Comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) inventories are vital for effective climate governance. However, a decade after the Paris Agreement, significant reporting gaps still exist. Emissions associated with military activities represent one such gap, with direct emissions from conflicts frequently unreported and pre- and post-conflict emissions consistently overlooked. Insufficient accounting prevents military emissions from being included in international climate agreements, undermining climate mitigation. We use open-source data in government, think tank, and civil society reports on combat operations and military installations to assess emissions from the Israel-Gaza conflict, including pre-conflict infrastructure, active conflict, and post-conflict reconstruction. We show that scope 1 and 2 emissions of open conflict exceeded 1.3 million tons CO2 equiv by January 2025. This value rises to 33.2 million tons CO2 equiv when including scope 3+ emissions of pre- and post-conflict activities like defensive fences and reconstruction, highlighting the need for more comprehensive reporting of military emissions and their significant climate costs.

Recent estimates point to dramatic increases in private capital flowing to biodiversity. Examining main sources of this increase — equity investments and debt — this review asks how biodiversity finance is being calculated, and whether private capital flowing to biodiversity action is growing as much as reported. Furthermore, by examining the literature on the standards and metrics, we ask whether these increases are likely to facilitate biodiverse outcomes. Ultimately, some growth can be ascribed to conceptual innovations in measuring biodiversity-related finance. In several cases, the dollar value represented in nominally biodiversity-related transactions does not reflect actual amounts spent on biodiversity. This review points to a risk of overestimating private financing of biodiversity targets, which may generate overconfidence in this approach. Consequently, this review argues that optimism for private capital solutions should be tempered and accompanied by an upscaling of policy alternatives and regulations that address the financial drivers of biodiversity loss.

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Late in the summer of 2020, forests across the western United States were on fire. In that year alone, California experienced six of the twenty largest fires in its recorded history, including the North Complex Fire, which killed sixteen people and burned more than 300,000 acres. Further north, the Beachie Creek and Lionshead fires merged near the Oregon-Washington border, ultimately burning more than 600 square miles (an area roughly half the size of Rhode Island) and killing five people. Across the West, more than 10 million acres burned—the second-highest annual figure since record-keeping began—incurring $18.9 billion in economic losses and firefighting costs.

The modern financial system has enabled a globalized economy by leveraging investments for production, consumption, and the trade of goods and services. However, this system has also engendered a series of wicked problems and externalities, including but not limited to climate change, environmental pollution, biodiversity loss, and inequalities that significantly challenge the well-being of nature and people. The system is also currently inadequate with regards to financing sustainable development, as recognized by the 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda. This Voices asks: what must be done to transform today's financial system for a sustainable future?

While adapting to the impacts of climate change will require massive human efforts across landscapes, economies, and everyday social life, adaptation is rarely conceptualized as work conducted by laboring people. In this intervention, we suggest that the conditions under which this largely invisible adaptation labor is currently carried out - in which workers are frequently underpaid, unpaid or unfree -should become a key concern for scholars and advocates of climate justice and just transitions. We propose an inclusive definition of climate adaptation labor and mobilize it to examine how the conditions of life under climate change are being produced and reproduced, by whom, and for whose benefit. Drawing from diverse cases across 12 countries in both Global South/Majority World and Global North/ Minority World contexts, we investigate the institutions and labor regimes through which adaptation labor is currently organized and (under)remunerated. We highlight how social difference and power entwine to devalue this work, particularly through idioms of "participation" and "contribution", and draw attention to the agency, autonomy, and claims-making power of adaptation laborers. Crucially, we suggest theoretical and practical approaches for transforming adaptation labor into a vehicle for redistribution and just transition.

Despite geographical critiques of the financialisation of climate governance, the realities of deteriorating environmental conditions, entrenched market logics, and the concentration of capital in the hands of financiers demand new strategies to contend with climate finance. We envision routes to better futures by surveying “financialised” responses to climate catastrophe that might be harnessed towards more reparative and decommodified ends. We combine ideas of “repair” and “capital switching” to evaluate financial tools for “reparative climate infrastructures” in five cases centred on energy, land, and water in the United States, Australia, Indonesia, and Brazil. Through these cases, we identify three key themes—governance, scale, and the state—that illuminate the socioecological, material, and political dimensions of reparative capital switching. The cases are each hopeful and cautionary. Together they offer a window into the contested terrain of climate finance in the present and highlight the need for critical attention to its strategic possibilities.

The assertion that ‘ecosystems are infrastructure’ is now common in conservation science and ecosystem management. This article interrogates that claim, which we argue underpins diverse practices of environmental investment focused on the strategic management of ecosystem functions to sustain and secure human life. We trace the genealogies and geographies of infrastructural nature as a paradigm of investment that coexists (sometimes in tension) with extractivist commodity regimes. We draw links between literatures on the political economy of ecosystem services and infrastructure and highlight three themes that hold promise for future research: labor, territory, and finance.

