Your weekly guide to Sustainable Investment

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Welcome to the show that never ends, where the only thing that gets transformed is your budget

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step right up to the greatest spectacle in the corporate world! Welcome to Transformation Theater—a multi-billion dollar industry where the magic of organizational change meets the reality of consultant paychecks, and somehow the consultants always win.

You've seen this show before, even if you didn't know it had a name. It's playing right now in conference rooms across the corporate world, featuring an all-star cast of earnest executives, expensive consultants, and middle managers who've perfected the art of nodding thoughtfully while mentally calculating their remaining vacation days.

The plot is always the same. Only the company names change.
 

Act I: The Great Awakening (Or: How to Discover the Obvious for $2 Million)

 

Our story begins with what consultants call "the burning platform"—a delightfully dramatic term for the moment when executives realize their business is about as competitive as a rotary phone in an iPhone world.

Picture the scene: A boardroom full of people who've spent the last decade optimizing their way to irrelevance suddenly discovers that optimization isn't the same as innovation. That being efficient at the wrong thing is still wrong. That their competition isn't just doing things better—they're doing different things entirely.

This moment of corporate enlightenment arrives with all the subtlety of a brick through a window. Market share is eroding. Customers are defecting. Employees are leaving. The board is asking uncomfortable questions. Something must be done.

Enter the consultants, stage left, with the confidence of surgeons and the track record of fortune tellers.

These aren't just any consultants. These are transformation specialists—the Navy SEALs of corporate change, armed with frameworks, methodologies, and an unshakeable belief that every organizational problem can be solved with the right PowerPoint presentation.

They arrive like well-dressed missionaries, carrying the gospel of transformation to the unwashed masses of corporate stagnation. They speak in tongues—Agile, Lean, Design Thinking, Digital Transformation, Culture Change—promising salvation through methodology.

The diagnosis is swift and expensive: The company needs to transform. Not change, mind you. Transform. Change is what you do to your oil. Transformation is what caterpillars do, and everyone knows caterpillars are beautiful, inspiring, and most importantly, billable.

 

Act II: The Analysis Paralysis Spectacular (Or: How to Turn Common Sense into Consulting Gold)

 

Now begins the most expensive phase of the show: the deep-dive analysis. Consultants swarm the organization like anthropologists studying a primitive tribe, except the tribe has to pay for the privilege of being studied.

They conduct stakeholder interviews, which is consultant speak for "talking to employees about what's broken." They run workshops, which is consultant speak for "expensive group therapy sessions." They analyze data, which is consultant speak for "looking at numbers everyone already knew."

The irony is delicious. Companies hire outside experts to tell them what their own employees have been saying for years. It's like paying a translator to explain what someone is saying in your native language.

But here's the beautiful part: The consultants don't just discover problems—they discover root causes. They don't just identify issues—they uncover systemic dysfunction. They don't just point out the obvious—they reveal strategic imperatives.

The language is crucial. You can't charge premium rates for telling a CEO their company is slow, bureaucratic, and out of touch. But you can charge premium rates for revealing that the organization suffers from "structural impediments to agility, innovation antibodies, and customer-centricity deficits."

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By: Amal Ahmed - Grist

The latest science on the link between climate change and natural disasters — and how they may be playing out where you live.
 

Extreme weather seems to make the headlines almost every week, as disasters increasingly strike out of season, break records, and hit places they never have before. 

Decades of scientific research has proven that human-caused climate change is making some disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat, warms the planet, and alters the conditions in which extreme weather forms. These changes are happening more rapidly than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to climate records. 

Below, we break down what experts know — and what they don’t — about the connections between climate change and wildfires. 

In a hotter, drier world, wildfires have become more frequent and destructive. Scientists have definitively linked anthropogenic climate change to increased wildfire risks: A 2016 study found that, because of human-caused carbon emissions, the total number of large fires since 1984 had doubled. A 2021 study supported by NOAA similarly concluded that climate change is primarily responsible for wildfire conditions, like hotter and drier summers. Wildfires themselves also release carbon when trees and other vegetation go up in flames. Globally, in 2023, wildfires caused 8.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. 

The Western United States is the epicenter of the country’s growing wildfire crisis: Dry, hot conditions are getting more dangerous, snow is melting earlier in the spring, and summer droughts have become more severe. Warming temperatures also encourage outbreaks of pests like bark beetles, weakening or killing wide swaths of forests. This dead and dried out vegetation becomes kindling waiting for a spark — whether that’s trash or debris fires, lightning strikes, or ill-advised fireworks. 

