector roles, and hard-to-find European postings. Free to browse, no account required to view postings; recruiters do pay to post, which keeps the noise ratio lower than open-listings sites.
🤙 RECS
Outrage + Optimism season premiere with Al Gore. The climate podcast hosted by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson opened its new season on 7 September 2026 with Al Gore as the season premiere guest. Gore uses the hour to talk honestly about disinformation, the state of the US federal climate policy environment, and what it costs an institution to keep telling the truth about the numbers.
🖐 FIVE MINUTES WELL WASTED
360Cities. A crowd-built library of high-resolution 360-degree panoramas from every continent, browsable directly in the browser without an account.
🤌 THE JARGON WATCH
“Double materiality” asks a company to report both how sustainability issues affect its financial performance (financial materiality) and how the company's activities affect people and the environment (impact materiality). Codified into EU law through CSRD and ESRS, refined in the July 2026 Omnibus revision that cut mandatory datapoints by more than 60%, it sits opposite the ISSB's investor-only lens. The concept turns materiality assessment from an audit checklist into a strategic exercise: preparers defend where the two lenses converge (transition risk that is also real-world impact) and where they diverge (supplier human-rights harms that may not touch the P&L). Sources below.
Some more short news available in the gallery version due to most inboxes’ length limits 😉
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