Twenty-Eight Jurisdictions, One Missing Name

As of April 2026, twenty-eight jurisdictions have adopted the ISSB’s sustainability disclosure standards on a voluntary or mandatory basis. A further twelve are planning to. South Korea, Japan, and the United Kingdom have all issued domestic versions. The S&P Global report tracking this progress runs to several thousand words.

It does not mention GRI once.

Charles noticed immediately. You cannot ignore what’s going on on the GRI side,” he said.

The omission is not minor. GRI, the Global Reporting Initiative, is the oldest and most established sustainability standard setter in the world, founded in 1997 and still the most widely used voluntary framework globally. Charles sits on its Global Sustainability Standards Board.

The omission tells you something about where the financial establishment’s attention is pointed. It also reveals the tension the article otherwise avoids.

Two Standards, Two Philosophies

Charles is Professor of Sustainability Accounting and the Erivan K. Haub Chair in Business and Sustainability at the Schulich School of Business, York University. He has spent more than twenty years researching social and environmental accounting and corporate reporting standards. Before academia he worked at KPMG.

His position inside this debate is specific. He is an accounting scholar who believes the accounting system has been pointed at the wrong question.

The tension between ISSB and GRI is philosophical, not technical. ISSB standards are financially oriented. They ask: how does the environment affect the company? The intended audience is investors. GRI standards ask the opposite: how does the company affect the world? The intended audience is society.

“You can see that it’s a very different type of reporting,” Charles said, “when you ask a company to report on what are you doing to address the issue that you are causing to the planet, versus what are you doing about the issues that the planet is creating on your business.”

The S&P article documents a world in which the ISSB framework is gaining significant institutional traction. It does not address what that framing choice excludes.

A Framework Adopted in Forty Different Ways

The headline claim is that ISSB adoption is accelerating. The detail beneath it is more complicated. South Korea declined to issue a third standard permitting additional sustainability disclosures, citing corporate burden. Japan added requirements for disaggregated Scope 3 emissions not found in the ISSB framework. The UK made its standards voluntary, with mandatory application for listed companies proposed from January 2027, and indefinite waivers on Scope 3 and non-climate reporting.

The US is frozen. The SEC’s climate disclosure rules have not gone into effect. The SEC has told a court it does not intend to defend them.

The consistency and comparability that investors called for is emerging more slowly than the headline adoption numbers suggest.

We Are So Into the Tree We Cannot See the Forest

This is the point at which Charles moves from the technical to the structural.

“We are so into the tree, we don’t see the forest.”

The sustainability accounting community debates which standards are better, which frameworks capture more, which exemptions are acceptable.

“We fight over reporting standards, which is ridiculous. We are far away from actual performance and action.”

His position is not that standards are useless. Reporting standards make companies more accountable. But accountability for what you disclose is not the same as accountability for what you do. A company that reports its emissions accurately and completely has not thereby reduced them. The system in which it operates was designed to maximise profit. Reporting on how it does that, however transparently, does not change the design.

The standards debate, conducted at high volume over many years, generates its own white noise. It allows those comfortable with the current system to point to complexity as evidence that reporting remains a work in progress. Meanwhile, production continues.

The Magic Wand and What It Would Actually Require

Charles’s answer is direct.

“I would change the capitalist system. I would change how the incentives are designed.”

The legal route is a globally ratified revision of fiduciary duty, moving it away from shareholder return toward broader stakeholder accountability. Some jurisdictions are moving in that direction. Europe has gone furthest on social and environmental standards, though political currents are shifting. He finds unexpected hope in Asian countries with a people-first cultural orientation, and in African countries already living with the consequences of emissions they did not produce.

“That’s the key,” he said, on whether such change would need to be globally coordinated. It would.

The ISSB is spreading. The system it measures is not changing. Whether better standards accelerate structural change, or substitute for it, is the open question the episode leaves intact.

Two Economies With the Same Interest

During the May 2026 heatwave, a familiar set of claims circulated across European platforms. Heatwaves are natural. Scientists manipulate data. The media exaggerates. A June 2026 report from the European Digital Media Observatory documents the pattern: climate disinformation spikes during extreme weather, and the narratives are recycled, not improvised.

