More than 50 Nigerian organisations are actively working towards adopting the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Sustainability Disclosure Standards, according to the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRC). The disclosure signals a notable shift in how the country's businesses treat sustainability information — from a peripheral obligation to a core part of how they report on themselves. The figure was shared by Dr. Rabiu Olowo, Executive Secretary and Chief Executive Officer of the FRC, at the 5th Annual Nigeria Employers’ Summit in Abuja, held under the theme “Leveraging Reforms and ESG for Enterprise Competitiveness and Inclusive National Growth.” Olowo described the response from the business community as encouraging. “As we speak, over 50 organisations across various sectors of the economy are actively progressing towards full adoption of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards,” he said. This story links three Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption & Production) is the core connection: target 12.6 explicitly calls on companies to adopt sustainable practices and integrate sustainability information into their reporting, which is exactly what adopting the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards achieves. SDG 8 (Decent Work & Economic Growth) follows from the FRC's own case — that credible disclosure attracts investment, sharpens competitiveness and supports long-term growth across Nigeria's economy. And SDG 16 (Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions) captures the deeper payoff: standardised reporting builds transparency and accountability, strengthening the governance and institutions that trustworthy markets depend on. Crucially, the momentum is not confined to one corner of the economy. The organisations moving towards adoption cut across banking, financial services, manufacturing, industrial goods, consumer goods, oil and gas, telecommunications, insurance and fintech — and, tellingly, extend into the small and medium enterprise sector, where reporting capacity has historically been thinnest. That breadth suggests sustainability disclosure is beginning to be understood as a mainstream business discipline rather than a concern reserved for large listed companies. Behind the headline number sits a sustained groundwork effort by the regulator. Olowo said the Council had organised more than 47 training sessions, workshops and technical engagements, reaching over 4,500 participants from more than 215 organisations. Alongside that, the FRC has developed guidance materials, created technical engagement platforms, facilitated stakeholder discussions and continued to provide practical support to reporting entities preparing for the change. The framing Olowo gave the standards is the part worth dwelling on. He was explicit that this is not merely a regulatory hurdle. “Sustainability reporting is no longer just a compliance exercise. It is a strategic tool that helps organisations improve transparency, strengthen governance, attract investment and remain competitive in the global economy,” he said. In other words, the value is in what disclosure does to the way a company is run and how credibly it can present itself to the outside world — not in the filing itself. That argument matters because the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards, developed by the International Sustainability Standards Board, are designed to give investors consistent, comparable, decision-useful information about the sustainability risks and opportunities a company faces. For a market like Nigeria, aligning with that global baseline is a way of speaking the same language as international capital. Olowo urged businesses to begin preparations ahead of Nigeria’s phased implementation of the standards, arguing that early adoption would enhance transparency, strengthen resilience, attract investment and improve the global competitiveness of Nigerian companies. The message to enterprises still on the sidelines was that the direction of travel is set, and that moving early is an advantage rather than a cost. Why It Matters At its heart, this is a transparency and governance story. Standardised sustainability reporting forces the kind of internal discipline that good governance depends on — measuring what a company actually does, disclosing it openly, and being held to account against a common yardstick rather than a self-flattering narrative. When more than 50 firms across a whole economy commit to that, the effect compounds: comparable, credible disclosure makes it harder to hide poor practice and easier for investors, regulators and the public to trust what they are told. For Nigerian business, the real prize is not a tidier report but stronger institutions — companies that are more transparent by design and more accountable in practice.

When most of us picture renewable energy, we picture solar panels glinting on a rooftop or wind turbines turning on a ridgeline. Kenya is quietly making the case for a different champion. In the volcanic Rift Valley north-west of Nairobi, the Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) is rehabilitating its ageing Olkaria I power plant to pump an additional 63 megawatts of geothermal electricity into the national grid, reinforcing a source of clean power that has been working around the clock for decades. According to reporting by The Standard, the rehabilitation of Olkaria I is around 70 per cent complete, with the first turbine expected to come online in mid-2026 and the full upgrade delivering its extra capacity later in the year. It is part of a wider renewal of KenGen's older units, designed to squeeze more reliable, low-cost power out of existing fields rather than starting from scratch. Unlike solar and wind, which rise and fall with the sun and the weather, geothermal energy taps the constant heat of the earth, giving Kenya a dependable "baseload" that runs day and night, in every season. This story sits at the meeting point of three Sustainable Development Goals. It speaks most directly to SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy): KenGen's Olkaria upgrade adds cheap, home-grown, round-the-clock geothermal power, cutting reliance on imported fuel and helping keep electricity both clean and affordable as demand climbs. It also advances SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), because rehabilitating ageing plants and extending transmission from the Rift Valley is fundamentally about building resilient, modern energy infrastructure that can carry a growing industrial economy. And it supports SDG 13 (Climate Action), since every megawatt of geothermal baseload displaces higher-emission thermal generation, shrinking Kenya's carbon footprint while strengthening its long-term energy security. The timing matters. Kenya's appetite for electricity is climbing steadily as industries expand and more homes are connected to the grid, with national peak demand recently touching a record of about 2,362 megawatts. Geothermal already carries an outsized share of that load, supplying roughly 40 per cent of the country's electricity and standing as its single largest source by both installed capacity and generation. Each upgraded unit at Olkaria helps keep pace with demand without leaning on expensive, polluting thermal plants that burn imported fuel. Kenya's geothermal story is not new, and that is precisely the point. The country has been generating power from its underground steam since the early 1980s, steadily building the expertise and infrastructure that have earned it a reputation as the "Iceland of Africa." Today it ranks among the world's leading geothermal producers, and its ambitions are still growing: national plans envisage lifting geothermal capacity from under 1,000 megawatts toward 3,000 megawatts in the years ahead, alongside expanding solar and other renewables. The appeal is easy to understand. Geothermal power is home-grown, shielding Kenya from volatile global fuel prices and the currency pressures that come with importing diesel. It produces a fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil-fuel generation, aligning neatly with the country's climate commitments. And because the resource is effectively inexhaustible on human timescales, it offers the kind of long-term energy security that intermittent sources alone struggle to guarantee. Challenges remain, of course. Drilling geothermal wells is capital-intensive and technically demanding, and moving new power from the Rift Valley to demand centres such as Nairobi still depends on upgrading transmission lines. But KenGen's incremental approach — refreshing proven plants like Olkaria I while exploring new fields — shows how a country can grow its clean-energy supply pragmatically. As the world races to decarbonise, Kenya is a reminder that the renewable future will not be powered by one technology alone, and that some of the most valuable clean energy has been beneath our feet all along. Why it matters. Solar power tends to be the first source we think of when we think of renewable energy. However, there are other sources — such as geothermal energy — that have been used for decades and hold huge potential. Kenya's steady, long-running investment in geothermal shows what that potential looks like in practice: reliable, round-the-clock clean power drawn from the earth itself.