But these risky conditions are now more common in other parts of the country as well. On the East Coast, states are experiencing more “fire weather” days per year than they were 50 years ago. In New Jersey’s Pine Barren forest, for example, dry fall and winter conditions mean that deciduous trees shed drier leaves onto the forest floor — essentially, kindling waiting for a spark. 

As the conditions that fuel wildfires have worsened, so too has the number of people living in wildfire-prone zones. Between 1990 and 2010, according to the Forest Service, housing developments in the “wildland-urban interface” — a vulnerable ecological area where housing abuts or intermingles with the edges of forest — increased by 41 percent. 

Like most climate events, wildfires are an inherent natural process, and plant species have adapted to live alongside lower-intensity, cyclical fires. For thousands of years, Indigenous tribes reduced fire risks by using controlled or cultural burns, strategically clearing areas of dried-up vegetation before nature takes its course. European settlers, and later the federal government, did not have the same relationship to fires and forests. The cultural and ecological practice was banned for centuries in some states, including California. The U.S. Forest Service also had a “10 a.m. policy” for decades that instructed fire agencies to extinguish every blaze the same day it started — even those burning low and slow. Abandoning controlled burns and focusing on fire suppression caused a buildup of dead vegetation that helped fuel larger fires. Only recently have some ecologists and lawmakers reversed course, collaborating with tribes to reintroduce controlled burns to improve forest management. 

“There are solutions we have in our knowledge and in our management approaches that can help restore these ecosystems and can also benefit the public,” U.S. Forest Service research ecologist Frank K. Lake, a descendant of the Karuk tribe, told Grist in 2020. 

Source

 

Research in Chile suggests climate crisis makes eruptions more likely and explosive, and warns of Antarctica risk

The melting of glaciers and ice caps by the climate crisis could unleash a barrage of explosive volcanic eruptions, a study suggests.

The loss of ice releases the pressure on underground magma chambers and makes eruptions more likely. This process has been seen in Iceland, an unusual island that sits on a mid-ocean tectonic plate boundary. But the research in Chile is one of the first studies to show a surge in volcanism on a continent in the past, after the last ice age ended.

Global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels is now melting ice caps and glaciers across the world. The biggest risk of a resurgence of volcanic eruptions is in west Antarctica, the researchers said, where at least 100 volcanoes lie under the thick ice. This ice is very likely to be lost in the coming decades and centuries as the world warms.

Volcanic eruptions can cool the planet temporarily by shooting sunlight-reflecting particles into the atmosphere. However, sustained eruptions would pump significant greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. This would further heat the planet and potentially create a vicious circle, in which rising temperatures melt ice that leads to further eruptions and more global heating.

Pablo Moreno-Yaeger, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, who led the research, said: “As glaciers retreat due to climate change, our findings suggest these volcanoes go on to erupt more frequently and more explosively.”

The research, which was presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Prague, and is in the final stages of review with an academic journal, involved camping high in the Andes, among active and dormant volcanoes.

Detailed work on one volcano, called Mocho-Choshuenco, used radioisotope dating to estimate the age of volcanic rocks produced before, during and after the last ice age, when the 1,500-metre-thick Patagonian ice sheet covered the area. Analysis of the minerals in the rocks also revealed the depth and temperature at which the rocks formed.

This data revealed that thick ice cover had suppressed the volume of eruptions between 26,000 and 18,000 years ago, allowing a large reservoir of magma to build up 10-15km (6.2-9.3 miles) below the surface. After the ice melted, from about 13,000 years ago, the pressure on the magma chamber was released, gasses in the liquid or molten rock expanded and explosive eruptions followed.

“We found that following deglaciation, the volcano starts to erupt way more, and also changes composition,” said Moreno-Yaeger. The composition changed as the magma melted crustal rocks while eruptions were suppressed. This made the molten rock more viscous and more explosive on eruption.

Some farms in England may soon stop producing food altogether, according to new proposals laid out by Environment Secretary Steve Reed. Speaking at the Groundswell farming festival in Hertfordshire, Reed outlined a shift in farming subsidies and land use policy that could have significant implications for upland farmers across the country.

 

The government’s post-Brexit revamp of farming subsidies is designed to focus food production in the most fertile and efficient areas. But in the less productive regions, particularly upland farms, support may be scaled back or removed entirely. That could leave many of these farms struggling to survive, as they're some of the most dependent on public payments.

 

He said his land use framework “envisions taking some of the least productive land out of food production, but supporting the more productive land to increase production”.