Two overlapping economies sustain the system. The carbon economy funds misleading content to protect commercial interests. The attention economy’s algorithms reward inflammatory material because engagement generates revenue. Neither is coordinating with the other. Their incentives converge.

“It’s spreading at the speed of light,” Sara said. Accurate climate communication travels in the same environment. It is not rewarded by the same algorithm.

From PR to a PhD in What Goes Wrong

Sara built her career across public relations, international development, and corporate sustainability consulting before arriving at the structural question of why so much communications work fails. A PhD in sustainability communication at Universidade do Minho, completed in 2024, produced the CARE model: a peer-reviewed audit framework covering Content, Aim, Reporting, and Engagement.

More than five years at EY followed, advising Portuguese companies on ESG strategy, materiality, and disclosure. The consulting work confirmed what the research had found.

“There are companies doing greenwashing on purpose,” she said, “and others that are caught in the trap and do it because of their lack of knowledge.”

She is now Managing Director of BeTrue, a sustainability communications agency, and founder of Mossy, an AI-powered greenwashing detection tool launched in June 2026 and built on the CARE model.

A Machine Built in the Fifties

The EDMO report traces the organised suppression of climate knowledge to at least the 1960s, when fossil fuel companies had internal evidence of the impact of their products and chose not to disclose it. Sara notes the connection was identified even earlier, around 1912.

Why does the suppression continue, given that those funding it have descendants who will inherit the consequences? “Power and money. Because they think they can buy their exit out of this crisis with money.”

The modern architecture adds a layer the fossil fuel industry did not design. Russia maintains a developed climate disinformation strategy targeting the EU. State actors and commercial actors share no coordination mechanism. They share a common interest in delay and confusion.

The CARE Model and the Gap It Measures

Sara’s doctoral research at Universidade do Minho produced the CARE model: a peer-reviewed framework for auditing sustainability communication across four dimensions, Content, Aim, Reporting, and Engagement.

At BeTrue, she applies it with sustainability and communications teams to close the gap between what organisations do and what stakeholders actually understand and trust. As CSRD raises the bar on disclosure, that gap is becoming harder and more costly to ignore. The penalty for miscommunication is no longer reputational alone. It is regulatory.

“There are companies doing greenwashing on purpose,” she said, “and others that are caught in the trap and do it because of their lack of knowledge.”

The work operates at the communicator end of the information supply chain. It helps organisations say things that are accurate, proportionate, and defensible. It does not change what the algorithm amplifies. A company that communicates accurately and one that communicates misleadingly compete in the same attention environment. The incentive structure governing which content travels further has not changed.

The Variable Upstream of All of It

The EDMO report describes the goal of disinformation as white noise: not persuasion, but exhaustion. Enough misleading content surrounding the signal makes the signal impossible to locate.

Sara’s counter moves upstream from communication entirely. “From the past two hundred years there was a decrease in sixty percent of our connection to nature.”

People disconnected from direct ecological experience are more susceptible to narratives that deny it. Her argument for nature-based education and local community engagement is not peripheral to the disinformation question. It is, in her reading, the underlying variable.

Her magic wand is a shift in consciousness: the ability to see how much daily purchasing is manufactured by advertising rather than need.

“I would give people the ability to see the reality of the world we are living in and the way they would recognise how many of the things that we buy every day are unnecessary, useless, and how companies deceive and mislead us.”

The incentive structure making disinformation commercially rational remains intact. That is the condition in which better sustainability communication is being attempted.

The IOC Took Eni’s Money. Greenpeace Called It Absurd.

Markets work when prices tell the truth. In the case of fossil fuels, they do not. Eni, the Italian oil and gas company, sponsored the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo. Greenpeace called it absurd. It was also, from a purely economic standpoint, entirely rational.

Eni’s products contribute to the warming that is shortening the Alpine ski season and threatening the long-term viability of winter sport. None of that cost appeared on Eni’s balance sheet. The IOC received a sponsor. Eni received credibility. The glacier continued to retreat.