Research Desk — This is a study analysis built from a single published report: the American Lung Association's State of the Air 2026, the 27th edition of its annual assessment, based on quality-assured monitoring data for 2022, 2023 and 2024. It goes deep on one finding: the rebound of ground-level ozone and the warming climate driving it. A hard-won trend line has bent the wrong way There are a handful of environmental numbers in the United States that have, for decades, pointed reliably in the right direction. The concentration of ground-level ozone in the air most Americans breathe was one of them. Since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, the American Lung Association notes, the combined emissions of the six pollutants the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulates fell by 78 percent through 2020 — one of the more consequential public-health achievements in the country's history, accomplished quietly, county by county, monitor by monitor. The Lung Association's State of the Air 2026, the 27th edition of a report first published in 2000, is the moment that trend line visibly bends. Drawing on the three most recent years of publicly available, quality-assured monitoring data — 2022, 2023 and 2024 — the analysis finds that 129.1 million people, some 38 percent of the U.S. population, were exposed to levels of ozone that put their health at risk. That is not a marginal uptick. It is the highest number the report has recorded in six years, and an increase of 3.9 million people over last year's edition alone. These three goals map the causal chain in the report. SDG 13 (Climate Action) is the driver — the report attributes the ozone rebound to heat, drought and cross-border wildfire smoke. That worsening ozone concentrates in dense metro areas, the concern of SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities & Communities), where 77 metros contain a failing county and Los Angeles has ranked worst for 26 of 27 years. The ultimate stake is SDG 3 (Good Health & Well-being) — the asthma attacks, impaired lung growth and premature deaths that 129.1 million exposed Americans now face. Ozone is measured against a national health standard of 70 parts per billion averaged over eight hours, the threshold the EPA has set under the Clean Air Act as the limit above which the air is considered unhealthy. Counties that repeatedly breach it earn a failing grade in the Lung Association's severity-weighted scoring system. In this year's report, failing ozone grades were spread across 219 counties in 36 states and the District of Columbia — the largest count of failing ozone counties since the 2016 report. Seventy-seven metropolitan areas contain at least one county that flunked. The geography of American smog, in other words, is not shrinking. It is widening. What ozone actually does, and why the rebound matters It is worth pausing on what this pollutant is, because ground-level ozone is uniquely a product of the conditions the report is worried about. Unlike soot or industrial particulate matter, ozone is not emitted directly from a tailpipe or a smokestack. It forms in the atmosphere when nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds — precursor emissions from vehicles, power plants, refineries and, increasingly, wildfire smoke — react in the presence of sunlight and heat. Ozone is, in effect, cooked. The hotter and stiller the air, the more efficiently the recipe works. That chemistry is why the pollutant is so damaging to the human respiratory system and why a rebound carries real consequences. The Lung Association catalogues ozone's effects across the full arc of a life: it inflames and irritates the airways, triggers wheezing, coughing and shortness of breath, provokes asthma attacks, worsens chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and is linked to premature death. In children, whose lungs are still developing, it can impede lung growth and contribute to new cases of asthma. The people most exposed are frequently those least able to absorb the harm. Counting across all pollutants, the report finds that nearly 2.4 million children and almost 11.9 million adults with asthma, roughly 6.7 million people with COPD, and close to 10 million people with cardiovascular disease live in counties that earned at least one failing grade — the populations for whom a bad-air day is not an inconvenience but a medical event. The broader backdrop makes the ozone finding harder to dismiss as a statistical wobble. Across all the pollutants it tracks, State of the Air 2026 concludes that 44 percent of Americans — 152.3 million people — live in places that received failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution. Nearly half of the nation's children, 46 percent or 33.5 million people under the age of 18, live in a county that failed at least one measure. Ozone is the single largest contributor to that failing-grade population, and it is the one moving most clearly in the wrong direction. A single-screen snapshot of the ozone story — the headline 129.1M Americans (38% of the population) breathing unhealthy ozone, up 3.9M and the highest in six years, alongside the 219 failing counties across 36 states, 77 affected metros, L.A.'s 26-of-27-year record, and the even split of 7 states worsening versus 7 improving. The green panel names the climate mechanism in the report's own words, with full source attribution to State of the Air 2026 and its 2022–2024 monitoring data. The climate fingerprint the report names out loud What sets this year's analysis apart from a routine annual tally is the directness with which the American Lung Association attributes the ozone rebound to a changing climate. The report does not hedge. “A changing climate is making it harder to protect this hard-fought progress on air quality and human health,” it states, pointing to “increases in high ozone days and spikes in particle pollution related to extreme heat, drought and wildfires.” The mechanism is laid out with unusual specificity. The report identifies two climate-linked drivers behind the worsening ozone numbers. The first is smoke that crossed a border. “Extensive wildfires in Canada in 2023 generated ozone-forming pollutants (also called precursor emissions) that blew across the border,” the analysis explains — a reminder that ozone precursors do not respect jurisdictions, and that a fire season hundreds of miles away can register on a monitor in the American Midwest or Northeast. The second driver is heat itself. “In both 2023 and 2024, high temperatures and other weather conditions were ideal for ozone formation, especially in the South,” the report finds. The chemistry underneath is precisely what a warming atmosphere delivers. “Climate change contributed to worsening ozone pollution by increasing precursor emissions (found in worsening wildfire smoke) and by creating atmospheric conditions, including higher temperatures and lower wind speeds, that allow pollutants to accumulate and ozone to form,” the Lung Association writes. Higher temperatures accelerate the reactions that produce ozone; lower wind speeds let the pollutant pool over cities instead of dispersing. Each additional degree of warming and each stagnant-air episode is, functionally, more raw material and better cooking conditions for smog. The report's blunt framing — “A changing climate is making the job of cleaning up the air more difficult” — captures the structural problem. The country can keep tightening emissions from cars and industry, and still watch ozone rise, because the atmosphere is doing more of the manufacturing on its own. A geography that is shifting under the old assumptions For decades the mental map of American smog had a fixed center: Southern California. That has not changed at the top of the table — Los Angeles again ranks as the city with the worst ozone pollution in the nation, a distinction it has held in 26 of the 27 years the report has been published, and its ozone worsened relative to last year. California as a whole accounts for eight of the 25 most ozone-polluted cities in the country, a legacy of geography, traffic and the sun-drenched basins where ozone forms readily. But the more revealing story in State of the Air 2026 is at the edges of the map, where the climate signal shows up as movement. Seven states saw their ozone pollution worsen in this year's data: Arizona, Connecticut, Louisiana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. The Southern and Gulf-state presence on that list is consistent with the report's own observation that heat made 2023 and 2024 ideal for ozone formation, especially in the South. Seven other states improved — Colorado, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, Utah and Wyoming — a reminder that local emissions controls still work and that the trend is not uniformly negative. The picture is one of a country pulling in two directions at once: conventional pollution control grinding levels down in some places while climate-amplified conditions push them up in others. This churn matters because it undercuts a comfortable assumption baked into how the nation manages air quality — that once a region has cleaned up, it stays clean. A metro area that spent years earning a passing grade can be pushed back into failure by a single hot, stagnant summer or a season of imported wildfire smoke, without any local increase in cars or factories. Ozone, uniquely among the criteria pollutants, is now partly hostage to the weather, and the weather is trending hotter. The blind spots in the data One of the quieter but more important contributions of State of the Air 2026 is what it says about the limits of the monitoring network itself. The 129.1 million figure for unhealthy ozone exposure is, if anything, likely an undercount. The report can only grade counties that have enough quality-assured monitoring data — 885 counties, home to more than 267 million people. But the United States has 2,295 counties or county-equivalent jurisdictions, about 73.5 million people's worth, where neither ozone nor particle pollution is being monitored at all. Those places are not necessarily clean; they are simply unmeasured. As the climate drivers the report identifies — heat, drought, wildfire smoke — spread ozone into rural and previously unaffected areas, a monitoring network built around historically polluted urban basins may be looking in the wrong places. The report also flags an emerging pressure on the system that could complicate the ozone outlook further: the electricity appetite of data centers. U.S. data centers have consumed roughly 4.4 percent of the nation's total electricity, a figure the Lung Association notes could climb to as much as 12 percent of total U.S. electricity demand within the next decade. Where that power comes from — and the precursor emissions associated with generating it — will feed directly into the ozone equation. The report cites modeling suggesting the public-health harms of data-center-related pollution could reach 167 million to 266 million dollars in California alone. It is a signal that the sources of ozone precursors are not static, and that new demand can offset old gains. There is also an equity dimension the report is careful not to bury, even in a year focused on climate drivers. People of color make up 42.1 percent of the U.S. population but represent 54.2 percent of the people living in a county with at least one failing grade. The burden of dirtier air, including the ozone the climate is now amplifying, does not fall evenly, and the communities carrying more of it are frequently those already living with the asthma, diabetes and heart disease that make ozone most dangerous. A methodology built to reflect lived exposure Part of what gives the ozone finding its weight is the Lung Association's deliberate choice about how to count bad-air days. The report uses monitoring data drawn from the EPA's own Air Quality System, characterized by Dr. Allen S. Lefohn of A.S.L. & Associates, with the health-impacts section reviewed by John Balmes, M.D. Crucially, its grades include every day a monitor recorded unhealthy air — even days the EPA later designates “exceptional events,” a category that frequently covers wildfire smoke. The Lung Association's position is explicit: “if an air pollution exceedance is ruled an exceptional event and is omitted for the purposes of regulatory compliance, it remains a threat to people's health.” In a year when so much of the ozone rebound is being driven by wildfire smoke, that methodological choice is the difference between a report that measures regulatory compliance and one that measures what people's lungs actually experience. It is why the 129.1 million figure reflects the air Americans breathed, not the air that counts on a compliance ledger. Why It Matters The ozone rebound in State of the Air 2026 lands at a moment when the machinery built to fight it is being loosened rather than tightened. The report itself calls attention to the many ways the current EPA is weakening, delaying and eliminating clean-air protections, and it urges the agency to value the health of America's children and to follow the science and the law. That is the accountability question this data forces. The Clean Air Act delivered a 78 percent cut in key pollutants over half a century precisely because health-based standards were set, defended and enforced — because, in the Lung Association's phrasing, our health should count. A warming climate is now adding ozone back into the air faster than local controls can remove it, which means the standards matter more than ever, not less. Rolling back protections while the atmosphere itself becomes a pollution source is a decision to accept more sick children, more asthma attacks and more premature deaths as the price of deregulation. The report's demand is straightforward: defend the Clean Air Act's progress, restore the EPA to its public-health mission, and hold state and local governments to their share of the work. Clean air is not a settled achievement to be spent down. It is a standard that has to be actively held — and this year's numbers are the cost of letting it slip. This Research Desk analysis is based on figures published in the American Lung Association's State of the Air 2026. All statistics are attributed to that report and its underlying 2022-2024 monitoring data.

