News
As electric vehicles slowly replace petrol-guzzlers on Australian roads they will collectively have the power to inject cheap electricity into the grid when it is needed most. This all hinges on their owners thinking like rational economic actors – and taking steps to maximise their value.
Mandatory climate reporting is quickly becoming a reality for Australian entities, with the development of standards well under way and implementation rapidly approaching. At the Investor Group on Climate Change Summit, which took place in Sydney in August, speakers discussed what is coming down the line in Australia and how it tracks with global developments.
Australia’s energy transition has accelerated. But it is not a straight-line journey to net zero and signs are that each progressive step brings new challenges. With the low-hanging fruit now mostly picked, martialling investment capital for equally vital future progress will be no easy task.
The nature crisis may be less widely discussed than the climate crisis but – as well as being a tragedy on its own terms – it represents no less of a threat to human wellbeing. Sustainable finance has the chance to learn from decades of gradually evolving expertise in the climate space to deliver faster action on biodiversity, according to participants at an ANZ-KangaNews roundtable that took place in Sydney in September. But the window to act will not stay open forever.
After years of lagging uptake in other global economies, uptake of electric vehicles in Australia is finally starting to accelerate. Clean Energy Finance Corporation and KangaNews hosted institutional participants in the sector at a September roundtable in Sydney, to discuss the detail on infrastructure and financing behind the headline uptake numbers.
Each year, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and KangaNews survey Australian fixed-income asset managers to get an update on the lay of the land in local sustainable capital markets, then invite investors to add qualitative thoughts to the data at a roundtable discussion. The 2023 outcome paints a picture of a market that continues to mature but still has a number of hurdles to clear.
Social factors have tended to be the black sheep of the sustainable finance family: harder to measure than emissions and frequently less prioritised than the need to respond to the existential threat of climate change. Participants at a KangaNews-Westpac Institutional Bank roundtable, which took place in Sydney in September, discussed moves to improve the measurability of social impact, the sector’s challenges and why the link between the pillars of environmental, social and governance (ESG) might make the term redundant.