The arrangement held because the price signal that would have made it unsustainable did not exist.

This is not primarily a story about corporate hypocrisy. It is a story about what happens when externalities go unpriced. The companies that build alternatives to the status quo compete on a tilted field. The companies that created the problem do not pay for it.

A Decade in China and the End of Landfill Space

Manuela Zoninsein spent nearly a decade in China between 2007 and 2015. She arrived as a Newsweek reporter, stayed to study Mandarin at universities in Taiwan and Beijing, and built an agricultural analytics firm tracking China’s agritech market for foreign investors. She watched, over those years, a country of one and a half billion people make the transition from reuse to single use at a speed and scale that settled a question she had not quite known she was asking.

“Anything that happens in China, one point five billion people jump,” she said. “You understand the impact.”

The landfill space ran out. The conclusion she drew was structural, not moral. Single use does not work at scale. She went on to study at Oxford and MIT, work at Palantir across four international markets, and co-found an agricultural marketplace in Brazil. The common thread, visible only in retrospect, was a repeated encounter with what happens when convenience is optimised and consequence is externalised.

Bike Sharing, Bottle Returns, and the Infrastructure Nobody Built

Two further observations shaped what became Kadeya. Watching New York build out its bike-sharing network, Manuela asked why the model worked. The answer was ownership economics. People do not want to maintain a bike, store it, or file a police report when it is stolen. They want mobility. Bike sharing sells the outcome rather than the asset.

The analogy to beverages was direct. At MIT business school she began asking why bottle return rates were assumed to be low. The consensus answer was behavioural: Americans were disinclined to return bottles. Her counter was infrastructural.

“If you create enough density, if you have enough points for pickup and drop off, actually you can get ninety-nine percent return rates with no penalty or deposit.”

The deeper error, she concluded, was methodological. Reuse had always been benchmarked against single use as currently designed, rather than asked what it could achieve if engineered to match single-use convenience. The former comparison always favours the incumbent. The latter is a different question entirely.

A Dishwasher, a Soda Fountain, and a Ninety-Nine Percent Return Rate

Kadeya’s answer is a bottling plant inside a vending machine footprint. Stainless steel bottles are dispensed, returned, inspected by machine learning, washed, sanitised, and refilled on-site. No plastic. No deposit. No supply chain shipping water around the planet.

“We did not invent a single new thing,” Manuela said. “We just recombined existing technologies in a novel fashion.”

The numbers are notable. Across five commercial deployments the return rate has held at ninety-nine percent. Carbon footprint runs seventy-five percent below single use. Employer costs are a third lower. Consumer price is at parity today. The company has turned down exclusivity offers from major beverage firms to keep the network open.

Kadeya targets workplaces where hydration is operationally critical and workers are mobile: construction sites, military bases, refineries, fulfilment centres. Manuela calls it the liquid railroad, beverage infrastructure built on existing tap networks rather than against them. The economic logic is designed to hold without a carbon price. That, for now, is a necessity rather than a choice.

The Additionality Problem and Why Carbon Credits Risk Becoming Indulgences

The Eni case and the Kadeya model represent opposite ends of the same market failure. Eni sponsored a climate-threatened event because its emissions were unpriced. Single use dominates because the cost of plastic waste is unpriced. In a world where those costs appeared in market prices, both propositions would look different.

Manuela’s answer to the magic wand question is a free and open carbon market. Get the price right and the economics of every commercial activity reset. Kadeya’s advantage widens. Eni’s position becomes harder to sustain.

The obstacles are well known. Additionality, establishing that a protected forest would not have been protected in any case, is difficult to prove credibly. Voluntary markets cover a fraction of total emissions. And there is an older problem that she identifies with precision: credits risk functioning like medieval indulgences. The polluter with the deepest pockets buys the right to continue.

“How do you create a cap? How do you really say that you’ve got the full market under consideration? And then how do you ensure that it is being consistently applied and measured? I don’t know that you can.”

The carbon market, in its current form, is not solving the pricing problem. It is deferring it.

