Quora Answer: Is the World Bank Right to Drop Its Climate Finance Target?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Do you think the World Bank is right to drop its climate finance target?”

The World Bank’s Board of Directors voted on 30^th June 2026 to drop its target requiring 45% of financing to carry climate co-benefits.  This was a terrible idea, and the timing alone proves it.  The target had already been met.  In 2025, 48% of World Bank Group financing carried climate co-benefits, exceeding the 45% goal first set at COP28.  Climate finance under the Climate Change Action Plan, launched in 2021, had nearly doubled by 2025.  A target abandoned the moment it succeeds is not being retired for inefficiency.  It is being retired because someone with the power to demand its removal did not like what it was funding.

United States Treasury Secretary Scott Kenneth Homer Bessent made that demand explicit at the April 2026 World Bank and IMF spring meetings, calling the target “distortionary” and arguing it “breeds inefficiency, distorts economic decision making, and moves the Bank away from its core mission.”  Russia and Saudi Arabia backed the same position.  Two of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters, and the world’s largest historical greenhouse gas emitter under a president who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” combined their shareholder weight to strip a functioning, already-successful target out of the institution meant to fund the world’s poorest countries through the transition those same countries did the least to cause.

The Green Climate Fund tells the identical story, in real time, on a shorter fuse.  In February 2025, the United States rescinded roughly US$4 billion in outstanding pledges to the GCF, the first country ever to formally withdraw a commitment already made.  The board met afterwards with an empty seat where the American representative should have sat.  Germany and Sweden pushed high-income developing nations to help cover the gap.  Saudi Arabia, oil wealth and all, called the suggestion “unacceptable.”  In spring 2026, the United Kingdom followed the American lead, halving its own GCF pledge from £1.6 billion to roughly £815 million.  By November 2025, a planned pledging event at COP30 for the Least Developed Countries Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund was simply cancelled, for lack of contributor interest.  The UNEP Adaptation Gap Report puts current adaptation needs at twelve to fourteen times the finance available.  This is not one government having a bad year.  It is a pattern, repeating across every major public climate fund simultaneously, and the World Bank’s own target just joined it.

The Loss and Damage Fund Cannot Fill the Gap Either

The Loss and Damage Fund closed COP28 with pledges totalling just over US$600 million.  This was smaller than the cost of building the Dubai Expo City venue hosting the conference.  Pledges are not disbursements.  They are promises, revocable the moment a donor government’s domestic politics shift, exactly as the GCF, the Adaptation Fund, and now the World Bank’s own target has each demonstrated within the same eighteen-month window.  Swiss Re Institute projects climate change could wipe out up to 18% of global GDP by 2050 under a 3.2°C warming scenario.  A fund built on voluntary pledges from governments now actively rescinding pledges elsewhere was never going to raise anywhere close to the trillions that figure implies.

A Secondary Compliance Carbon Market is the Answer

Public multilateral finance is hostage to whichever government holds the largest voting share in any given electoral cycle.  A genuine secondary market for compliance-grade carbon credits is not.  Article 6’s rulebook, finalised at COP29, and the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism, fully funded and operational following COP30, finally give carbon credits the legal and financial infrastructure to trade as a genuine, liquid asset class rather than a voluntary offset nobody can price reliably.  The EU Emissions Trading System offers the working proof of concept: it has cut covered emissions by 51% since 2005 and raised over €265 billion in cumulative revenue, funded entirely by market participants paying for verified carbon allowances, with no government pledge conference required and no single shareholder able to rescind the mechanism on a whim.  A functioning secondary market creates enforceable claims, priced by private capital chasing genuine returns, immune to a change of Treasury Secretary or a new administration’s rhetoric about “hoaxes.”  Private capital does not abandon a position because Washington’s politics shifted.  It abandons a position when the underlying asset stops performing, and a properly regulated compliance market gives carbon credits that discipline – the discipline every public pledge fund examined here has just proven it lacks.

