For more than a decade, federal regulators say, PFAS left Chemours facilities in West Virginia, North Carolina, and New Jersey and entered three of the country's major rivers. On Wednesday, that alleged history of contamination produced one of the most consequential enforcement actions yet against a manufacturer of the so-called "forever chemicals."
The British government is moving forward with plans to require companies importing commodities such as cocoa, palm oil, soy and rubber to demonstrate that their supply chains are not contributing to illegal deforestation, marking one of the most significant expansions of the country's environmental due diligence regime since the passage of the Environment Act.
The EBA published final draft technical standards revising the European banking sector's Pillar 3 disclosure requirements on environmental, social and governance risks. The package also introduces new disclosure requirements covering equity exposures and aggregate exposures to shadow banking entities, completing a major portion of the implementation work required under the Capital Requirements Regulation 3 (CRR3).
The Financial Markets Authority said it will adopt a "no action" approach for insurers expected to be removed from New Zealand's climate-related disclosures regime, allowing them to forgo climate statement lodgements while Parliament considers amendments to the law. The decision follows a recent government announcement that health and life insurers will be excluded from the regime and will no longer be required to produce annual climate statements once the legislation is enacted.
There is a particular kind of language that survives long after the conditions that produced it have changed. It remains in annual reports, in strategy decks, in conference agendas and regulatory consultations, carrying forward assumptions that no longer quite fit the world it describes. Sustainability increasingly feels like one of those words. We still use it. We still build departments around it. We still publish targets beneath its banner.
More than half of Malaysian banks' lending is concentrated in sectors that depend heavily on nature. That finding sits near the beginning of a new report released Thursday by Bank Negara Malaysia, the World Bank Group, and the United Nations Development Program's Biodiversity Finance Initiative (UNDP BIOFIN). It is also the statistic most likely to linger.
The modern AI industry has become remarkably good at directing attention toward intelligence while keeping the infrastructure that makes that intelligence possible largely out of sight. Public discussion revolves around what the technology can do. We debate whether it will transform education, accelerate scientific discovery, replace jobs, or reshape entire industries. Investors discuss model performance. Governments debate regulation. Companies race to announce new capabilities.