When the Richest People in History Do Not Price In the Consequences

There is a political economy argument running beneath the packaging and carbon questions. Manuela makes it directly. The most powerful figures in business and government are, in her reading, pursuing strategies that shrink the markets on which their own wealth depends. A race to the bottom generates less aggregate demand, not more. A hollowed-out middle class buys less.

Her observation about the CEO of Salesforce carries the point efficiently. A prominent climate and DEI position, held publicly for years, has been quietly abandoned as political conditions shifted. The commitment was priced at the prevailing rate of reputational risk. When that rate fell, so did the commitment.

Kadeya’s commercial model is not constructed on reputational risk. It is constructed on cost, convenience, and return rates.

The bet is that a business case built on operational advantage rather than goodwill holds across political cycles.

Whether a functioning carbon market arrives to reprice the competition before those cycles exhaust the window for structural change is, for now, the open question.

The Label and What It Does Not Require

When OpenAI completed its restructuring as a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation on 28 October 2025, it did not create any new enforceable obligation to publish safety metrics. It did not require disclosure of how outputs are generated. It did not give civil society organisations formal standing in governance decisions. It did not mandate independent verification of whether the stated public benefit is being achieved.

A public benefit corporation is a legal structure that requires directors to consider the interests of stakeholders beyond shareholders. It does not require them to demonstrate that they have done so.

The distinction is the subject of a recent Financial Times article explored in this episode of The Responsible Edge. The article’s central question is whether PBCs can solve AI governance challenges. Asher Jay’s answer is clear.

“Just making it about intention and not having tangible ways to translate that into practice is a cop-out.”

Formation

Asher did not arrive at this argument through law or policy. She arrived through coastlines.

She grew up travelling, and the water told the same story wherever she went. Bloated dolphins. Turtles in nets. Plastic on the shoreline. She describes these encounters as affecting her “on a very cellular and emotional level.” They produced not a career path, but a preoccupation.

She studied biochemistry and environmental science, volunteered across conservation nonprofits, and then moved into fashion design, branding, and modelling. She describes that period honestly. “

That’s a way to sort of deflect true responsibility and be in alignment with my own calling,” she said. “It was me listening to what the outside world thought would be a safer way.”

The recalibration came through creative conservation work: campaigns against wildlife trafficking for WWF, the Rainforest Action Network, and National Geographic. In 2014, the National Geographic Society named Asher an Emerging Explorer for that work. She later founded Henoscene, a platform built to surface discrepancies in corporate impact commitments around net zero claims, carbon offsets, and water positive pledges. It raised one million dollars in seed funding before entering a strategic pivot. She now serves as Chief Network Architect at the Shareholder Democracy Network, a bipartisan nonprofit that redirects retail proxy votes through civil society organisations, and as an impact consultant to the Mountain Lion Foundation.

The question she has been asking across all of it is the same. Whether stated commitments can be made legible to anyone outside the organisation making them.

The Governance Gap

Asher’s critique of OpenAI is structural, not personal. She tracks the company’s trajectory: nonprofit, then capped-profit entity, then public benefit corporation, with purpose-oriented language accompanying each transition. None created an external verification mechanism that would allow an independent observer to determine whether the mission remained intact.

Her characterisation of the implicit logic is direct.

“Let’s get away with what we can,” she said, “make as much money as we possibly can while we’re getting away with it and then wait to be tapped on the wrist.”

On Anthropic, which also operates as a public benefit corporation, she is conditional. There is an opportunity, she says, to learn from OpenAI’s trajectory. But the conditional is load-bearing.

“It’s always an aftermath, afterthought,” she said. Intention stated in founding documents does not constitute a governance mechanism.

The structural absence she returns to most consistently is civil society. The boards of the major AI labs are composed primarily of people with a financial stake in the company’s commercial performance. Organisations representing ecological, social, and democratic interests, the constituency that the PBC structure is nominally meant to serve, have no formal standing in how these companies are governed.

What Verifiable Accountability Would Require

Asher is specific about remedies. She would mandate that AI labs publish safety metrics and accountability standards. She would require disclosure at the level of every output: where information was sourced, how an image was generated. She would fund AI literacy globally, including for populations with no current access to the technology.