The Dire Consequence of Political Expediency

Every developing nation, and every private investor, now watching the World Bank abandon a target it had already exceeded, the United States rescind a formal pledge outright, and the United Kingdom quietly halve its own commitment months later, has learned the same lesson twice over in eighteen months.  Public climate finance commitments are not durable.  They are conditional on domestic political convenience in whichever country holds the largest shareholding, and that conditionality poisons every future pledge with the justified suspicion that it will evaporate the moment a different administration takes office.  That is not merely bad optics.  It actively discourages the long-term private investment climate adaptation and mitigation genuinely need, because no serious capital allocator builds a multi-decade infrastructure plan around a funding source proven, across three separate institutions now, to disappear on a single shareholder’s whim.  A secondary compliance carbon market does not solve every funding gap.  It solves the one public finance has just proven, repeatedly, it cannot: durability that survives an election.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith & Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Quora Answer: What is Something That Would Cause Terror in the World Right Now?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What is something that would cause terror in the world right now?”

If people are smart enough, climate change should be enough.  Most have not understood the consequences, politically, economically, and in terms of basic survival.

Coastal Cities and the Water Table

Many coastal cities will become uninhabitable due to rising tides.  The World Meteorological Organisation projects the population exposed to a 100-year coastal flood could roughly double if global mean sea level rises 0.75 metres, and the IPCC estimates over one billion people globally will be exposed to coastal-specific climate hazards by 2050.  Shanghai, Dhaka, Bangkok, Jakarta, Lagos, Cairo, London, New York, and Los Angeles all sit on the WMO’s own list of major cities under direct threat.  Rising tides do not merely flood streets.  Saltwater intrusion contaminates freshwater aquifers, and Bangladesh’s Bhola Island offers a documented preview: half the island was submerged in 1995, leaving 500,000 people homeless in a single event, with scientists projecting Bangladesh will lose 17% of its land to climate-driven flooding by 2050.  A drowned aquifer does not merely displace people from their homes.  It removes their drinking water at the same time.

Food, Migration, and Conflict

Changing weather patterns will adversely affect food supply, driving up the price of staples and producing shortages.  Increased desertification in continental interiors will accelerate displacement of both animals and people.  Estimates for climate-driven displacement by 2050 range from the World Bank’s 216 million internally displaced to the Institute for Economics and Peace’s worst-case figure of 1.2 billion people at risk under combined climate and civil unrest pressure.  Even the World Bank’s Groundswell Report, its most conservative published estimate, projects 143 million people displaced, 86 million from Sub-Saharan Africa alone.  Displacement at this scale strains the resources of even the wealthiest nations, and it accelerates conflict over water and arable land directly.  A 2007 to 2010 drought in Syria, among the worst in the country’s modern history, drove large-scale rural-to-urban migration that fed directly into the tensions preceding the civil war, according to research cited by the Climate Change Academy.  Climate change does not need to cause a war on its own.  It only needs to remove the food and water buffer that was previously keeping an existing tension contained.

Water, Weather, and the Compounding Disasters

Climate change will affect ocean salinity and alter currents, reshaping weather patterns worldwide, producing drought in some regions and devastating floods in others.  As ice melts, atmospheric water content rises, increasing precipitation intensity.  Heavier rainstorms and snowstorms mean more flash floods, avalanches, and landslides.  A 2022 drought in East Africa alone left 37 million people facing food insecurity, worsened further by reduced wheat imports following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a direct illustration of how climate stress compounds with unrelated geopolitical shocks rather than arriving in isolation.

This is not the extinction of humanity.  It is a measurable rise in death and suffering, concentrated disproportionately among the nations least equipped to absorb it, with South Asian economies alone projected to lose 1.8% of GDP by 2050, rising toward 8.8% by 2100.  The greater loss sits beyond the human ledger entirely, in the biodiversity this trajectory is already quietly erasing, and biodiversity, once gone, does not come back on any timeline that matters to the people currently deciding whether to take any of this seriously.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith & Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Reflections on the upGrad ESG & Leadership Masterclass

Most webinars are a waste of an hour.  You join, you endure forty-five minutes of someone reading their own slides aloud, you leave having learned nothing that you could not have gleaned from a two-paragraph Google search.  The organisers congratulate themselves.  The speaker adds “thought leader” to their LinkedIn profile.  Everyone goes home none the wiser.  The KnowledgeHut upGrad masterclass on ESG and Leadership held on 1st June 2023 was not that.  It was the kind of session that is uncomfortably rare in the professional development space, one where the speaker had actual operational knowledge, actual skin in the game, and an actual opinion about what matters and what does not.

