For twenty years, sustainable finance was mitigation finance wearing a bigger coat. Green bonds financed solar farms. Transition finance financed the boring middle of decarbonizing steel and cement. Net zero pledges financed PowerPoint decks. All of it pointed the same direction: stop the planet from warming further. That conversation is over ' not because we won it, but because we ran out of runway to keep pretending mitigation alone was the strategy. Somewhere in the last three years, without a rebrand announcement, sustainable finance quietly split into two children: mitigation finance, now mature and largely priced, and adaptation finance, which is neither of those things yet and is about to become the fastest-growing vertical in the sustainability economy. I want to make that case properly this time ' with the numbers, the economics literature behind them, and where I think the field goes from here. We are living inside the warmest sustained period ever measured. WMO's...
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