“AI is also a privilege,” she said. “I don’t think it reaches a vast majority that we don’t even converse about because they may not even have access to food, let alone a computer.”

Her most structurally significant proposal is civil society representation at board level. Not advisory boards. Voting seats. If the benefit being served is public, the organisations that represent the public should have a direct role in governance decisions. Market-facing board members cannot, she argues, adequately represent interests that do not appear in price signals.

“We should have greater representation of the diversity of people, of democratic representation being afforded,” she said. “That can only be done through civil society.”

Her work at the Shareholder Democracy Network operates on a related logic. Most retail shareholders receive proxy vote notifications and disregard them, lacking time or expertise to evaluate board nominees or governance resolutions. The network routes those votes through civil society organisations with established positions on corporate conduct. A shareholder aligned with the Sierra Club elects to have their proxy cast in accordance with the Sierra Club’s recommendations. One decision. One click. Retail influence redirected through organisations already trusted to represent public interest.

Unresolved

Regulatory frameworks for AI governance are being constructed across multiple jurisdictions, at different speeds, with different assumptions about what accountability requires. The major AI labs are participating in those processes while continuing to scale.

OpenAI’s PBC structure formally requires the company to advance its stated mission and consider the broader interests of all stakeholders.

It does not require it to prove that it has.

Whether governance architecture takes shape before these systems become too embedded to constrain is genuinely open.

The PBC label describes an aspiration. Governance requires a mechanism.

The pressure is not a lack of data. It is a lack of agreement on what data means. Information is abundant, but credibility is scarce. Consumers transact daily without understanding who they are buying from. At the same time, trust in institutions is fragmenting, and attention is narrowing into smaller circles.

Into this environment steps a proposition that assumes more information will change behaviour. The question is whether visibility alone can shift choices when cost, habit and convenience dominate.

Raja Darbari did not begin in payments. After university, he worked with farmers in South America, trading quinoa and cacao. The experience exposed a disconnect between products on shelves and the people behind them.

“You then quickly realize that most of the products you see… have a really complex supply chain… impacting real people and… our planet.”

He later worked across consulting and banking, including roles at HSBC and Barclays. The pattern he observed was scale without proximity. Capital moved efficiently, but impact remained distant.

The formation of Ample reflects that tension. Payments, he argues, are one of the few systems people engage with daily at scale.

Raja describes them as “a shared touchpoint people interact with every day.”

The turning point is less a moment than a constraint. Direct-to-consumer sustainability tools struggle to reach users. “Direct to consumers is really hard,” he says.

The decision was to embed data where behaviour already exists. Not before purchase, but during and after. This is a reversal of typical influence models. It assumes feedback can reshape future decisions.

There is also an admission of limits. Even informed consumers do not always act.

“Cost, convenience are important considerations,” he notes.

Ample’s work is operational rather than advisory. It aggregates “unstructured sustainability data” from brands and third parties, verifies it across sources, and converts it into labels.

These labels appear within banking apps alongside transactions. A purchase may show tags such as “family owned” or “paying a living wage.” The aim is not to rate the consumer, but to describe the merchant.

The model relies on integration with banks and payment networks to achieve reach. It also extends upstream. Raja references “Green City Maps” as a way to surface the same data earlier in the journey.

The core claim is modest. Provide information. Let behaviour follow.

“It’s to give people the right information so they can make informed decisions.”

The tension sits in the gap between information and trust.

Raja frames trust as “the most valuable currency that we have.”

Yet the same environment that creates demand for transparency also undermines it. He points to “a flood of AI generated content” and “no shortage of greenwashing.”

Verification becomes central, but also contested. Multiple data sources do not guarantee consensus. Labels simplify complexity, but also compress nuance.

There is a second tension in behaviour. Most consumers do not have time to research. Ample’s premise is that reducing friction will increase alignment. But the system still competes with price and habit.

Raja does not resolve this. He shifts the frame from enforcement to encouragement.