There is plenty of hand-wringing about Ireland's slow progress on cutting carbon emissions, but one technology is quietly delivering exactly what was asked of it. Solar energy is on track to make its full contribution to halving national emissions by 2030, and its rise over just a few years has been striking. “The run rate is 1 gigawatt a year in connected solar,” says Ronan Power of industry body Solar Ireland. During the May heatwave, solar supplied a third of the country's electricity needs, at peak providing almost as much power as imported gas. The numbers tell the story of a technology moving from the margins to the mainstream. Two gigawatts were in the system last year — enough to power around a million homes — and 8GW is set to be installed by the decade's end, of which 2GW would be rooftop, provided planning and grid connection keep pace. Growth in large utility-scale solar is concentrated in the flat, sun-favoured midlands, east and south, where grid capacity and terrain align. Yet the momentum runs into real obstacles. The grid is not keeping pace with the power being generated, and curtailment — when the system simply cannot absorb the renewable electricity on offer — wastes an average of €1.4 million every day. Solar Ireland argues that already-available technology could optimise the system and cut that waste. Developers feel the pain acutely. Justin Brown, chief executive of Power Capital Renewable Energy, says grid connection is his biggest frustration: projects sit ready to produce but idle, waiting to be plugged in, in what he calls the only business he knows where “a contract is more of a promise” with no penalties for delay. The build-out has also stirred rural opposition, with recent protests in east Cork, Galway and Wexford over the loss of prime agricultural land, the “industrialisation” of the countryside and safety concerns around battery storage. Campaign group Amass, resisting a large Galway project, insists many of its supporters back renewable energy but want genuine consultation, planning transparency and a proper regulatory framework for battery energy storage systems. Their chairman, Brendan Cronin, argues that questions of food production, land use and democratic participation in planning have become national issues, not isolated local disputes. The ecological case, however, is strong. Ecologist Padraic Fogarty describes solar as the most benign of renewable technologies — no pollution, no moving parts for birds to collide with, and evidence of benefits for wildflowers, birds and wildlife where panels replace intensive livestock. Even at 8GW, Solar Ireland notes, the country would use just 0.1 per cent of its land. And the old objection to renewables — intermittency — is fading. IRENA director-general Francesco La Camera says the “sun doesn't always shine” argument has been “played against renewables for a long time by lobbyists.” Pairing solar with utility-scale batteries now makes round-the-clock clean power a reality, with solar-plus-storage hybrids already outcompeting new fossil-fuel plants in many regions and bringing Ireland within reach of near-100 per cent renewable electricity. Why it matters The solar dream is achievable, and more countries are proving the point. What was once a dream — perhaps even an unrealistic one — is slowly but surely turning into a very real one, with tangible results being achieved. On a positive note, we are very upbeat about a future built entirely on renewables. On a less positive note, we have to pose the question: what excuse are the other EU countries that are lagging behind using to justify their lack of progress?

There is a number in Lidl's Sustainability Report 2025 that looks like an unambiguous success, and another, a few pages later, that quietly undoes the celebration. The first is 45.6 percent — the reduction in operational greenhouse gas emissions, covering Scopes 1 and 2, that the discounter has achieved since 2019. The second is 153,971,514 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent: the company's total carbon footprint for 2025, a figure that has not fallen in step with the operational gains but has instead climbed higher than in any previous year the report tracks. Read together, the two numbers describe the defining tension of climate action in food retail. A company can do almost everything right inside its own four walls and still watch its overall emissions rise, because the overwhelming majority of them were never inside those walls to begin with. This is the Scope 3 paradox, and Lidl — part of the privately held Schwarz Group and one of the largest food retailers in Europe, with more than 13,000 locations across 32 countries and over 386,000 employees — is an unusually clear illustration of it. The Sustainability Report 2025 does not hide the arithmetic. It lays out, in a detailed carbon-footprint table prepared according to the GHG Protocol, exactly where the company's emissions come from, how they have moved over time, and why the operational progress that dominates the headlines accounts for a vanishingly small share of the whole. The report frames all of this not as charity but as risk management, and that framing matters for understanding why the numbers are disclosed at all. Citing the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2025, Lidl notes that extreme weather events rank among the most significant global risks of the century, and it draws an explicit line from a warming, acidifying ocean and more frequent flooding to the stability of the food chains its business depends on. The company points out that climate change is a social as well as an environmental threat — referencing the World Health Organization's estimate that preventable environmental risk factors are associated with some 1.4 million deaths a year in the EU alone — and that farming and fishing communities in the Global South, often the source of the goods on Lidl's shelves, are among the most exposed to lost income and food insecurity. For a retailer whose entire model rests on reliable, affordable supply, a destabilised agricultural base is not an abstract concern but a direct commercial one, and it is that self-interest, as much as principle, that runs through the report's climate chapter. The operational story is real — and small It is worth being fair to what Lidl has done, because the operational achievements are genuine and hard-won. Direct emissions from the company's own activities (Scope 1) and the indirect emissions from the energy it buys (Scope 2) came to roughly 915,000 tonnes of CO₂e in 2025 — about 900,911 tonnes of Scope 1 and just 14,476 tonnes of market-based Scope 2. That Scope 2 figure is the clearest evidence of what a determined procurement strategy can do. As recently as 2019 the same market-based measure stood at 878,042 tonnes; by 2025 it had collapsed to a fraction of that, because since 2022 Lidl has procured almost exclusively renewable electricity and generated a growing slice of its own. The report puts the renewable share of total energy consumption at almost 100 percent for 2025, split between 93.7 percent purchased renewable energy and 6.2 percent self-generated, largely from photovoltaics. Lidl has installed PV systems on 4,090 of its properties, with a total installed capacity of 586,105 kilowatts-peak, and has been building out solar internationally since 2016. Total energy consumption actually fell year on year, from around 10,142 gigawatt-hours in the 2024 fiscal year to about 9,998 gigawatt-hours in 2025, while energy intensity dropped from roughly 717 to 691 kilowatt-hours per square metre of sales area. The efficiency measures behind those figures are the sort of unglamorous engineering that rarely makes news but genuinely moves emissions. Heat pumps are now fitted in more than 7,700 buildings — 59 percent of the estate, including 7,650 stores, 86 logistics centres and 25 national headquarters. Some 4,591 buildings, or 35 percent of the portfolio, carry recognised green-building certification such as EDGE, BREEAM, LEED or DGNB, with 128 added in the reporting year alone. Natural refrigerants like ammonia, CO₂ and propane now account for 64.4 percent of refrigerant refill volume, and are used in 71 percent of logistics centres, helping cut volatile refrigerant gases by 21 percent since 2019. On the road, Lidl ran 100 battery-electric trucks across 18 countries during the reporting year, with Lidl Netherlands operating more than 80 and Lidl Sweden reporting fossil-free store deliveries since February 2025. None of this is trivial, and taken on its own it would tell a flattering story. But here is the uncomfortable proportion the report makes unavoidable: those combined Scope 1 and 2 emissions of around 915,000 tonnes represent roughly six-tenths of one percent of Lidl's total footprint. Strip out everything the company most likes to talk about — the solar panels, the heat pumps, the electric trucks — and you have addressed less than one percent of the problem. Where the other 99 percent lives The rest sits in Scope 3, the emissions embedded in Lidl's value chain rather than its own operations. In 2025 that came to 153,056,127 tonnes of CO₂e, or about 99.4 percent of the company's entire carbon footprint. And unlike the operational line, Scope 3 has been moving in the wrong direction. The report sets a Scope 3 base year of 2022 — earlier figures are only partially comparable because of a methodological overhaul — and against that baseline of 127.8 million tonnes, the 2025 total represents an increase of nearly 20 percent in three years. The report is candid about where the weight lies. By far the largest single category is purchased goods and services, at 116,348,832 tonnes in 2025 — roughly 76 percent of all Scope 3 emissions and about three-quarters of Lidl's entire footprint. This is the carbon of the assortment itself: the meat, dairy, produce, packaged food and non-food articles that fill the shelves, together with everything it took to grow, raise, process and package them. Lidl notes that within its product range, animal products such as meat and dairy are among the most emission-intensive food categories, with agricultural processes and animal husbandry the main drivers, while non-food and electronic goods carry their own heavy burdens from manufacturing and, in the case of electronics, the energy consumed during use. That use-phase category is where the 2025 figures contain their most striking single movement. Emissions from the use phase of sold products (Scope 3 category 3.11) more than doubled, jumping from 10,446,777 tonnes in 2024 to 22,230,330 tonnes in 2025. The report attributes this largely to an increase in activity data and to methodological refinement — Lidl divides its products into 30 groups to estimate lifespan and average energy consumption — and specifically flags that improvements in the electricity mix have not yet been reflected in the calculation because of delayed data availability. In other words, part of the jump is Lidl seeing its own emissions more accurately rather than emitting dramatically more. But that nuance cuts both ways: it is a reminder that Scope 3 figures are estimates built on assumptions and databases, and that as the measurement improves, the number can move sharply in either direction. This is also where the choice of accounting method quietly shapes the story. Lidl reports Scope 2 on both a market-based and a location-based basis, and the gap between them is instructive. On the market-based approach — which credits the company for the renewable electricity contracts it actually buys — its 2025 electricity emissions all but vanish. On the location-based approach, which applies the average emission factor of each grid Lidl operates on regardless of contracts, the same electricity consumption carried 1,506,921 tonnes of CO₂e in 2025. The difference is not a rounding error; it is larger than Lidl's entire Scope 1 footprint, and it reflects the fact that the grids the company draws from are still far from clean even where its own contracts are green. Lidl