As the then Chief Executive Officer of Equinox Zenith and President of the Board of Red Sycamore, I was tapped to deliver a masterclass on my thoughts on corporate leadership in the ESG industry.  We are living in the age of climate change, and the primary risk exposure for any business operating on an intermediate to long-term horizon is carbon taxes and carbon credits.  Not reputational risk.  Not consumer sentiment.  Not the annual sustainability report that your communications team writes and nobody reads.  Carbon taxes.  The hard financial impost that governments are legislating into existence at an accelerating pace and that will determine whether your business model survives the next decade.  This is not a point the industry has failed to make.  It is a point the industry has made badly, repeatedly, in language so laden with jargon and moral earnestness that the average CFO closes the tab within thirty seconds.  The upGrad session made it differently.  It made it as a financial argument, not an ethical one.

The Tesla Example, Revisited with the Benefit of Hindsight

The Tesla example is worth dwelling on because most commentators who cite it get it wrong, and the years since have made the correction considerably more interesting than it was in 2023.  Tesla Incorporated is routinely discussed as an electric vehicle manufacturer.  For years it was, more accurately, a regulatory credit arbitrage business that also happened to make cars.  In 2022, Tesla reported US$1.78 billion in regulatory credit sales.  In 2023, that figure was US$1.79 billion.  In the first quarter of 2024 alone, it reported US$595 million.  Tesla’s competitors, General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, were paying Tesla to exist, funding their most dangerous competitor because they had failed to meet the emissions standards Tesla exceeded by design.

That revenue stream has since collapsed, and the collapse is the sharpest lesson in this entire argument.  Tesla’s credit revenue fell 28% in 2025 to roughly US$2 billion.  By the second quarter of 2026, it had cratered to just US$146 million, down 67% year-on-year, after the 2025 Working Families Tax Cuts Act reduced the American civil penalty for missing Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to zero, removing rivals’ incentive to buy Tesla’s credits at all.  In Europe, Toyota and Stellantis withdrew entirely from Tesla’s CO₂ pooling arrangement for 2026, with Stellantis instead building its own compliance pool alongside its Chinese partner Leapmotor.  Tesla did not lose this revenue because carbon regulation weakened.  It lost it because rivals stopped needing to rent compliance from a competitor once the political and structural conditions shifted.  The lesson from 2023 was correct.  Carbon markets are a market to be captured.  The lesson the intervening years added is that a revenue model built on renting a regulatory gap is only as durable as the regulation itself, and regulation is precisely the variable a competitor’s own government can legislate out from under you.

The Immediate Takeaways, Tested against What Actually Happened

The session’s immediate takeaways were three.  ESG market leadership translates into market dominance.  ESG market leadership affects market access.  ESG market leadership is part of personal and corporate branding.  None of these are new ideas.  The ESG consulting industry has been saying variations of them for years.  What distinguished the upGrad session was the specificity of the argument and the absence of the usual hedging.  Most ESG presenters will tell you that sustainability is important and that you should consider doing more of it.  This session told you why, with numbers, and what happens to businesses that do not.

As we approach 2030, every signatory to the Paris Agreement remains under increasing domestic political pressure to demonstrate measurable progress on their climate pledges.  The mechanism most governments are reaching for is the carbon tax, and what was transitional in 2023 is now live.  The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered full operation from January 2026, and the definitive regime now imposes an actual carbon cost, rather than a reporting obligation, on imports from countries without equivalent carbon pricing.  For any Southeast Asian manufacturer exporting to Europe, this stopped being a future problem two years ago and is now simply an operating cost.

