Concepts
The foundational ideas behind climate finance: risk, value, accountability, and the gap between ambition and action.
Twelve ideas. One question: what makes climate a financial problem?
- 01 Climate FinanceFoundational The flow of money (public, private, and blended) directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, building resilience, and managing climate-related risks across the global economy.
- 02 Adaptation vs Mitigation Two distinct strategies for dealing with climate change. Mitigation cuts the emissions causing it; adaptation prepares for the impacts that are already coming regardless.
- 03 Climate Litigation Legal action against governments, corporations, or financial institutions, aimed at compelling climate action, penalising climate inaction, or challenging misleading climate claims.
- 04 GHG Scopes The three-category framework for classifying where a company's greenhouse gas emissions actually come from: what it burns directly, the energy it buys, and the full chain of activity that surrounds its products.
- 05 Greenwashing Making misleading claims (through action, omission, or emphasis) about the environmental credentials of a product, strategy, or organisation.
- 06 Greenwashing Typology A practical taxonomy of the six main patterns of misleading environmental communication, from hiding in crowds to blaming consumers.
- 07 Just Transition The principle that the shift to a low-carbon economy must be fair, protecting workers and communities that bear the heaviest costs, and ensuring the benefits are broadly shared.
- 08 Net Zero vs Carbon Neutral Two terms that sound interchangeable but represent fundamentally different levels of ambition, and the difference matters enormously for credibility, regulation, and climate outcomes.
- 09 Physical Risks The financial and economic damage caused directly by climate change, through extreme weather events, shifting weather patterns, and the gradual transformation of natural systems.
- 10 Stranded Assets Assets that lose value earlier or more severely than expected due to climate-related risks, whether from physical damage, policy change, or market shifts, often with no prospect of recovery.
- 11 The 1.5°C Threshold The temperature limit central to the Paris Agreement, 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels, that scientists identify as the boundary beyond which climate impacts become significantly more severe and some become irreversible.
- 12 Transition Risks The financial risks that arise not from climate change itself, but from the economic, policy, and social shifts required to move to a low-carbon economy.