Globally, climate finance has doubled in under a decade to $2 trillion in 2025. This momentum has shifted the trajectory of warming from a ~3.6°C end-of-century trajectory in 2015 to ~2.7°C today. Despite progress, global climate finance still needs to scale 3-4x by 2030 to bring emissions in line with a trajectory toward net zero. Capital continues to concentrate in the Energy, Transport, and Built Environment sectors with technologies that are cost-competitive with higher-emission alternatives.

Though funding is insufficient across all sectors, the scale-up required will be materially smaller in these sectors at 2-4x by 2030, compared to 25-80x scale-up needed in Industry, Agrifood, and Carbon Management. Public sector capital deployment has stagnated across regions, and it is the private sector that has stepped up and will be increasingly essential to accelerate the deployment of capital.

Regulation is often utilized as a key demand driver for non-toxic alternatives; however, the lack of regulation and increased litigation risk in the herbicide industry creates both a unique risk landscape and an investment opportunity.

Such legacy chemicals such as glyphosate, atrazine, paraquat, and dicamba have documented carcinogenicity, endocrine, and neurological risk effects, and have collectively driven billions of dollars in litigation exposure for their manufacturers, most notably Bayer’s over $10 billion in existing Roundup
settlements.

Data centers could be the best offtakers clean energy has ever had, not because they are virtuous, though many hyperscalers carry ambitious clean energy targets, but because of their economics. The economic value of AI is so high that power cost is not material to profitability, especially for higher margin activities like frontier inference, even when factoring in non-electricity costs (e.g., compute hardware, land).

Despite the rapid growth in global climate finance, a large segment of the climate economy remains undercapitalized, leaving many emerging technologies and established operating businesses stranded in the “missing middle.” Scaling these emerging technologies represents $100-$200 billion deployment opportunity for growth capital.

The global plastics industry is facing mounting regulatory, environmental, and health pressures that are reshaping market dynamics. With approximately 418 million metric tons produced in 2023, and contributions of 3.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the plastics industry’s scale and impact demand attention.

Property insurance is emerging as one of the most immediate and visible barometers of climate risk. As extreme weather becomes more frequent and severe, insurers are raising premiums, tightening underwriting, and withdrawing from historically stable markets. These actions are not temporary corrections. They mark a structural shift, a fundamental repricing of physical risk that is already reshaping real estate values, mortgage access, municipal credit, and the geography of economic growth.

2025 was a turnaround year for the voluntary carbon market (VCM), entering a period of stabilization following the sharp contraction that began in 2022. While overall market value declined in 2024 amid falling issuances, pricing for transacted credits remained relatively resilient, indicating that demand is consolidating around a narrower subset of higher-quality credits, rather than leaving the market entirely.

The U.S. power system is entering a period of rapid load growth driven by electrification, economic expansion, and AI-related data center development. Simultaneously, high cost-of-living is a central regulatory and political issue that constrains rate cases, limiting new build.
In this environment, affordability has become a binding constraint, selecting which capacity resources scale and earn durable returns.

Climate is not the primary driver for investment allocation, but we learned from leading institutional asset owners that increasingly it is becoming an essential element – which is critical to support the accelerating amount of capital needed to decarbonize the real economy. Read for insight into how to create the conditions necessary for climate integration within governance, workflow, strategy, and capital deployment. This paper was developed in partnership with the Investor Leadership Network (ILN), One Planet Sovereign Wealth Fund Network (OPSWF), and the Milken Institute.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been valued as a cheap and versatile compound utilized across global industries for decades, but the tide is turning. With studies linking exposure to severe health and environmental impacts, these “forever chemicals” now represent a regulatory and reputational challenge. This paper explores how investors can capture value amid this transition.

Understanding the Climate Finance Gap: 2025 Update examines how global climate markets are evolving and what investors must do to close the gap. The paper identifies six imperatives for climate investors, including expanding private debt, unlocking growth equity for scale-ready technologies, and backing emerging managers poised to drive innovation.

The European grid is at a crossroads, navigating a new era of load growth driven by electrification and AI. At the same time, unstable policies in the US has increased uncertainty at a time when many of its home-grown technology companies are looking to deploy at scale.