The CBAM is not alone.  Singapore introduced its carbon tax in 2019 at S$5 per tonne.  It rose to S$25 per tonne in 2024, and is on schedule to reach S$45 per tonne in 2026 and S$50 to S$80 per tonne by 2030.  Companies that had not begun decarbonisation planning by the time of the original masterclass were not behind the curve.  They were off the map, and the map has only become less forgiving since.

Leadership as a Structural Observation, Not a Values Statement

The point about leadership was equally unambiguous.  Leadership is not the art of commanding.  It is the exercise of influence to effect preferred outcomes.  Corporate leadership without ESG leadership is inadequate corporate leadership.  This is not a values statement.  It is a structural observation.  A chief executive who does not understand their company’s carbon exposure, who cannot articulate a credible decarbonisation pathway, and who treats ESG as a communications function rather than a strategic one, is not fit for purpose.  The market has continued to agree, and more emphatically than in 2023.  A study that year found 77% of Asia-Pacific firms included ESG metrics in evaluating senior executives’ remuneration packages, up from 63% the year before.  The board is watching.  The shareholders are watching.  The regulators, now armed with CBAM’s fully operational enforcement regime, are watching with considerably sharper teeth than they had two years ago.

What the upGrad session did, and what very few ESG presenters manage to do, was land the argument without losing the audience to either despair or boredom.  The carbon market is not a threat to be managed.  It is a market to be captured.  Every industry has exposure to it.  The businesses that are ahead of this are not the ones that hired a Chief Sustainability Officer and issued a glossy annual report.  They are the ones that built carbon strategy into their revenue model, though Tesla’s own subsequent collapse in credit revenue adds a crucial refinement: the model must be built on genuine, durable environmental value, not on a regulatory arbitrage that a rival government can dismantle in a single tax bill.

Red Sycamore, for what it is worth, is doing exactly this, building investment-grade blue carbon credits for the compliance market across up to 500,000 hectares of seagrass coastline in the Siargao region of the Philippines, with further access to coastline near the Bay of Siam in southern Thailand.  It is not a charitable endeavour.  It is a financial instrument backed by measurable, verifiable environmental impact, calibrated using Reef Aquaculture Conservancy MRV methodology, and structured to meet compliance-market documentation standards rather than the voluntary-market self-certification that collapsed so publicly elsewhere in the industry.  That distinction, compliance-grade and durably verified versus voluntary and cheaply revocable, is precisely what the upGrad session was advocating, and precisely what the market has since demanded of every serious corporate player, whether they were ready for it or not.

Most of them were not.  The gap between where corporate ESG strategy stood in 2023 and where it needs to be today is not a gap that gets closed by webinars.  But it helps, occasionally, to hear someone make the argument without apology, without hedging, and without the insufferable self-congratulation that has become the signature register of the sustainability industry.  The upGrad session was that.  It should have had a larger audience.  It should have been recorded and circulated to every senior management team in Southeast Asia.  It was not.  That, too, is a data point about where the industry actually is.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith & Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Carbon Credits: The Trillion-Dollar Market Hiding Behind a Two-Billion-Dollar Scandal

A carbon credit is a permit.  One credit allows the holder to emit one tonne of CO₂, or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases.  It is also called a carbon offset.  Polluting companies receive credits allowing them to emit up to a periodically shrinking limit, and any surplus gets sold to companies that need more.  Cap-and-trade, in one paragraph.  What follows is why the scale of this system matters far more than most commentary bothers to explain.

The Two Markets are Not Remotely Comparable in Size, & Treating Them as Equivalent is the First Mistake

Global compliance carbon markets reached a trading value of approximately $1.5 trillion in 2024, covering roughly 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions across 46 national and 37 subnational jurisdictions.  The EU Emissions Trading System alone accounts for the overwhelming majority of that figure, valued at around €770 billion, and it has generated over €175 billion since 2013, ploughed directly into renewables, energy efficiency, and low-carbon innovation.  EU compliance permits closed 2025 at roughly €82.85 per tonne, up 21.5% year-on-year.

