Grégoire Fabre is chosen as a TBLI Hero for redefining how capital drives positive change. As a leader in sustainable finance, Grégoire has dedicated his career to steering investments toward solutions that balance profit with purpose, proving that financial innovation and planetary regeneration can go hand in hand.
His work bridges institutional capital with climate resilience, biodiversity, and social equity—turning bold ideas into measurable impact. With vision, integrity, and a relentless commitment to aligning finance with the needs of people and planet, Grégoire embodies the spirit of what TBLI stands for.
TBLI honors Grégoire for showing that true leadership is not about managing assets but regenerating our shared future. He has been extremely helpful to TBLI and its mission. Most important, he is a true mensch who understands generosity.
TBLI Radical Truth Podcast
TBLi Radical Truth Podcast Podcast Introduction “Redefining Development: What It Really Takes” – with Paula Caballero
Welcome to TBLi Radical Truth Podcast, where knowledge inspires and we dive into the big ideas shaping sustainability, finance, and the future of our planet.
In this episode, we’re joined by Paula Caballero, often described as the “mother of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).” With a career spanning government, the World Bank, and international NGOs, Paula has been at the center of rethinking what development means in the 21st century.
In “Redefining Development: What It Really Takes,” Paula shares candid insights on the systemic shifts needed to move beyond incremental progress. From climate and biodiversity to inequality and governance, she argues that true development is not just about growth—but about resilience, justice, and shared prosperity.
With her wealth of experience and a fearless voice, Paula challenges us to confront the uncomfortable truths and embrace the bold changes needed to achieve a sustainable future.
TBLi Radical Truth Podcast brings you visionary thinkers and practitioners who are rewriting the rules of finance, development, and impact.
Let’s begin our conversation with Paula Caballero.
This is your final call to join a room full of impact leaders. ⏳
The guest list for our TBLI Virtual Mixer is filling up. Why? Because professionals like you are seeking more than just a network—they're seeking a community aligned with their values.
Don't be on the outside looking in. This Friday, you could be meeting your next partner, collaborator, or source of inspiration.
The Future of Finance is Here
While others debate sustainability, leaders are building it.
With TBLI Circle, you can:
✅ Execute breakthrough initiatives first.
✅ Access exclusive, unadvertised deal flow.
✅ Shape the standards your competitors will follow.
✅ Connect with decision-makers controlling billions.
Don't watch from the sidelines. Lead the transformation.
Let’s start with a little truth bomb, courtesy of the upcoming book Radical Truth: You’re fucked.
Welcome to Chapter 11—both a section of a book and the financial status most of us are hurtling toward. But before you slam your laptop shut and retreat to the curated serenity of your LinkedIn feed, hear me out.
This isn’t another sanctimonious lecture about your carbon footprint. Guilt is useless. Guilt is what the system sells you so you’ll buy the solution. This is about understanding your role in a game that was rigged long before you showed up.
The Beautiful, Bankrupt Lie of "Voting With Your Wallet"
You’ve been told since birth that your consumer choices matter. That if we all just buy the right bamboo toothbrushes and reusable bags, we can shop our way to sustainability.
What magnificent bullshit.
Don’t get me wrong—make better choices. But let’s not kid ourselves. You could live like a monk, weaving your clothes from discarded dental floss, and the global emissions needle wouldn't budge. Why? Because just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions.
They’ve masterfully pulled a corporate Jedi mind trick. They invented concepts like your "carbon footprint" (popularized by BP, by the way) to shift the burden from the polluting giants to the individual just trying to get through the day.
They’ve even monetized your guilt. Feeling bad about plastic in the ocean? For $39.99, you can buy a reusable bottle (made in a factory, shipped on a bunker-fuel-burning ship) with a promise that a portion of proceeds will "raise awareness." They're not just polluting the planet; they're polluting the very language of change. "Sustainable," "green," "eco-friendly"—these words have been drained of meaning faster than the aquifers under a corporate almond farm.
The point isn’t to stop trying. It’s to recognize that individual virtue has been weaponized to distract us from the one thing that actually works: collective action.
The Master’s Tools, The Master’s House, and Your Mortgage
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde wrote. But what if you have to live in the master’s house while trying to build a new one?
That’s the central contradiction they want you trapped in.
If you participate in the system, you’re a hypocrite. (“Oh, you critique capitalism, yet you own an iPhone? Curious.”) If you drop out, you’re irrelevant and probably hungry.
See the perfect trap? They’ve engineered a system where simply pointing out the problem makes you a target. Climate activists get hammered for flying to conferences. As if the only valid critic is someone living completely outside a system designed to make that impossible.
So, how do you navigate this without losing your mind?
Abandon Purity Politics. The pursuit of personal ethical perfection is a dead end. Everyone is compromised. No one gets out clean.
Focus on Leverage Points. Your energy is finite. Stop worrying about every plastic straw and direct your effort where it actually creates change—like organizing in your workplace or community.
Find Your Community. Systemic change doesn’t happen through individual virtue; it happens through collective power. Find the people doing the work and join them.
The Happiness Industrial Complex: Or Why Your Mindfulness App Won't Save You
If you’re miserable in late-stage capitalism, a multibillion-dollar industry is ready to sell you the solution: Yourself.
Your mindset is wrong. Your vibration is low. You need to manifest more. It’s gaslighting on a galactic scale. The system creates the conditions for mass suffering, then sells you a ten-step program to overcome the very suffering it produces.
Companies offer mindfulness apps instead of addressing burnout from chronic understaffing. The message is clear: "The problem isn’t that we’re exploiting you; it’s that you aren’t managing your stress properly. Here’s a meditation. Now get back to work."