uses the market-based figure for its headline totals, as the GHG Protocol permits, but the location-based number is a useful reminder that "almost 100 percent renewable" describes a procurement achievement more than a physically decarbonised power supply. The remaining Scope 3 categories fill in the picture. Upstream transportation accounted for 6,849,831 tonnes, disposal and recovery of sold products for 4,656,855 tonnes, and capital goods for 1,356,303 tonnes, with smaller contributions from fuel- and energy-related activities, employee commuting, waste, business travel and downstream transport. Notably, some of Lidl's operational decisions deliberately shift emissions between scopes rather than eliminate them: when the company founded its own shipping line, TAILWIND Shipping Lines, in 2022, it moved certain transport emissions out of Scope 3 and into its own Scope 1, precisely so it could exert direct control and drive efficiency measures such as weather routing, more efficient propellers and low-friction hull coatings. It is a revealing detail — evidence that the boundary between "our emissions" and "someone else's" is partly an accounting choice, and that the honest way to read a retailer's footprint is to look at the total. Decarbonisation by leverage If nearly all of Lidl's emissions are created by other companies — the thousands of suppliers who grow and manufacture what it sells — then the company cannot reach its climate targets by acting alone. The Sustainability Report 2025 is essentially an admission of this, and its most consequential commitments are therefore about influence rather than direct action. The headline supplier target is precise: by the end of the 2026 fiscal year, Lidl wants the suppliers responsible for 75 percent of its product-related Scope 3 emissions to be required to set their own climate targets in line with SBTi criteria. This is decarbonisation by leverage — a single buyer using its purchasing power to push science-based targets outward across its supply base, on the logic that thousands of individual supplier decisions will ultimately matter far more than anything Lidl does to its own roofs and refrigerators. To make that plausible, the report describes an "empowerment concept" built around three mechanisms. There is a digital supplier platform offering webinars, training materials and FAQs on calculating emissions and setting targets, and used to track suppliers' annual progress. There are live training sessions run in partnership with the WWF Climate Business Network, offered twice a year since October 2024, covering science-based target-setting and greenhouse-gas accounting. And there is the Supplier Leadership on Climate Transition (Supplier LOCT) programme, a "digital climate school" that ran six-month courses for more than 100 suppliers in a pilot between October 2024 and January 2025 and continued at the same capacity through the 2025 fiscal year. Underpinning all of it are the Schwarz Group companies' own science-based targets, which were first approved by the SBTi in September 2021 and re-approved with updated ambition in spring 2025, aligned to the 1.5°C pathway. There is also a demand-side lever that speaks directly to the composition of the footprint. Because plant-based products are, on average, less emission-intensive to produce than animal-based ones, Lidl has set a target to raise the share of plant-sourced proteins in its range to 20 percent by 2030 — an attempt to bend the purchased-goods category downward by changing what shoppers put in their baskets, not just how it is transported. Alongside this sit smaller, place-based experiments: a "Carbon Farmers" pilot in Belgium working with ten farmers over five years on soil carbon sequestration, and a Bavarian regional-brand programme in Germany aiming to cut emissions per kilogram of milk by at least 25 percent by the end of 2026 against a 2021 baseline, with farmer bonuses tied to hitting the measures. It is also worth understanding what is driving this level of disclosure in the first place, because it shapes how the figures should be read. The report notes repeatedly that key performance indicators for the reporting year had to be collected before the year was out in order to meet the reporting obligations arising under the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and that "appropriate projection methods" were therefore used to fill the remaining period. In other words, Lidl is not disclosing a rising 154-million-tonne footprint purely out of goodwill; it is building the data machinery that European regulation increasingly demands, and some of the 2025 figures are part-projected rather than fully measured. This is not a reason to dismiss the numbers — projection is standard practice and the report is unusually explicit about it — but it does mean the year-on-year movements should be read as the output of a maturing measurement system, not a precision instrument. The sharp rise in the use-phase category is the clearest example: a company that measures its supply chain more thoroughly will, at least initially, tend to report more emissions, not fewer, and that is a pattern likely to recur across the sector as CSRD-driven disclosure beds in. These are serious, structured interventions. But it is worth being clear-eyed about the gap between the ambition and the arithmetic. The supplier target is about coverage — getting suppliers to set targets — not yet about delivered reductions, and the timeline for those reductions to show up in Lidl's own reported Scope 3 total stretches years beyond the 2026 fiscal-year milestone. Meanwhile the absolute number keeps climbing. The report's own five-year table shows total emissions rising every year from 108.3 million tonnes in 2019 to nearly 154 million in 2025. Some of that reflects a growing business and better measurement rather than worsening performance, and Lidl is transparent about those caveats. But transparency about why a number is rising is not the same as the number falling, and on the metric that ultimately matters — total tonnes of CO₂e released into the atmosphere — the trend line in this report still points up. Why It Matters For a food retailer, the meaningful climate fight was never in the car park or on the store roof; it's in the supply chain. Lidl's own numbers show operational wins matter, but they're a rounding error next to the 99 percent that comes from what's on the shelves. That is the real test the Sustainability Report 2025 sets — not whether a discounter can put solar panels on its warehouses, which it plainly can, but whether it can reach back into thousands of farms and factories it does not own and change how they produce. The honest reading of this report is that Lidl has proved the first and only started the second. The supplier-engagement machinery is real, but the payoff lives in future reporting years, and until the 116-million-tonne purchased-goods line starts to bend, the headline 45.6 percent operational cut is a story about the easy 1 percent. What makes Lidl worth watching is that, as a privately held group under no shareholder obligation to publish any of this, it has chosen to show the hard 99 percent going the wrong way — and that kind of candour is exactly what the rest of the sector should be measured against. The bottom line Lidl's Sustainability Report 2025 is, in the end, a more useful document precisely because it refuses to let the operational good news stand alone. It shows a company that has genuinely decarbonised the part of its footprint it controls directly — nearly 100 percent renewable energy, a 45.6 percent operational cut, a Scope 2 line reduced to almost nothing — while being unflinching about the fact that this part was always the smallest. The 154-million-tonne total, and the 116-million-tonne purchased-goods line inside it, are the real measure of the task ahead. Whether Lidl's supplier-leverage strategy can turn that trend around is the question the next few reports will answer. For now, the discounter has done the honest thing that many of its larger, listed rivals still avoid: it has published the number that makes it look worse, and dared its industry to do the same. Figures in this article are drawn from Lidl's Sustainability Report 2025 (Lidl Stiftung & Co. KG), "Protecting climate" chapter.

Happy Sunday. This week we're handing the good-news microphone to a plant that spends its whole life with wet feet. Mangroves are those tangled, stilt-rooted trees that grow where the land loses its argument with the sea — along tropical shores, river mouths and muddy deltas. For decades they were written off as one of the planet's most threatened ecosystems, cleared for shrimp farms, timber and seaside development. So it's genuinely lovely to be able to tell you this: they're coming back. The turning point A new study published in the journal Science in June 2026, led by Tulane University with Dr Thomas Worthington of the University of Cambridge, looked at four full decades of satellite images of the world's coastlines. The verdict? Mangrove forests are no longer in net decline. Globally, they're growing again. The numbers tell a quietly hopeful story. Between the 1980s and 2010, the world lost nearly 2,900 square kilometres of mangroves. But over the last sixteen years, gains have outpaced losses — so much so that by 2023 the total four-decade loss had shrunk to just about 1%, far less than anyone had feared. “After decades of loss, we're finally seeing a global turning point for mangroves,” said lead author Dr Zhen Zhang. “This highlights their strong resilience and their potential as a powerful nature-based solution for climate mitigation and coastal protection.” Why a muddy forest is such a big deal Mangroves punch well above their weight. A healthy belt of them does a remarkable amount of quiet work: They guard the coast. Their dense roots break the force of storm surges and waves, sheltering the communities behind them. They're carbon superheroes. Mangroves lock away enormous amounts of “blue carbon” in their waterlogged soils — often more, acre for acre, than dry-land forests. They're a nursery for the sea. Fish, crabs and prawns shelter and breed among the roots, feeding coastal fisheries and the families who depend on them. And the recovery isn't only about area. Researchers found that many existing forests are growing denser and healthier, with closed-canopy mangroves — the kind that store the most carbon — expanding across the globe. How it's happening Part of the comeback is deliberate: restoration projects and stronger conservation rules are paying off. But nature is doing plenty of the work on her own. Mangroves are quietly recolonising abandoned aquaculture ponds and marching out onto freshly formed mudflats, especially in river deltas where sediment builds the perfect nursery bed. Give them half a chance, and they take it. A gentle note of realism None of this is a signal to relax. New forests are young and can't yet do everything a mature one does, and in some places clearing still goes on. A sharp freeze wiped out swathes of Texan mangroves in 2021, a reminder of how fast progress can reverse. As Dr Zhang put it, the most immediate and effective way to protect mangroves is to stop deforestation. What it means for your Sunday We don't have mangroves here in the Mediterranean, but we have our own underwater forests — the Posidonia seagrass meadows that hug Malta's coast and do the very same job of storing carbon and sheltering sea life. The lesson travels: coastlines can heal when we let them. So take the win. This is what happens when protection, restraint and nature's own stubbornness pull in the same direction. You can be part of that story in small ways — supporting a coastal or ocean conservation charity, keeping our own shorelines litter-free on beach days, and choosing seafood that's caught with the sea's health in mind. Progress is rarely loud. Sometimes it looks like a quiet green tide creeping back up a muddy shore, root by root, doing the world an enormous favour. Have a wonderful Sunday.