The voluntary market, by contrast, was valued at approximately $2 billion to $2.5 billion in 2023, and even its most optimistic growth projections put it at $100 billion to $250 billion by 2030, still a fraction of where compliance markets already sit today.  The voluntary market is not a smaller version of the same thing.  It is roughly 0.15% the size of the compliance market, running on self-certification instead of government enforcement, which is precisely why an investigation could find, as The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial did in January 2023, that over 90% of Verra’s rainforest offset credits were likely phantom credits representing no genuine reduction at all, with the underlying deforestation threat overstated by roughly 400% on average according to a Cambridge University study.  Disney, Shell, Gucci, BHP, and Salesforce all bought into that fiction.  A market a few billion dollars in size, built on marketing department discretion, will always be more vulnerable to exactly this kind of collapse than a trillion-dollar market operating under statutory cap enforcement. 

Consider What This Money is Actually Supposed to Fund, because the Shortfall is Obscene

The Loss and Damage Fund, agreed at COP27 and operationalised at COP28 in 2023, exists to compensate developing nations for climate harm they did not cause.  Estimates of what developing countries actually need range from $215 billion to $387 billion annually this decade, with some analyses, including from the Loss and Damage Collaboration, putting current-year losses already above $400 billion annually, projected to rise to $580 billion by 2030 and between $1.1 trillion and $1.7 trillion by 2050.  The initial pledges at COP28 totalled roughly $700 million.  That is not a rounding error against $400 billion.  That is 0.1% to 0.2% of one year’s actual need, pledged as though it were a permanent solution.  Pledges and competing national interests were never going to close a gap of this magnitude, and four years on from COP28 nothing about that arithmetic has improved.

The GDP Numbers Underneath All of This Should Terrify Anyone Treating Climate Finance as Optional

The Swiss Re Institute’s stress test across 48 economies, representing 90% of global GDP, found that under a severe scenario of 3.2°C warming, the global economy could lose up to 18% of GDP by 2050 compared to a world without climate change.  Even under a moderate 2°C scenario, the loss sits at 11%, translating to roughly $23 trillion in reduced annual global output.  China stands to lose close to 24% of its GDP in the severe scenario.  ASEAN markets specifically are projected to lose about 37% of GDP by 2048 under the most extreme case, with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand collectively losing economic output exceeding seven times their combined 2019 GDP by 2050.  This is not a distant abstraction for the region.  It is the single largest economic risk most ASEAN economies will face this century, and it dwarfs, by orders of magnitude, the entire current size of the voluntary carbon market that keeps absorbing corporate climate budgets to negligible effect.

Why a Secondary Market Matters Strategically, Not Just Financially

A trillion-dollar compliance market with a liquid, fungible secondary layer does something a $700 million pledge round can never do: it attracts institutional capital at the scale the GDP numbers demand, because pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and insurers will only deploy serious money into an asset class with price discovery, ratings, and enforceable standards behind it.  Currently, compliance carbon credits are not fungible across markets, which strangles exactly the kind of liquidity that would let capital move efficiently toward the highest-integrity mitigation projects.  Fixing that requires several things done in parallel: quality standards and a clear regulatory framework defining which credits qualify, verified against actual emissions reductions rather than marketing claims; rated carbon credits as the mechanism that finally lets institutional risk committees treat these instruments the way they already treat rated corporate debt; and a single, liquid trading infrastructure that makes credits genuinely tradeable rather than trapped inside jurisdiction-specific silos.

Regulatory recognition is the final and hardest step, running through partnerships with sovereign wealth funds on the basis that this infrastructure constitutes strategic national assets, and through recognition from central banks willing to treat high-integrity carbon credits as rated instruments rather than reputational accessories.  Achieve that, and carbon credits sit one step from full financial instrument status, tradeable and collateralisable the way investment-grade debt already is. 