“People every day are making positive impact with their spending,” he says.

The focus is incremental change across a large base. One better choice by many people.

The broader system constraint is temporal. Corporate incentives remain short term.

“The commercial world today is largely driven by short-term incentives,” he says.

This affects both sustainability investment and communication. Firms either overstate progress or withdraw from disclosure. Raja’s position is procedural. Be explicit about current state, define direction, and report progress, even when targets are missed.

Trust, in this framing, is cumulative. It depends on “small, consistent actions.”

The model assumes that if information becomes ambient, values will follow. That remains unproven at scale. Payments can reveal patterns, but they do not change constraints.

The system is moving toward greater visibility. Whether that produces alignment or further fragmentation is still open.

Short-term earnings cycles leave long-term risk unpriced

Public companies allocate capital against short-term financial signals. Annual accounts look backward. Market expectations reset every quarter.

Sustainability operates on a different timeline. Climate exposure, supply chain fragility, and resource constraints develop over decades. Returns on mitigation are delayed and uncertain.

This creates a structural conflict. Investment decisions prioritise near-term cash generation. Sustainability initiatives compete for capital without comparable payback profiles. In periods of volatility, they are deprioritised. Businesses “are just bunkered down short term in a survival mode.”

The issue is not awareness. It is how risk is priced and when value is recognised.

From contaminated land to board-level capital decisions

Amelia began her career in environmental remediation, working on contaminated land and complex infrastructure programmes, including the London 2012 Olympic Park.

These roles required translating environmental constraints into operational delivery. Regulatory approval, cost control, and timelines were immediate constraints.

Over two decades, Amelia moved into executive roles across infrastructure, transport, and listed companies. Her work focused on embedding sustainability into business models, governance, and commercial strategy.

Her position is explicit. Businesses exist to generate profit. “They’re not on a philanthropic journey.”

The constraint is not profit itself. It is whether that profit model remains viable under changing environmental and social conditions.

Where sustainability loses: inside financial planning cycles

The friction becomes visible in financial planning.

Transition plans require projecting performance over 10 to 15 years. Financial systems are built around 12-month reporting cycles. This creates resistance. Forecasts are uncertain. Once disclosed, they create accountability.

At the same time, sustainability proposals often fail to align with financial metrics used in capital allocation. This reinforces internal scepticism.

Amelia describes the perception directly. “They’re perceived as being kind of moral highwaymen.”

At this point, sustainability is not rejected on principle. It is rejected because it cannot be priced.

Rewiring sustainability into revenue, cost, and risk

Amelia’s approach focuses on embedding sustainability into core financial drivers.

This means linking ESG strategy directly to commercial outcomes. Execution is structured across three areas.

• Revenue generation. 
• Cost efficiency. 
• Risk management.

Prioritisation is selective. “Don’t worry about the other things. For now. Just fix that problem.”

This aligns sustainability with existing decision-making logic rather than competing against it.

An expanding mandate inside unchanged financial systems

The CSO role sits in a narrow space.

Sustainability is expected to be embedded across the organisation. At the same time, regulatory pressure, disclosure requirements, and systemic risks are increasing.

Full integration has not occurred. Most organisations remain fragmented. Central coordination is still required.

The deeper issue is structural.

• Capital allocation prioritises short-term return
• Sustainability requires long-term investment
• Disclosure frameworks impose long-term accountability

This creates exposure. Companies must commit to outcomes they cannot model with precision.

At the same time, risk categories are expanding. Climate volatility, supply chain disruption, and emerging technologies introduce new financial exposure.

The CSO is expected to manage this within systems that were not designed for it.

Bridging timelines without resolving the mismatch

The role is shifting from advocacy to financial translation.

Sustainability leaders must express long-term systemic risk in terms that fit short-term capital allocation. This requires trade-offs. Some initiatives are delayed. Others are reframed to deliver immediate value.

Amelia’s approach is incremental. Establish short-term wins. Build credibility. Extend planning horizons over time.

The underlying tension remains unresolved. Financial systems reward immediacy. Sustainability depends on duration.

The CSO operates between the two, without control over either.