Genuine well-being in a dysfunctional system sometimes requires being less "well-adjusted." Some anxiety is rational when facing climate collapse. Some anger is appropriate in the face of injustice. Don’t meditate your righteous fury away—channel it.
Your Beautiful, Fucked-Up Future: How to Hope Without the Bullshit
Let’s be real. The situation is dire. If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention.
But we’ve been sold two false narratives: the techno-optimist fantasy that some billionaire will innovate us out of this, and the doom-porn prophecy that it’s all hopeless.
The truth is in the messy middle. This isn’t about naive optimism. It’s about disciplined hope. The kind that acknowledges the odds and proceeds anyway.
Hope is a verb. It looks like:
Zooming out from the 24/7 news cycle and seeing your actions as part of a longer arc.
Embracing partial victories without mistaking them for the final win.
Connecting your individual actions to collective movements. Hope dies in isolation.
The system wants you either complacent or despairing. The revolutionary stance is the stubborn insistence that another world is possible, and it’s worth fighting for—even without guarantees.
The Bullshit Stops With You.
You didn’t make this mess. But you’re here now. What you do matters—not because you alone can fix it, but because without your piece, the puzzle remains incomplete.
So, don’t just buy the right things. Build the right things. Don’t just optimize your life. Question the very definition of a "good" life.
Protect your joy. Find your people. Cause good trouble.
The future isn't something that happens to you. It’s something you build, one stubborn, unyielding, radically truthful action at a time.
What’s your first move?
This article is inspired by the upcoming book "Radical Truth." Feel free to share, but maybe, just maybe, have a real conversation about it instead.
Global temperature rise may feel like it’s gradual, but the changes it brings can turn out to be sudden, massive, and self-reinforcing. These changes are what scientists call tipping points. When a tipping point is reached, an Earth system abruptly and dramatically changes, often irreversibly, like the Amazon rainforest turning into a savanna — a point of no return that is already perilously close.
But today, a group of 160 scientists from 23 countries is announcing that the planet has already reached its first major tipping point: the widespread death of warm-water coral reefs. That’s due primarily to rapidly rising marine temperatures — the seas have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat we’ve created — but also the acidification that comes from more atmospheric CO2 interacting with water. (This interferes with corals’ ability to build the protective skeletons that form the complex structure of a reef.) Since the late 1980s, ocean surface warming has quadrupled. Accordingly, in the last half century, half of the world’s live coral cover has disappeared.
“We’re no longer talking about future tipping points — there’s one happening right now,” Steve Smith, a research impact fellow at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute and a coauthor of the report, told Grist. “Although our governments are used to planning for incremental, slow change, things do seem to be speeding up.”
The more individual corals perish, the harder it gets for a reef to bounce back, destabilizing it and pushing it into a spiral of die-off. A quarter of all marine species rely on these bustling warm-water ecosystems — which cover some 350,000 square miles — but corals are bleaching as they release the symbiotic algae they need to harvest energy. Since 2023, more than 80 percent of the world’s reefs have suffered through the most widespread and intense bleaching event on record. Ever-higher acidification makes it even harder for corals to reproduce and then grow back from this kind of disturbance.
Warm-water corals are particularly vulnerable to climate change because they’ve made an evolutionary compromise. Being close to the ocean surface, their symbiotic algae soak up bountiful sunlight to provide energy, meaning they don’t need to rely as much on outside nutrients. But that positioning also means that during marine heat waves, hot water envelops the corals, stressing them to the point where they release their algae, causing bleaching.
“This is a tradeoff. They have a balance they have to strike,” said Gordon Zhang, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Reef Solutions group who wasn’t involved in the new report. “If the water doesn’t move much, and it’s a very shallow place, the water just keeps heating up.”
EU Postpones Sustainability Reporting Rules for Non-EU Companies
• The European Commission has delayed the adoption of sustainability reporting standards for non-EU companies under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) until at least October 2027.
• The delay is part of the EU’s broader effort to reduce administrative burdens through its “simplification agenda,” affecting over 100 planned legislative acts.
• The move coincides with transatlantic negotiations and internal EU proposals to narrow the scope of corporate disclosure requirements under the Omnibus I initiative.
The European Commission has delayed the rollout of sustainability reporting standards for large non-EU companies under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), as part of a broader effort to reduce regulatory complexity and administrative costs across the bloc.
The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) for non-EU companies were initially slated for adoption by mid-2024, before being postponed to June 2026. They will now be pushed back even further — with the Commission stating that no action will be taken before October 2027.
The deferral was confirmed in a letter sent by the Commission to the EU’s financial regulators outlining its “de-prioritisation” process. The letter lists 115 legislative acts, deemed “non-essential” to immediate policy objectives, that will be delayed under the bloc’s simplification agenda aimed at boosting competitiveness and reducing red tape.
World’s Biggest Pension Fund Puts Impact Investing on the Agenda
Aaron Clark, Ishika Mookerjee and Nao Sano
(Bloomberg) -- A decision by Japan’s $1.8 trillion pension fund, the world’s biggest, to consider a shift into impact investing has triggered a wider adjustment among the country’s money managers.
The Government Pension Investment Fund opened the door to impact strategies in March and at least four other Japanese pension funds are updating or revising their investment policies, according to a review of the funds’ investment policies. At the same time, there’s evidence that asset managers pitching for pension mandates are now adjusting their approach to match growing demand for impact strategies.
The ripple effect through Japan’s $5 trillion money management industry is backed by the government, which has identified the strategy as a way to help address some of the country’s real-world challenges. That’s as policymakers in Japan face a rapidly aging society and one which ranked 118th last year in a gender-equality review of 146 countries.
GPIF President Kazuto Uchida has made clear he thinks that an investment approach targeting environmental and social goals “ultimately leads to” economic and capital markets growth.
