Two Banks, One Revealing Pivot

In April 2026, Scotiabank and Royal Bank of Canada both withdrew their 2030 interim financed emissions targets. Scotiabank went further, retiring its 2050 net zero goal entirely.

Both cited shifting policy assumptions, reduced data availability, and an investment environment in which, as RBC’s own research put it, investors “may still support change but aren’t demanding it as much.”

In their place: transition finance. RBC reports low carbon lending up forty-three percent since 2023. Scotiabank reports one hundred and fifty-four billion dollars extended toward climate-related financing since 2019.

Whether that is a replacement or a reframing is the question the article leaves open.

Reading It Several Times

Charlie Bronks is Group Head of Responsible Business at Crown Agents Bank, a London-listed financial services group operating in emerging and frontier markets. She led the bank’s B Corp certification, built its responsible business governance framework from the ground up, and serves as a board trustee of the UN Global Compact Network UK.

She read the article more than once before settling on her view.

“The obvious headline is that RBC and Scotiabank have retired their interim financed emissions targets. But the more interesting question is what it says about the evolution of sustainability itself.”

Her reading is not celebratory. But it is not straightforwardly critical either.

Being Inside the Transition

Charlie pushed back when the conversation framed the withdrawals as terminology. These banks have real influence over where capital flows. Retired targets create cover for continued fossil fuel lending regardless of framing.

But she also resists the reflexive reading. Exiting a client or a market because of its emissions profile does not reduce those emissions.

“Coming out of it completely doesn’t necessarily stop the problem,” she said. “Being part of the change is what we’re going to see a lot more of.”

The transition finance argument in its most honest form. What it struggles to answer is how an institution distinguishes genuine transition engagement from lending to the status quo with better language attached.

Evidencing Delivery in Frontier Markets

At Crown Agents Bank, responsible business is not adjacent to the commercial proposition. It is the commercial proposition. The bank operates where the trade finance gap runs to approximately two and a half trillion dollars. Many clients cannot be named publicly because they operate in environments where visibility creates risk. Payment failures in these corridors can be life-threatening.

“We’ve had clients come in and say: we chose you because of your sustainability credentials,” Charlie said.

UK government procurement now allocates ten percent of contract value to social value criteria. In a competitive tender between institutions with similar financial offerings, that ten percent is often determinative.

Show Me What You’ve Done

Her magic wand answer is structural.

“I would like to see organisations recognised not for making big promises, but for consistently helping clients transition responsibly.”

The Scotiabank and RBC withdrawals were commitments made when the policy environment supported them, removed when it did not. That fragility is the real story. Whether the accountability mechanisms being built, ratings, reporting requirements, procurement criteria, arrive fast enough to make evidenced delivery the industry standard before the next round of target withdrawals is, as of now, open.

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.