A $400 billion annual funding gap and an 18% GDP loss scenario cannot be financed by phantom credits, self-certified rainforest projects, and corporate goodwill campaigns.  They require a trillion-dollar compliance market with real liquidity, real ratings, and real enforcement, scaled to match the size of the problem it claims to solve.  Climate mitigation has to become self-funding through a genuine secondary market, because pledges have had every opportunity to close this gap, and the numbers prove, year after year, that they never will.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith & Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Regional Developments in Sustainability Finance from AlterCOP29

The following are notes of the presentation delivered at AlterCOP29, on the 14^th November 2024.  These are my opinions, as President of Red Sycamore. 

Regulators are setting minimum standards for sustainability reporting and disclosures to introduce more transparency and accountability on climate issues.  One of the discussions is the legal responsibilities of Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs).  Some companies are pushing for the appointment of people with legal backgrounds.  Others, including myself, are pushing for CSOs to have an accounting background, because this is not primarily about legal compliance, but financial compliance. 

Countries are developing green taxonomies to standardise what qualifies as a green or sustainable investment.  The ASEAN Taxonomy Version 2 was released in June 2023, to provide a science-based framework to classify sustainable activities.  It includes four environmental objectives: mitigation of climate change risks, adaptation to climate change, protection of healthy ecosystems and biodiversity, and promotion of resource resilience and a transition to a circular economy.  The ASEAN Capital Markets Forum (ACMF) has released a roadmap for sustainable capital markets, focusing on strengthening infrastructure and improving access to financial products.  This roadmap aims to promote sustainable finance and support the region’s transition to a low-carbon economy. 

The ASEAN Taxonomy aims to ensure interoperability with other widely used international taxonomies, such as the EU Taxonomy and the Green Bond Principles.  Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are developing national taxonomies to align with the ASEAN Taxonomy.  Here, in Singapore, we have introduced a carbon tax and are developing its taxonomy to support sustainable finance and decarbonisation efforts. 

Issuance of green bonds has increased, with a cumulative value of over US$4 trillion since 2018.  Sustainability-linked bonds have gained traction, as they link financial performance to sustainability targets.  Despite a drop in net inflows from US$161 billion in 2022 to US$63 billion in 2023, sustainable funds continue to attract significant investments.  Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) funds are becoming more popular.  Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) provide funding and support for sustainable projects.  These institutions help to implement policies that promote sustainable finance.  The sustainable finance market in SEA is still relatively small, which indicates significant potential for growth.  Several countries in the region are considering or implementing carbon pricing mechanisms to incentivise emission reductions. 

Discussions at COP29 are focused on establishing a new climate finance goal to replace the previous commitment of US$100 billion annually by 2020.  Developing countries, including those in SEA, are advocating for a higher annual commitment of at least US$1.3 trillion from wealthy nations to support climate action.  Singapore has pledged up to US$500 million to support Asia’s decarbonisation and climate resilience through the Financing Asia’s Transition Partnership (FAST-P).  They aim to raise US$5 billion with international partners to make climate action less financially risky.  That is extremely ambitious. 

The Economic Development Board (EDB) has launched a new grant to support carbon project developers and finance activities that can generate high-quality carbon credits aligned with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.  This grant aims to spur the development of more carbon projects in the region. 

Several countries in Southeast Asia are considering or implementing carbon pricing mechanisms to incentivise emission reductions.  Singapore introduced its carbon tax on 01^st January 2019, under the Carbon Pricing Act (CPA).  The initial tax rate was set at S$5 per tonne of CO₂ equivalent (tCO2e) for the first five years (2019-2023) to provide a transition period for businesses to adjust.  To support its net zero target, the carbon tax will be raised to S$25/tCO2e in 2025, S$45/tCO2e in 2026 and 2027, and is expected to reach S$50-80/tCO2e by 2030.  The carbon tax applies to all industrial facilities with annual direct greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of at least 25,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e).  This covers about 80% of Singapore's total GHG emissions from around 50 facilities in sectors such as manufacturing, power, waste, and water. 

From this year, companies can use high-quality international carbon credits (ICCs) to offset up to 5% of their taxable emissions.  These credits must comply with rules under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and meet seven principles to demonstrate high environmental integrity.  A transition framework has been introduced to support emissions-intensive trade-exposed (EITE) companies as they work to reduce emissions and invest in cleaner technologies, while managing the near-term impact on business competitiveness. 

