Whether it’s gossip, theories of change, business models, or pie in the sky, these topics will ensure you’ll never run out of things to talk about at London Climate Action Week (LCAW) – not that most RI professionals find themselves with that problem…
1) The “CDP deal”
You know that couple in your friendship group that argues at every dinner party and should have broken up five years ago? Well, that’s CDP! And they’ve finally broken up!
On 11 June, CDP announced it is spinning off its commercial activities from its charitable activities. While the commercial arm will be part of a private-equity owned company, the CDP Foundation will focus on driving “strategic principles for disclosure”.
There will inevitably be some pearl-clutching about losing CDP as a public good. Although it never really was a pure public good to begin with (worth reminding readers that CDP would typically require academics to pay a licence to access the data for public benefit research).
The obvious first question on everyone’s minds is whether people will still pay for CDP data as it loses its non-profit veneer, data budgets remain constrained, and the inexorable drive towards public and alternative disclosures continues.
The other question: who will pay an organisation focused on “strategic principles for disclosure”? Perhaps that one is moot. I imagine (hope) CDP has some sort of profit-sharing clause written into the deal, and so perhaps won’t have to worry about funding. Unless, of course, the commercial business doesn’t deliver on its promise.
One other potential reason for that? Cocktail topic #2.
2) The collapse in data and software costs
We all know budgets are in freefall in most organisations. But so are costs. The interesting question then is: how far can costs fall?
If you ask the mainstream ESG data providers, the answer is probably: not much further! Fixed overhead, financial-sector salary scales, and the need for robust sales budgets are already destroying margins.
But when you dissect the offering, the actual underlying solutions are often (at least on paper) mind-bogglingly cheap to replicate, given the amount of open-source data to work from and, of course, the ability to push a ton of compute at any particular problem (eg ripping data from annual reports).
So one question is what will win out: the ability to deliver ever-cheaper solutions or the “margin floor” facing large data providers?
And if margins remain tight, another question emerges: what is the service offering that can still drive margins, if it isn’t models and data?
3) Wait… did investor pressure on oil and gas companies work after all?
On 10 June, Carbon Tracker (CTI) published a blog titled “Does investor pressure matter? Look at what oil companies are actually doing”.
In it, they claim that their work helped bring questions about future oil demand and the value of oil and gas reserves into the mainstream. And that investor pressure for capital discipline with oil and gas companies curtailed capex.
Over the past years, there has been a clear shift in focus across investors away from supply-side fossil fuels engagement and divestment towards looking at impact levers on the demand side (eg power, autos, land use).
That has not necessarily translated to the focus of advocacy organisations. And CTI is saying: “Not so fast! This supply side stuff worked! Oil and gas companies are not behaving the way they behaved 10 years ago.”
So is CTI right? Do we finally have proof that investor pressure worked? Or are we still missing the thread that ties investor pressure, capital discipline, and downstream emissions reductions together into coherent story?
Whatever your view on the matter, what was true in Shakespeare’s King Lear is just as true today: “Nothing can come of nothing.”
4) The RI Europe vote heard around the world
At the beginning of the RI Europe plenary on Managing Transition 2.0, I asked the audience one question: “Should financed emissions be the primary indicator to inform climate actions and targets by financial institutions?”
In a room of hundreds of RI professionals, just ONE SINGLE PERSON put their hand up.
The obvious question for cocktail hour: if nobody thinks emissions should be the primary (or as the panel discussion surfaced, perhaps even secondary or tertiary lever), why don’t we see that in products yet?
Is this financed emissions’ Götterdämmerung? Or a simple reflection of the gap between what investors would like to see and what ultimately is feasible to implement?
5) Is the transition in better shape than it was before Trump got elected?
Sustainability professional Simon Zadek on LinkedIn was ready to give Donald Trump an award for his services to the environment (admittedly, as an April Fool’s joke!). But jesters do oft prove prophets.
Pretty safe to say that the “pulse” on the transition had turned decided decidedly more pessimistic as 2025 unfolded. But what a difference a day makes. In recent workshops the Inevitable Policy Response ran with investors, the optimism / pessimism pendulum vis-a-vis October 2024 is mostly 50/50.
I don’t reckon many people would have forecast that after US election night. But is this a prisoner of the moment overcorrection in response to the Strait of Hormuz closure? Or should we really be 100 percent more optimistic now?
My question for Climate Week: where do you stand?
6) Have we reached peak screen time or is this just the beginning?
At a children’s birthday past last week, I saw a kid scroll through about 400 Youtube shorts within 15 minutes. A second grader at my son’s school is posting TikToks from the bathrooms.
I don’t know many (any??) parent who is comfortable with the current dynamic.
It’s not just kids of course. Many people feel like they have a problematic, unhealthy relationship with technology and their personal screen time.
Not that asset prices seem to care.
It seems apparent that the emerging political consensus is to outlaw social media for minors (undoubtedly causing some young people to lament, like Edgar in King Lear, “We that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”)
Not that asset prices seem to care.
So what gives? Are markets right that tech has become “unregulatable” and the rise of digital consumption inevitable? Or are we where tobacco was in the 1950s, slowly realising how damaging technology can be but also ultimately willing to arrange ourselves with that reality for the rest of the century (explaining why asset prices don’t seem to care)?
Or are we perhaps at the cusp of a meaningful regulatory reset, with outright bans, a revolution in the tax code that involves metering (and taxing) digital consumption, and a dismembering of tech monopolies?
I wanted to originally just quote King Lear in this op-ed because, as much as it pains me to admit this, I can at times be a bit pretentious – and my joy in interspersing my text with random, ill-fitting quotes proves they are not written by AI.
But unfortunately, the quote that perhaps works best here is found in Richard II instead: “Violent fires soon burn out themselves.”
So which one is it? The rise of “technocracy” and end of policy oversight? Or the dawn of a new distributed, regulated, and contained tech industry, pointing the way to a different kind of future (I should have said pretentious and melodramatic…).
You know, just your typical RI cocktail chat.
See you at London Climate Action Week!
Jakob Thomä is co-founder of Theia Finance Labs (formerly Two Degrees Investing Initiative), research director at Inevitable Policy Response and professor in practice at University of London SOAS.