There is a particular kind of blind spot that comes from measuring what is easy to measure. For the better part of a decade, the debate about artificial intelligence and the environment has been conducted almost entirely in the currency of carbon. How many tonnes of carbon dioxide did it take to train a large language model? How many flights' worth of emissions does a month of chatbot queries represent? These are useful questions. But a new study from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) — the body known within the UN system as "the UN's think tank on water" — argues that they are also dangerously incomplete. Published on 3 June 2026 under the title Environmental Cost of AI's Energy Use: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints, the report makes a case that should unsettle anyone who has taken comfort in a data centre's renewable-energy pledge: judging the sustainability of AI by its carbon footprint alone can hide the damage it does to water and to land, and in some cases can actively encourage decisions that make that damage worse. The central insight of the UNU-INWEH team, led by institute director Professor Kaveh Madani and lead-authored by Dr Miriam Aczel, is deceptively simple. Every kilowatt-hour of electricity that trains or runs an AI system carries not one environmental footprint but three. There is the carbon released when that power is generated. There is the water consumed — both to cool the servers and, crucially, to generate the electricity in the first place. And there is the land occupied by the energy infrastructure and the supply chains that feed it. The trouble is that these three footprints do not move together. They can, and frequently do, move in opposite directions. As the report puts it, "low-carbon" is not automatically "low-water" or "low-land." Reduce one and you may quietly magnify another. Nowhere is that trade-off starker than in the report's headline example of switching a power source. Moving electricity generation from coal to bioenergy, the study notes, can on average cut the carbon footprint of that electricity by around 70 per cent. It is exactly the kind of move that looks like unambiguous progress on a carbon ledger. Yet the same switch increases the water footprint of the electricity more than thirty-fold and its land footprint roughly a hundred-fold. A decision that scores as a triumph in a carbon-only accounting system turns out to be, in the fuller picture, a transfer of environmental pressure from the atmosphere onto rivers, aquifers and soil. "What surprised us most is how often the choices that look greenest from a carbon perspective end up worse for water or for land," Aczel said on the report's release. "If we keep judging AI sustainability by carbon alone, we might think that renewables make AI infrastructure clean but that is solving one problem while creating other problems, often in places that didn't ask for it." That last phrase — places that didn't ask for it — is the moral centre of the water and land story, and it is worth dwelling on the scale involved before turning to who bears it. The report's projections for 2030 are arresting. If current trajectories hold, the global data centres powering AI are on course to consume around 945 terawatt-hours of electricity by the end of the decade, nearly three per cent of projected world electricity use and roughly twice France's entire 2025 consumption. The carbon associated with that power gets the headlines, and it is large: an estimated 399 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, enough that offsetting it would demand some 6.7 billion trees grown over ten years, about twice the number of trees estimated to stand in the whole of the United Kingdom. But it is the water and land figures attached to the very same electricity that the UNU-INWEH team wants readers to sit with. The associated water footprint is projected at 9.3 trillion litres a year. To make that number legible, the researchers translate it into human terms: it is equal to the basic annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people living in Sub-Saharan Africa. The land footprint, meanwhile, is projected to exceed 14,500 square kilometres — an area roughly twice the size of the Jakarta metropolitan region, home to more than 32 million people. These are the kind of comparisons that can numb rather than inform, so the report also works at the opposite end of the scale, at the level of a single interaction with an AI system. Here the water footprint becomes almost intimate. Generating one typical AI image, the study estimates, carries an electricity-associated water footprint of roughly 29 millilitres — about two tablespoons. That sounds trivial, and for a single image it is. But the same calculation applied to a single high-complexity AI-generated video yields around 4.1 litres of water, which the report points out is almost the two-day drinking-water requirement of one person. The energy behind those numbers scales just as sharply: the electricity to generate a typical image would run a 10-watt LED bulb for about 17 minutes, while a high-complexity video would keep that same bulb lit for 42 hours. Put differently, a typical AI image demands around 1,450 times the energy of a basic text-classification task, and a single short AI video can consume as much electricity as 200,000 such classifications. The water rides along with the watts. "AI's Hidden Thirst" visualises the water and land story behind AI's energy use, drawn entirely from UNU-INWEH's published figures: data-centre electricity roughly doubling from 448 TWh (2025) to a projected 945 TWh (2030); the two footprints usually left off the ledger — 9.3 trillion litres of water and 14,500 km² of land by 2030; the "carbon trap," where switching coal to bioenergy cuts carbon ~70% but raises water 30-fold and land 100-fold; and the per-query water cost, from ~29 mL for an image to 4.1 litres for a complex video. What makes these per-query figures more than a curiosity is the sheer volume they are multiplied by, and the fact that the multiplication is largely invisible to the people doing it. The report is emphatic that the public conversation has fixated on the wrong stage of an AI system's life. Training the model — the one-off, headline-grabbing computation — is not where most of the environmental cost lives. Training GPT-3 was estimated to require 1.3 gigawatt-hours of electricity, and GPT-4 somewhere between 50 and 70 gigawatt-hours, but those are effectively sunk costs paid once. It is inference, the continuous running of a deployed model to answer everyday prompts, that dominates, accounting for an estimated 80 to 90 per cent of an AI system's total energy use. ChatGPT alone is estimated to handle around 2.5 billion prompts a day, which the report translates to roughly 383 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year for that single product. The water footprint of that one service is equivalent to the minimum annual domestic water needs of about half a million people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Every one of those 2.5 billion daily prompts spends a few tablespoons of water somewhere, and almost none of the users pouring them out will ever see the tap. The report's most sobering contribution to the sustainability debate may be its treatment of efficiency, because it dismantles the most comforting assumption in the whole field. The intuitive hope is that as AI models become more efficient — as the energy and water per query fall — the overall footprint will fall with them. The UNU-INWEH team invokes the rebound effect, sometimes called the Jevons Paradox, to explain why this hope so often fails. As models become more efficient they also become cheaper to run, and as they become cheaper they get used far more. The per-query savings are swallowed whole by the growth in the number of queries. "A lot of people think that the environmental footprint of AI reduces, as technology improves and processes become more efficient," Madani said. "But that is only a partial picture of the overall problem. More efficient and affordable AI and energy mean more consumption of AI, making the overall footprint far bigger than what we save through efficiency gains." For water in particular, this is a warning that technological optimism alone will not close the tap; without explicit limits on tokens, output resolution and default video length, the study argues, efficiency improvements will simply be absorbed by volume. If the abstract projections make the water and land story feel distant, the report's site-level cases bring it uncomfortably close, and they are where the phrase "places that didn't ask for it" acquires real faces and real geography. Consider Ireland, which has become the world's cautionary tale of AI infrastructure outrunning the systems meant to support it. By 2023, data centres accounted for 21 per cent of all metered electricity in the country — more than every urban household combined. The strain grew severe enough that the national grid operator paused new data-centre approvals around Dublin until 2028. Ireland is not, in the report's framing, an outlier so much as a preview: a documented example of what happens when compute growth simply outpaces energy and, by extension, the water systems tied to power generation. The water dimension becomes explicit in the study's other cases. In Querétaro, Mexico, expanding compute infrastructure is drawing on water supplies during prolonged droughts. And in Uruguay, plans for a water-intensive data centre coincided with a 2023 drought that depleted Montevideo's freshwater reserves to the point that tap water became unsafe to drink. These are not hypotheticals or 2030 projections. They are places where the water cost of the global AI boom has already landed on local communities, most of whom are not the ones running the models that the water is helping to cool. That asymmetry — between where AI's benefits accrue and where its water and land burdens fall — is the thread the report keeps returning to, and it is what elevates the study from an environmental audit into a question of justice. "If you map where data centres are getting built against where water stress is worst, you tend to see the same regions in some instances," said Dr Mir Matin, who manages UNU-INWEH's geospatial and infrastructure analytics programme and co-authored the report. "And the communities living near these sites are not necessarily the ones using the AI being run there. That asymmetry is the issue. Without fixing it, we'll just be repeating older patterns, where some places carry the costs and other places capture the benefits." The land side of the ledger sharpens the point still further. The report warns that AI infrastructure could generate up to 2.5 million tonnes of electronic waste each year by 2030 — the equivalent, in the study's own image, of discarding nearly 250 Eiffel Towers annually — much of it processed in low-income economies with limited safeguards. And the critical minerals that AI hardware depends on are extracted disproportionately in jurisdictions with weaker environmental oversight, often in the Global South. The land footprint of AI, in other words, is not only the acreage under the servers; it is the mines at one end of the supply chain and the waste dumps at the other. The geography of who benefits is astonishingly narrow. Only 32 countries in the world