Malaysia is considering implementing a carbon tax, with discussions ongoing about the appropriate rate and coverage.  Indonesia has introduced a carbon tax on coal, with the revenue intended to fund renewable energy projects and reduce emissions.  The Philippines has implemented a carbon pricing mechanism through its Renewable Energy Act, which includes incentives for renewable energy projects.  No Southeast Asian (SEA) countries have implemented a national Emissions Trading System (ETS) similar to the European Union ETS. 

The global carbon credit framework is a system designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by allowing countries and companies to trade carbon credits.  Article 6 enables countries to pursue voluntary cooperation to reach their climate targets.  It allows for the trading of carbon credits between countries, helping to finance climate action in developing nations.  Credits traded under Article 6 come with corresponding adjustments to ensure that emissions reductions are not counted twice.  The Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) set rigorous thresholds on disclosure and sustainable development, ensuring that carbon credits meet high-integrity standards.  These principles serve as a global benchmark for high-quality carbon credits.  The supervisory body for Article 6.4 has established standards for how international carbon crediting projects will work.  This includes a dynamic mechanism to update these standards as needed.  This framework is expected to direct resources to the developing world and help save up to US$250 billion a year when implementing climate plans. 

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) introduced a concept called transition credits to help accelerate the phase-out of coal-fired power plants in Asia.  Transition credits are a new class of high-integrity carbon credits generated from the emissions reduced through the early retirement of coal-fired power plants (CFPPs) and their replacement with cleaner energy sources.  These credits aim to provide financial incentives for asset owners to retire coal plants earlier than their operational lifetimes, serving as a complementary financing instrument to bridge the economic gap for early coal plant retirements.  The Asian Development Bank, the International Energy Agency, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Singapore are also involved.  According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Southeast Asia will need an estimated US$12 billion in concessional finance by the early 2030s to support the accelerated uptake of clean energy technologies.

Executive Leadership Seminar Panel 2: “ESG & Climate Change - Succeeding in a New World”

Panel 2 of the Executive Leadership Seminar was “ESG & Climate Change - Succeeding in a New World”.  Leadership in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and in climate change refers to the role of leaders in driving sustainability initiatives within their organisations.  Leaders need to educate themselves and build their climate-risk competency, gaining an understanding of industry-specific global warming, international debate, risk literacy, and more.  Leaders are responsible for integrating ESG principles into their organisation’s strategy and operations.  This includes setting ESG goals, tracking progress, and reporting on ESG performance.  Leaders play a crucial role in addressing climate change by reducing their organisation’s environmental impact, investing in clean technologies, and advocating for policies that support a low-carbon economy. 

Executive Leadership Seminar Panel 2: “ESG & Climate Change - Succeeding in a New World”

This panel explored developments since the last United Nations Climate Change Conference, 28^th Conference of Partners, at Dubai, and how we need to adapt to the new regulatory framework, the sociopolitical realities, and the onset of carbon credits as a proposed financial instrument.  This upends the financial market and shapes economic policy globally. 

The panel was moderated by Mr. Kin Ng, Chief Executive Officer of Red Sycamore Group.  The panellists were Mr. Matthew Fernandez, Chief Operating Officer of microLEAP PLT; Mr. Melvin Tan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of 8VantEdge; Dr. Roslina Chai, Founder of Chrysalis Institute of Be-ing, and Senior Associate, Strategy & Innovation for  Decision Processes International Asia; and Mr. Vernon Lim, Senior Consultant of Monarch Advisory and Vjoire. 

Mr. David Chen, Chief Executive Officer of AgriG8; Mr. Kevin Lim, Chief Executive Officer of Megaton Shipping; Dr. Victor Tay, Chief Executive Officer of Global Catalyst Advisory, Governing Council of the China-ASEAN Business Alliance, and Regional Managing Director of Asia; Stout Investment Bank; and Dr. Vincent Lim, Chief Financial Officer, Asia-Pacific of Datalogic Singapore, and Associate Faculty of the Singapore Institute of Technology