Governments and conservation organisations often point to a large gap between existing financial resources and the resources needed to achieve biodiversity objectives. But the gap is almost always presented without context, as though biodiversity loss will be resolved through increased funding alone. To illuminate crucial pathways for transformative change, this report examines the political and economic dimensions of biodiversity loss. “Beyond the gap: placing biodiversity finance in the global economy” addresses two questions: how does the organization of the global economy drive biodiversity loss, and how has existing biodiversity finance performed? Trade, investment and financial regulation (or lack thereof), global economic pressures that push biodiverse countries into debt, and inequality across racialized, gender, class and colonial lines, all drive biodiversity loss and require urgent attention. Instead of transformation, a series of voluntary measures and market-based mechanisms such as payments for ecosystem services or blended finance schemes have been presented as tools to span the resource gap. This report shows that these efforts are marginal at best, and, at worst, entrench the power of rich world governments and non-state institutions like banks, large international NGOs, and supranationals. It is apparent that we must move “beyond the gap”. Only by placing biodiversity loss in the global economy will it be possible to realize transformative, inclusive and equitable change. The authors offer concrete recommendations for negotiators, civil society organizations, and activist groups to push questions of biodiversity finance beyond the gap.

According to an increasingly prevalent set of discourses and practices within environmental and development finance, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanization and climate change that threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges. To harness this private finance, though, cities must be reformatted in investment-friendly ways. In this article, we chart the emergence of this discourse and associated practices within the World Bank. We call this rescaled and climate-inflected program of leveraged investments coupled with technical assistance Green Structural Adjustment. Drawing on policy documents, reports, and interviews with key staff, we examine programs that include Green Structural Adjustment to show how it aims to restructure local governments to capture new financial flows. Green Structural Adjustment reduces adaptation to a question of infrastructure finance and government capacity building, reinscribing both causes and effects of uneven development while creating spatial fixes for overaccumulated Northern capital in the Global South.

N eg o tatin g C im te C h an g e in C rsis This work by eminent scholars from around the world off ers a provocati ve and deeply insightf ul analysis of ‘the politi cs of paralysis and self-destructi on’ that have long hindered eff ecti ve and equitable climate policy over the past 20 years. The book is very ti mely, and I hope will help to increase the sense of urgency for a deal that will save the planet and billions of poor people around the world that bear a disproporti onate impact of climate change.

Approaches to financing biodiversity conservation tend to focus on funding gaps, but fail to address underlying political and economic drivers. We propose two strategies - tax reform and debt justice - to supercharge public financing for biodiversity and deflate harmful financial flows, while chipping away at the causes of state austerity.

The heterodox literature on financial risk has in recent years focused predominantly on how risk is distributed, and on the market instabilities and social inequalities that different risk distributions seed. Typically much less discussed is the constitution of financial risk, which is this article’s concern. Drawing empirical examples from two climate financial instruments, its particular interest is in the changing scale – social, spatial and temporal – of the “risk pools” associated with different financial products: the populations across which the products in question serve to aggregate underlying risk. The article explores how, against a historical backdrop of four decades of scale compression in the shape of risk individualization under neoliberalism, certain novel climate financial products seemingly indicate a contrary stretching of the risk pool. The article critically examines sovereign catastrophe insurance pools and green (climate) bonds, highlighting both the significance of the stretching that they effect but also the tensions and limits apparent in this emergent dynamic.

As the effects of austerity continue to ravage cities and the impacts of climate change become more pronounced, municipal officials around the world are struggling to pay for climate adaptation. Some cities have already begun to anticipate the new infrastructures that climate change will require, while others have been forced to adapt in real time as climate crises have arrived in spectacular ways. Two of the most emblematic events are Superstorm Sandy, which drenched New York City in October 2012, and the drought-induced crisis of water scarcity in Cape Town, South Africa, which was most visible between 2016 and 2018. In both cases, the cities turned to green bonds, a form of municipal finance that foregrounds environmental ambitions. In this paper, we track the forms of adaptation projects that green borrowing are earmarked to fund. Drawing from scholarship on the financialization of nature alongside recent work on racial capitalism and austerity, we find that rather than transformative municipal change each city is largely carrying on with projects that reinscribe existing inequalities in the city. In addition to reflecting inequalities already present in the two cities, however, the use of municipal debt for adaptation intensifies risks, both financial and environmental, borne primary by the poor or working class people of color. Building on qualitative fieldwork in Cape Town, New York, and across the green bond investment chain, we argue that the risks posed by climate change in the city cannot be financialized away. Ultimately, we call for the end of municipal austerity driven by national and supranational budgeting choices in favor of increasing national funding of municipal adaptation by rescaling borrowing to higher political scales that can more progressively distribute risks.

As Australian wildfires raged and youth-led climate movements inspired millions globally to march against climate change, commentators dubbed 2019 "the year the world woke up to the climate crisis" (1). However, one of the major contributors to climate change over the course of the past century too often remains overlooked: the U.S. military. Two recent studies demonstrate the scale of U.S. military greenhouse gas emissions, which rivals the emissions of the majority of countries around the world (2, 3). As global leaders prepare to discuss the next phase of international agreements at COP26 in Glasgow and political discourse around sustainable transitions to green economies becomes more mainstream, the United States must reconsider the ecological costs of its military's global operations, including its domestic and global base infrastructure.