host AI-specialised data centres at all, and more than 90 per cent of that capacity is concentrated in just two of them, the United States and China. More than 150 countries currently have little or no access to sovereign AI compute. The report frames this not merely as an economic divide but as an environmental-justice one: excluded countries can still find themselves supplying the minerals and absorbing the e-waste, bearing pieces of the water and land footprint while the strategic and economic benefits flow elsewhere. "The concentrated development of AI infrastructure in the privileged areas of the world is creating a large digital divide," said Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, Rector of the United Nations University and a UN Under-Secretary-General. "AI can certainly advance prosperity and human well-being. Whether it does so equitably is now a governance question, not a technical one." "Local Costs, Distant Benefits" maps where AI's water and land burden actually falls, using the report's documented cases: Ireland, where data centres took 21% of national metered electricity in 2023 and new Dublin grid approvals are paused to 2028; Uruguay, where a 2023 drought left Montevideo's tap water unsafe as a water-intensive data centre was planned; and Querétaro, Mexico, where compute expansion draws on scarce water amid drought. It closes on the digital divide — only 32 countries host AI data centres, over 90% of capacity sits in two, 150+ have almost none — and up to 2.5 million tonnes of AI e-waste a year by 2030. For all its warnings, the report is careful not to become a case against artificial intelligence, and that restraint is worth taking seriously. "This report is not a case against artificial intelligence, a technological transformation that is improving the lives of billions of people around the world," Madani — who was named the 2026 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate — was at pains to say. "It is a call for using it responsibly and addressing its unintended impacts proactively to make it sustainable and equitable." The constructive core of the study is a plea for better measurement. Its foremost recommendation is that disclosure standards for AI's environmental impact should require carbon, water and land footprints to be reported jointly, in standardised units, across both training and inference and across jurisdictions, so that regulators, investors and the public can finally compare like with like. Because siting decisions are, in the report's phrase, environmental decisions — the same AI workload can have wildly different water and land profiles depending on where it is run and which grid powers it — the study urges that permitting, environmental-impact assessment and community consultation reflect that reality. And because efficiency alone will not contain growth, it calls for demand-side guardrails: caps on tokens, default low-resolution outputs, and resource budgets that stop the rebound effect from erasing every technical gain. The value of a study like this is not that it tells us to stop using AI; it plainly does not. Its value is that it changes the unit of account. For years the industry has been able to point to a falling carbon number and call itself greener, while the water drawn from a drought-stricken Uruguayan reservoir and the land opened up for a critical-minerals mine went unrecorded on the same balance sheet. What UNU-INWEH has done is insist that these belong on one page. A world serious about keeping AI within planetary limits, the report concludes, is achievable — capability and stewardship can grow together — but only if we agree first to measure all three of the things AI consumes. Carbon was always only ever one of them. The machine, it turns out, is also thirsty, and it is hungry for ground.

Every large company now publishes a sustainability report, and every one of them wants to be judged on its ambitions. Bayer, to its credit, invites exactly that. “You should hold us to that ambition,” writes chief executive Bill Anderson — who also holds the title of Chief Sustainability Officer — in the opening pages of the company’s Impact Report 2025. It is an unusually direct invitation, and this article takes it at face value. Because when you set the marketing language aside and follow the numbers through the report, the story of Bayer’s regenerative agriculture programme is not the smooth upward curve the framing implies. It is a promise that has, on its central metric, stalled. The promise itself is bold and genuinely important. Bayer estimates that there are around 550 million smallholder farmers worldwide, and describes them as “the backbone of food security in many rural regions of the world.” These are farmers working plots of less than ten hectares, largely in low- and middle-income countries. The report is candid about the bind they are in: yields are often low because of limited access to quality seed and agronomic knowledge, financing is scarce, market access is poor, and — increasingly — they are on the front line of a changing climate, exposed to more frequent harvest losses. Against that backdrop, Bayer has committed to “support a total of 100 million smallholder farmers in LMICs by 2030” through better access to its products, services and partnerships. It is the agricultural half of the company’s “Health for all, Hunger for none” mission, and it maps directly onto the Sustainable Development Goals for Zero Hunger and No Poverty. This deep dive links three Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) is the primary goal, as Bayer's 100-million smallholder-farmer target sits at the heart of its "Hunger for none" mission and its bid to strengthen food security for the world's ~550 million smallholders. SDG 1 (No Poverty) follows directly, since raising smallholder yields, incomes and market access is how that farmer support translates into lifting rural families out of poverty. SDG 13 (Climate Action) completes the set through Bayer's regenerative-agriculture levers — reduced tillage, cover crops and its 30%-by-2030 on-field emissions target — which aim to cut farming's greenhouse gas footprint while helping farmers withstand a changing climate. So how is it going? Here is where the report rewards a careful reader. The trajectory Bayer discloses runs as follows: 42 million farmers in the 2019 base year, rising to 45 million in 2020, 49 million in 2021, and 52 million in 2022. Then the momentum evaporates. The figure reached 53 million in 2023, slipped back to 52 million in 2024, and recovered to 53 million in 2025. In other words, across the three most recent reporting years the number has moved between 52 and 53 million and effectively gone nowhere. Bayer reports the 2025 result as an increase of “one million compared with the previous year” — technically true, but a one-million-farmer gain on a base of 52 million, in the fifth year of a ten-year sprint, is not the pace of a company on track to reach 100 million by 2030. The arithmetic is unforgiving. To hit its target, Bayer would need to add roughly 47 million more farmers in five years — nearly doubling its current reach — after adding just 11 million in the previous six. The report does not present this gap as a problem to be explained; it presents 53 million as steady progress. That is precisely the kind of framing an accountability-minded reader should push back on. To its credit, Bayer does not hide the reasons behind the plateau, even if it does not dwell on them. The 2025 uptick, the report explains, reflected “the strong performance of our non-commercial partnership projects in Africa,” while reach from “our commercial business in Asia/Pacific remained constrained by market- and weather-related factors.” That single sentence contains an important admission. The growth that Bayer can point to is coming disproportionately from philanthropically funded partnership programmes rather than from its core commercial business selling seeds and crop-protection products to farmers. The regional breakdown reinforces the point: of the 53 million farmers reached in 2025, around 35 million were in Asia/Pacific, roughly 16 million in Africa and the Middle East, and only about 2 million in Latin America. The commercial engine, in other words, is sputtering in exactly the region Bayer identifies as strategically central, and the target is being propped up by the partnership work. Bayer's 2030 agriculture scorecard, drawn from its Impact Report 2025. The flagship commitment — supporting 100 million smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries — sits at 53 million in 2025, just 53% of the way there and effectively flat since 2023, despite the target being tied to Board long-term pay. Alongside it run three regenerative-agriculture targets for 2030: a 30% cut in farming customers' on-field greenhouse gas emissions per unit of crop, a 30% reduction in the environmental footprint of Bayer's crop-protection portfolio per hectare, and a 25% gain in smallholder water productivity. Together they show a company with precise, measurable climate and resource goals — and one headline number that isn't moving fast enough to be met. Those partnerships are worth examining on their own terms, because they are where much of the genuine on-the-ground impact appears to sit — and because they raise the question of how much of this is Bayer and how much is other people’s money. The flagship initiative, Better Life Farming, is a coalition of Bayer, the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank), the irrigation firm Netafim, the fertiliser company Yara and some 35 local public and private partners and NGOs. It runs a network of “last-mile” centres that bring inputs, agronomic advice, financing and market access to remote rural areas, and Bayer reports expanding that network to more than 4,000 centres across India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Honduras, Tanzania and the Ivory Coast in 2025. Separately, the Bayer Foundation — with funding from the Gates Foundation and the German development agency GIZ — backed the Digital Farmer II programme run by Mercy Corps AgriFin, which the report says reached 5.4 million smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2025, 42% of them women. And through the Pula Foundation’s “10 million Resilient Farmer Initiative,” Bayer’s Crop Science division is helping fund an effort to insure smallholders against climate risk, reaching around 750,000 farmers in Kenya, Ethiopia and Nigeria in 2025 on the way to a 2030 goal of ten million. These are substantial programmes, and the report deserves credit for one thing that many corporate sustainability documents lack: independent verification. Bayer commissioned the social-impact measurement company 60 Decibels to survey participants in three smallholder projects in India, Kenya and Mexico/Honduras between 2022 and 2024. Across those longitudinal surveys, somewhere between roughly 60% and 95% of participants said the programmes had raised their yields and farm income and improved both their way of farming and their quality of life. For its FarmRise digital-advisory app — which reached around 130,000 active smallholder users in India in 2025 before expanding to the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kenya — independent 2025 research found that 73% of farmers said the app had improved their farming and 79% reported greater confidence in