 

Reed said this was so “you maintain outputs, or even increase outputs while increasing the space for nature. We have a limited amount of land in this country for the many demands we make of it for food production, housing, energy and for nature, and we need to make sure that we are using it optimally for all of those outcomes.”

 

Under the new plans, landowners may either lose subsidies altogether or be offered financial incentives to remove their land from food production and repurpose it, perhaps as wildflower meadows or restored peatlands. The goal? Create more space for nature, even if that means reducing the UK’s overall farmed area.

 

Reed told Groundswell there would be “no compulsion” under the land use framework but that “it would seem odd if the [land use data] didn’t then help at least inform the way that farming budgets were allocated”.

 

He said communities would be supported through the transition: “I grew up in the 80s, and the Thatcher government at the time destroyed the industry that my entire family worked in, and nothing was put in place. So those communities were destroyed, and one of the reasons I got involved in politics was to make sure that can’t happen again.”

 

These policy shifts are part of a broader strategy to reimagine the use of farmland in response to climate change and biodiversity loss. Reed also announced that a £150 million fund would reopen to support farmers in new ways — from wildfire prevention and educational outreach to more environmentally sound slurry storage. Starting next year, farmers will even be paid to dig ponds, which can help store water and improve local biodiversity.

 

However, the changes don’t end there. The government is also overhauling the current nature-focused farming scheme. This program, created by the previous Conservative government, rewarded farmers for environmental stewardship — planting hedgerows, leaving wildflower strips, cutting pesticide use, and more. The idea was to pay for ecological benefits, not just the number of acres farmed.

 

But that initiative is now facing a budget cut. The spending review revealed that funding would drop by an average of £100 million annually through 2029.

 

Reed said the scheme would be simplified, adding: “We need to return firmly to the principle of public money for public goods. Our reformed SFI [Sustainable Farming Incentive] will maximise benefits for the environment, particularly in terms of water quality and biodiversity, allowing us to clean up our polluted rivers, welcome wildlife back to farms, and strengthen the natural foundations vital to sustainable food production. We will simplify the SFI and support farmers to take on packages of actions, which, when they’re done together, achieve more for nature.”

 

Combined with other shifts, the mood among many farmers has soured in recent months. The Labour government’s policies have sparked protests, most notably over a new inheritance tax on agricultural land.

 

In a recent misstep, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) abruptly closed applications for the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme, leaving many farmers unprepared. Following threats of legal action, the government reversed its decision and reopened the program.

 

Meanwhile, farmers are also battling challenges beyond policy. Extreme weather has been hitting the sector hard. Droughts and floods have become more frequent and intense, and this year’s dry spell is expected to take a serious toll. Some arable farmers are predicting crop losses of up to 50 per cent. Livestock farmers, already struggling, fear they won’t have enough grass to feed their animals through the season.

 

Reed acknowledged these difficulties and said, “I think there have been challenges along the way. I know early on, the announcements that were made around inheritance tax were difficult for the sector. I know that.”

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By:  Leslie P. Norton - Morningstar

8 takeaways from a panel about materiality. Financial relevance matters for values-based and conventional investors, too.
 

Will an emphasis on materiality, or financial relevance, help sustainable funds?

Sustainable investing has been in the doldrums for three years, dismissed as “woke investing,” and its themes, including institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, renewable energy, and electric vehicles, have been targeted by the Donald Trump administration. Many sustainable funds have also been poor performers, though lately, that’s started to turn.

One big source of criticism: The term “sustainable investing” is too big of a tent. It includes both people who want do good through their investments (so-called values-based investors) and people who want to avoid environmental, social, and governance risk, including some conventional investors. Money managers tried to straddle that uneasy divide without explaining themselves to investors, leaving themselves open to criticism instead. And under the new presidential administration, some of the investment themes became controversial.

“These different objectives really kind of crash into each other,” says Lisa Cooper, founder and CEO of Figure 8 Investment Strategies, a financial advisor that specializes in sustainable investing. “I’m not sure we were ever under one big tent.”

But a consequence of the backlash against ESG is that it forced the sustainable-investing industry “to coalesce around materiality,” or financial relevance, says Anna Totdahl, investment officer for ESG and sustainability at Oregon State Treasury.

Will it help? That new emphasis will also be meaningful for conventional investors who need to be aware of sustainability-related risks. I discussed the subject on a May 2025 panel with Cooper; Totdahl; Beth Williamson, head of sustainable equity research and associate portfolio manager at Calamos Investments; and John Streur, chief investment officer of all material risk investment strategies for Boston Common Asset Management. The panel was organized by Portland Women in Investment Management and Portland State University.

Here are some key findings.