All articles by Elizabeth Meager
Elizabeth Meager
What the inclusion of gas and nuclear in the EU Taxonomy means
The financial world is split on the real-world impact of natural gas and nuclear being labelled as sustainable activities. For investors and lenders with strict exclusions in place it will likely mean very little, while certain fund managers welcome the outcome.
New Zealand plays catch-up on climate policy
Climate change minister James Shaw tells Capital Monitor how New Zealand intends to make up for the policy missteps that led to greenhouse gas emissions rising for the past three decades. The finance sector is key to its plans.
Energy advertising faces rising pressure over ‘climate washing’
Authorities in Europe and the US are increasingly scrutinising advertising and marketing material – most notably from energy companies – for potentially spreading environmental disinformation. Litigation is growing in this area, in a worrying trend for the fossil fuel sector.
UK lags behind peers with “pitiful” post-Covid education spend
Britain was already spending less on education than many other wealthy countries before the pandemic further exacerbated the learning inequality gap between rich and poor. Its response? To commit much less to the sector than certain other nations in its post-Covid spending too.
Cop26 targets pushed back under threat of being sued
Countries party to the Energy Charter Treaty are under yet more pressure to reform the agreement following the Cop26 climate summit, with Denmark and New Zealand admitting the threat of investor-state lawsuits has hindered their climate policy ambitions.
New year, new data: disclosure themes to watch in 2022
Last year put sustainability accounting and reporting on the map. The next 12 months should see regulators, standard setters and companies taking a closer look at areas like double materiality, Scope 3 emissions and nature-based reporting.
China is stopping financing coal power overseas – so what?
President Xi Jinping’s commitment to end overseas coal plant construction lacks detail and could take years to achieve any real impact. In any case, the sector has plenty of other sources of funding that need curbing if its emissions are to be cut sufficiently to reach net zero.
Flawed climate finance pledges fail as fossil fuel subsidies persist
Rich countries are not honouring their annual $100bn climate finance pledge to poorer ones, yet they still spend heavily on environmentally harmful fossil fuel subsidies. Can this imbalance be addressed?
Follow the money to fight ‘big oil’, says ClientEarth chief
The founder of ClientEarth, James Thornton, explains how the environmental law charity takes on large corporates and governments to tackle climate change.
Cop26 methane pledge needs “money and muscle”
There are calls for regulation to support the new global commitment to cutting methane levels, seen as one of the quickest ways to tackle climate change. But how it will be funded is unclear, and the absence of China, India and Russia from the pledge does not bode well.