investing in their farms. Third-party measurement of this kind is the single most credible thing in this section of the report, and it should be recognised as such. It is also, tellingly, applied to the partnership programmes rather than to the headline 53-million figure, whose methodology Bayer describes only in broad terms and partly on its website. That headline figure carries unusual weight for another reason: it is not just a reputational target but a financial one. Bayer discloses that the 100-million smallholder goal, along with its other “100 million” commitments, is “accounted for in the long-term variable compensation” of its Board of Management and senior managers. When a target is wired into executive pay, its definition and measurement become questions of governance, not just marketing. A metric that has hovered at 52 to 53 million for three years while remaining tied to leadership incentives invites the obvious question of how demanding the underlying measurement really is — and whether “support” is being defined generously enough to keep the number from falling. The regenerative-agriculture story does not end with farmer headcount. Bayer frames its whole agricultural sustainability effort around a specific definition of regenerative agriculture: an “outcome-driven cropping system” built on two objectives — helping farmers maintain or increase yields while using fewer inputs, and “regeneration” that has a positive impact on nature through improved soil health, biodiversity, water conservation, lower field-level greenhouse gas emissions and greater carbon sequestration. It is a deliberately outcome-based framing, and it is more rigorous than the vague “regenerative” branding that has become common across the food industry. The practical levers Bayer names are familiar and evidence-backed: reduced or no tillage and the sowing of cover crops, both of which help capture carbon dioxide in the soil. But here too the accountability lens finds something worth flagging. Bayer’s on-field climate target is to enable its farming customers to cut their greenhouse gas emissions “per mass unit of crop produced by 30% by 2030,” measured across 17 crop-country combinations against individually defined base years drawn from the 2021 or 2022 harvests. Buried in the same passage is a disclosure that deserves more attention than it gets: “Base years were adjusted in 2024 due to additional data requirements based on an updated GHG calculator within the GHG reporting methodology and lack of data availability from prior years.” Adjusting a baseline is sometimes legitimate and sometimes necessary when methodologies improve. But moving the starting line partway through a target period is exactly the sort of change that can quietly make a goal easier to hit, and it is the kind of detail that external assurance and clear year-on-year disclosure exist to keep honest. The report notes that some crop-country pairings — Italy-Corn and Spain-Corn — were included specifically “because data were already available,” another reminder that what gets measured here is shaped as much by data convenience as by where emissions are highest. Bayer’s other agricultural targets follow the same pattern of specificity: a 30% reduction in the treated-area-weighted environmental impact per hectare of its crop-protection portfolio by 2030 against a 2014–2018 baseline, delivered partly through its “CropKey” molecule-design approach; and a 25% improvement in water productivity for its smallholder rice customers by 2030 against a 2019–2021 baseline, driven by its DirectAcres initiative to shift farmers from transplanted, flooded rice to mechanised direct-seeded rice. Rice is a shrewd place to focus, given its outsized methane footprint, and direct-seeded systems have a real evidence base behind them. These are the kinds of targeted, technically literate commitments that distinguish a serious operator from a greenwasher — provided the results are eventually disclosed against those baselines with the same clarity. One further detail cuts in Bayer’s favour and deserves acknowledgement in any fair accounting. The company states that it “does not plan to assert its intellectual property rights against smallholder farmers who save seeds on their farms for private and non-commercial use,” specifically to avoid pushing them into extreme poverty. For a company whose commercial model rests heavily on proprietary seed and trait technology, that is a meaningful concession, and it addresses one of the longest-running criticisms levelled at large agribusiness in the developing world. So what does an honest reading of the Impact Report 2025 conclude about Bayer’s regenerative agriculture work? Not that it is hollow. The partnerships are real, the third-party verification is more than most peers offer, the technical targets are precise rather than aspirational fog, and the seed-saving commitment has teeth. But the central promise — 100 million smallholder farmers by 2030 — is behind schedule in a way the report’s framing works hard to soften. Reach has been flat for three years, the growth that exists leans on donor-funded partnerships rather than commercial expansion, the metric that anchors executive pay has barely moved, and at least one climate baseline has been quietly adjusted mid-course. Bill Anderson asked to be held to Bayer’s ambition. Held to it, the picture is of a company doing genuine and often admirable work at the field level while its flagship number tells a story of stalled momentum that five years of accelerating effort will be needed to rescue. That is worth watching — and worth measuring, year by year, against exactly the baselines Bayer has set for itself. Why It Matters Corporate sustainability reports are written to be admired, not audited. That is why the numbers matter more than the narrative. A pharmaceutical and agricultural giant like Bayer can point to thousands of last-mile centres and millions of farmers reached, and every one of those claims may be true — but a flagship target that has sat at 53 million for three years, while tied to executive pay, is the difference between real impact and reputation management. Holding companies to account does not mean assuming bad faith. It means reading past the framing, checking the trajectory against the target, noticing when a baseline gets moved, and asking whether growth is coming from the core business or from other people’s philanthropy. Bayer invited that scrutiny in its own CEO’s words. The least we can do is take the invitation seriously — because the farmers, the climate and the mission all depend on the promises being kept, not just published.

Nigeria has switched on 23 renewable-energy mini-grids across 15 states under the Africa Mini-Grid Programme, a decentralised electrification drive that its backers say has already brought reliable power to about 20,000 households and more than 50,000 people. The programme was formally presented in Abuja on 2 July 2026 at a media launch, where the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, used the occasion to assure Nigerians that electricity supply would improve before the end of the year. The Africa Mini-Grid Programme (AMP) Nigeria Pilot Project is jointly implemented by the Rural Electrification Agency (REA), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). It is designed to demonstrate how decentralised renewable energy can expand electricity access, improve agricultural productivity, stimulate rural enterprise and strengthen climate-resilient economic development in communities that sit beyond the reach of the national grid. This story links to three Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) is the primary connection: the Africa Mini-Grid Programme extends reliable, solar-powered electricity to rural communities beyond the reach of Nigeria's national grid. SDG 1 (No Poverty) reflects the programme's deliberate pairing of energy access with economic upliftment — confronting energy poverty and agricultural poverty together so farms, small businesses and households can raise incomes. SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) captures the decentralised infrastructure being built and the productive-use equipment integrated into each mini-grid, turning rural electrification into a foundation for local enterprise and resilient economic activity. Tegbe said President Bola Tinubu’s administration remained committed to improving supply despite decades of underinvestment, telling stakeholders the government was working on several fronts at once. “For the avoidance of doubt, before the end of this year, Nigerians will see a significant improvement in electricity delivery,” he said. He cautioned, however, that the problem could not be fixed overnight: “What was badly managed for 50 years cannot be resolved in six months. We are fixing the infrastructure, fixing the main grid, building off-grid assets where necessary and strengthening the resilience of the entire electricity network.” The minister was careful to frame renewables as central rather than supplementary. “Renewable energy, especially solar technology, is not an alternative source of power. It is not a generator solution. It is an integral part of our national power architecture,” he said, adding that the government was matching technologies to the specific energy needs of different communities and using mini-grids to reach locations the grid cannot economically serve. For the REA’s Managing Director, Abba Aliyu, the programme’s significance lies in what electricity makes possible rather than in the hardware itself. He described the AMP as a model that combines electrification with economic development, deliberately designed to confront energy poverty and agricultural poverty at the same time by building productive-use equipment into the projects. “The true impact of the AMP is found in the rice processor whose productivity has doubled, the farmer who now processes and stores produce locally, the woman entrepreneur whose business remains open after sunset, and the young technician who has discovered a new source of livelihood,” he said. Reliable power, he argued, allows farming communities to process and store produce, add value and raise incomes — so that “farms become businesses, harvests become industries and communities become local economies.” The programme is built to scale. Tegbe welcomed plans for a second phase targeting a further 50 mini-grids and another 50,000 households, while the UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Africa, Ahunna Eziakonwa, noted that Nigeria was one of the first countries to complete the project cycle. She said additional financing from the World Bank and other development partners would support expansion, building on existing initiatives including hydropower. “Nigeria has the capacity, the will and the community buy-in for this to happen,” she said, expressing confidence that more resources would follow — and positioning the 23 pilots as a template for renewable-energy investment across the continent. Why it matters We may think of solar power as a mere alternative to fossil-fuel-generated electricity, and yet it has the power to bring far greater certainty to local communities whose supply is anything but guaranteed. In a world where demand for electricity keeps rising, and where our day-to-day lives depend on it more and more, a guaranteed clean supply is not a luxury but a core necessity.

Danish development finance institution Impact Fund Denmark has announced the final close of SDG Fund II, securing DKK 5 billion — around USD $760 million — in commitments for a blended finance fund dedicated to backing private-sector businesses that advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals across developing and emerging markets. The close, announced on 1 July 2026, marks one of the larger recent European mobilisations of private capital toward the SDGs. The fund is structured as a public-private partnership, with private investors contributing 60 percent of the capital and Impact Fund Denmark providing the remaining 40 percent. Its stated purpose is to invest in the private sector to help build sustainable companies that can contribute both to the green transition and to just and inclusive development — a dual economic and environmental mandate that sits at the heart of the impact investing model. Central to the fund's design is the mechanics of blended finance, which brings together public or philanthropic money and private capital within a common structure. The approach is intended to make otherwise hard-to-fund investments viable, particularly those carrying high perceived risk, such as early-stage climate mitigation technologies. Under SDG Fund II, private investors receive priority returns of up to 6 percent while sharing a portion of gains above a 12 percent threshold, and the fund overall targets annual returns of 12 to 15 percent. That risk-sharing architecture is what allows commercial investors to participate in markets they might otherwise avoid. According to Impact Fund Denmark, the fund is expected to contribute in particular to SDG 5 on gender equality, SDG 8 on decent work and economic growth, SDG 10 on reduced inequalities, and SDG 13 on climate action. The investor base reflects a notable widening of appetite among mainstream Danish institutions: participants include the pension funds P+, PenSam, PKA, PFA and PBU, alongside Jyske Bank. The fund has also secured a European Fund for Sustainable Development Plus (EFSD+) guarantee of more than €71 million, which reduces investment risk by covering potential losses on individual investments. That guarantee forms part of the EU's Global Gateway strategy to mobilise private capital for sustainable development, and it is designed to improve the risk-return profile for the institutional investors backing the fund. Impact Fund Denmark noted that the vehicle focuses on private companies that are not yet listed, reflecting the large share of economic growth in developing markets that occurs outside public equity markets. SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) is the primary link: SDG Fund II channels capital into unlisted private companies in emerging markets to build viable businesses and create jobs — such as the 840 new roles at Morocco's Imperium Holding, 95 percent of them held by women. SDG 13 (Climate Action) reflects the fund's green-transition mandate, visible in the new solar capacity being built by India's Radiance Renewables and the roughly 500,000 tonnes of annual CO₂ cuts expected from Sturdee Energy in Southern Africa. SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) captures the fund's defining blended-finance structure, in which an EU EFSD+ guarantee and public capital de-risk investments to mobilise private pension-fund money at scale under the EU's Global Gateway strategy. Deployment is already well underway. The fund invests across 13 developing and emerging markets, and more than DKK 1 billion — roughly $150 million — has already been committed to five companies. They include Radiance Renewables, a key player in India's green transition that will use the capital to build an additional 926 MW of solar capacity; Sturdee Energy, which develops renewable projects in Southern Africa and is expected to cut CO₂ emissions by around half a million tonnes a year; Imperium Holding, a Moroccan tea-packaging leader set to create more than 840 new jobs, 95 percent of them filled by women; Project Villeta in Paraguay, which produces green fertiliser using hydropower and displaces carbon-intensive imports from Russia and the Middle East; and Spiro, one of Africa's largest e-mobility companies, expanding electric motorcycles and battery-swap stations to cut costs for local drivers and lower emissions. The remaining approximately DKK 4 billion (about $600 million) is expected to be invested by 2028. “Both five pension funds and now also Jyske Bank investing in the fund shows that an increasing number of private investors see the potential in combining returns with sustainable development. For us, this demonstrates that public funding can be used to mobilise private capital at scale,” said Lars Bo Bertram, CEO of Impact Fund Denmark. For the broader European sustainable finance market, the close is a signal that blended structures — pairing public guarantees with institutional money — are becoming a credible route to channel private savings into the SDGs at scale, without asking investors to sacrifice competitive returns. Why it matters We have long stressed that environmental activism cannot rest on the voluntary sector alone — it has to be blended with the private sector. Funds like this one play a decisive role in steering entire industries in the right direction, showing that public money can be used to mobilise private capital rather than replace it. We hope to see more vehicles of this kind directing their efforts toward industries that, over and above being profitable, are also more environmentally friendly.

Nestlé has announced that regeneratively farmed British wheat will go into the 1.5 billion KitKat bars produced each year at its factory in York, scaling up a partnership with regenerative food and farming brand Wildfarmed from trial to full production. The move, confirmed on 17 June 2026, brings nature-friendly wheat into one of the UK's most recognisable confectionery supply chains as the brand marks more than 90 years as a British staple. Trials to use a proportion of Wildfarmed's wheat in the KitKat wafer began last year at the York site, and the grain will now be used across the full annual run made in the city. According to trade reporting on the announcement, just over half — around 51% — of the wheat in each wafer will come from Wildfarmed's regenerative network, with the remainder continuing to be drawn from Nestlé's existing suppliers. Crucially, the company says the change leaves the taste and the unmistakable snap of the bar untouched. The wheat comes from Wildfarmed's community of British farmers, who follow a set of standards rooted in the core principles of regenerative agriculture. Those practices include limiting soil disturbance, maintaining year-round soil cover, promoting plant diversity and keeping living roots in the ground. Together, Nestlé says, they help increase biodiversity on farms and fields, improve soil health, minimise water pollution and reduce carbon — restoring the land rather than depleting it. "We're thrilled to be working with Wildfarmed," said Dr Emma Keller, Head of Sustainability at Nestlé UK and Ireland. "This collaboration is all about making the KitKat everyone has known and loved for the last 90 years in an even more sustainable way, all while supporting British wheat farmers to adopt regenerative farming practices that are intended to support carbon reduction and increase biodiversity. With this partnership, it's not just about growing crops a bit differently; it's about working to grow and support a more sustainable future for farmers and the landscapes we depend on." She added that for a large food and drink company with a diverse, farmer-based supply chain, "collaboration is essential to help us achieve our sustainability goals." Wildfarmed, founded by Andy Cato, George Lamb and Edd Lees, was set up to make resilient, nature-rich farming mainstream. "For too long, nature has effectively been priced at zero in our food system. Farmers have been pushed to maximise yield, often at the expense of soil, biodiversity and resilience. We believe it's time to flip that model," said co-founder and CEO Edd Lees. "Partnering with Nestlé to use regenerative British wheat is a big step forward in our mission to make regenerative farming the default, not the exception, and prove that nature restoration can sit at the heart of iconic brands." The KitKat partnership is one strand of a broader Nestlé effort to reduce its environmental footprint while maintaining product quality, and it builds on long-standing relationships with British farmers — including 22 years of work with dairy collective First Milk, whose Ayrshire and Cumbrian farmers supply milk for chocolate and coffee products made in Yorkshire and Cumbria. The approach aligns with Nestlé's wider goal, set out in its 2022 Regenerative Agriculture Framework, of sourcing half of its key ingredients from farmers using regenerative methods by 2030. For a household-name product, embedding regenerative sourcing at this scale offers a visible test of whether nature restoration can be built into mainstream food brands without asking consumers to change a thing.

Private equity and venture capital investor EQT Group has established a new $4.4 billion sustainability-linked loan (SLL), with interest rates tied to the performance of portfolio companies in its Asia Pacific-focused buyout fund, BPEA IX, against material, company-specific sustainability targets. The firm announced the financing on 18 June 2026. EQT described the facility as the largest of its kind in Asia and one of the largest sustainability-linked loans globally to date. It supports BPEA IX, which at $15.6 billion in total commitments is the largest Asia Pacific-dedicated private equity fund raised so far. What distinguishes the structure is how directly it links cost of capital to outcomes. Rather than offering a one-off discount for signing up to broad commitments, the loan features interest rate incentives that reward actual progress against targets and genuine sustainability value creation. Each BPEA IX portfolio company is required to set two materiality-based metrics and targets tailored to its own industry and operations, alongside a dedicated governance metric designed to embed sustainability into strategic decision-making. On climate specifically, every portfolio company must also determine a tailored climate target that is scientifically grounded and commercially viable. The framework is built to guard against the greenwashing concerns that have dogged the sustainability-linked debt market. All metrics and targets must align with international frameworks and obtain "no-objection" clearance from multiple sustainability coordinators, and performance against them is verified annually by an independent third-party advisor. "As a pioneer in the use of Sustainability-Linked Loans in private equity, we are proud to serve as a standard-setter in the market," said Tang Zongzhong, Head of Sustainability at EQT Private Capital Asia. "We believe this Facility sets a new benchmark for the industry with an innovative approach that ensures sustainability targets are relevant and meaningful to our investments, and enables us to truly drive value creation and impact at scale." The deal is EQT's third SLL in Asia, following a prior $3.3 billion financing for BPEA Private Equity Fund VIII, which was itself the largest of its kind in the region at the time. "Breaking our own record to establish another large-scale SLL reflects our deep conviction that sustainability creates value and contributes meaningfully to business growth and long-term investment returns," said Hari Gopalakrishnan and Nicholas Macksey, Co-Heads of Private Capital Asia at EQT. Sustainability coordinators on the transaction included BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB and ING. "We are seeing strong demand for sustainability-linked loans from borrowers across Asia, as sophisticated corporates increasingly integrate sustainability into their business and financing strategies to meet international standards," said Antoine Rose, Head of Sustainable Investment Banking for Asia Pacific and Middle East at Crédit Agricole CIB. "EQT's launch of Asia's largest sustainability-linked loan establishes a benchmark for other large-scale corporates." For the wider market, the financing signals that sustainability-linked structures are maturing beyond corporate balance sheets and into the heart of private equity, where fund-level facilities can cascade accountability down to every company in a portfolio. By making cost of capital contingent on verified, materiality-based performance, EQT is testing a model in which environmental and governance progress is not a reporting afterthought but a direct financial lever — one with measurable consequences for returns.