The Sustainable Finance Guide blueprint: enhancing a sustainability framework for people, business and nature

This article is part of the Sustainable Finance Guide, a new series by Globalfields in collaboration with illuminem. Together, we provide readers with clear, educational insights into where sustainable finance stands today and how it is evolving to support nature, regeneration, and long-term resilience. 

This Guide starts from a simple premise: sustainable finance only works if it delivers measurable benefits for people and nature - and recent signals suggest it urgently needs recalibration

In the course of 2025, several events brought our attention back to positions that could be seen as discouraging with regards to sustainability, environmental integrity, and efforts to combat climate change.  

For instance, regarding climate action, the latest Conference of the Parties (COP) in Brazil failed to achieve the decisive commitments and actions needed for fossil-fuel phase out, adequate climate finance, and deforestation. Developments in green finance continue to herald nature as an ‘asset’, which leaves ambiguity as to whether nature is protected or exploited. At the same time, major banks, including in the UK, left the UN-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), undermining the global conversation on the role of financial institutions in the climate and environmental crisis debate.

Yet, all these changes continue to be identified in isolation from the bigger story.

Despite growing efforts to undermine COP outcomes, these forums remain essential for coordinating climate commitments, litigation, adaptation, and the loss and damage fund. 

In parallel, ESG reporting simplifications are also important to avoid overburdening businesses, but they should happen as long as they are socially and environmentally just. Green investment is vital to establishing green economies. But it must be anchored in clear legislative boundaries - protecting the environment and guaranteeing access to information, active participation in decision-making, and effective recourse mechanisms. 

In this new Sustainable Finance Guide, we make sense of this fragmented architecture and prepare the sustainability landscape for 2026 through engaging in macro and micro conversations that seek to unite rather than fragment. 

The inclusion of both academic and practitioner perspectives is deliberate, capturing the breadth of issues, from taxonomies to nature to just transition, while working towards alignment in the service of environmental integrity and climate stability.

We believe this is an existential issue. One that will be raised in the context of the proposed “Spirit of Dialogue,” the overarching theme of the forthcoming 56th World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. 

Our Sustainable Finance Guide breaks the silos across areas of work (for example, on sustainable versus green) and across institutions (academia versus private sector). The sustainability space is extensive and heterogeneous. While no guide has yet to capture all the elements of the sustainable finance landscape, we aim to critically re-engage with carefully selected areas. We explore a conversation that integrates a wide range of perspectives and re-establishes the true meaning of socially and environmentally sustainable action. 

The Guide features five main sections, with each section containing several articles and case studies that strive to capture the following messages: 

1. Sustainability is heterogeneous, complex and multi-dimensional. As such, it brings different perspectives in law, policy and analytics. This complexity has to be understood as a sign of strength and not as fragmentation. Section 1 explores the broader sustainability arena and how it complements green and climate finance, as well as covering the rapid expansion of the sustainability sector in the past 20 years.  

2. The multifaceted nature of sustainability enables taxonomies that consider the safeguards of people and nature whilst treating climate risk as a core issue to be mitigated. Section 2 dives into global green taxonomies and the value of aligning activities with international commitments to determine investment eligibility. It also depicts why understanding climate risk, now material for all stakeholders in the sustainable finance landscape , helps expose the limits of short-term financial horizons in addressing systemic climate challenges.

3. Green finance is the most well-known type of intervention and has therefore attracted both deserved and unwarranted criticism. Section 3 focuses on financing for mitigation, adaptation, and climate resilience, as well as cross-cutting green finance.

4. A sustainable transition, even when supported by risk-mitigation tools such as blending and concessional finance, is only sustainable if anchored in a regulatory framework that protects people and nature.  Section 4 looks at the critical elements that underpin the sustainable transition: from outlooks on the use and genuineness of concessional and blended finance to the needed integrity of ESG frameworks. 

5. Greening and finance have to work for people and nature, and not the other way round. Section 5 tackles this synergistic view from addressing the importance of a just transition, the nuanced layer of value-based and ethical finance to the broader sustainable finance landscape and how we, as a society, can work for not against nature.   

This guide has been developed by Globalfields, a private firm working in green finance and environmental, energy, and climate governance, in partnership with illuminem. It also features guest contributions from global experts, whose diverse perspectives help break silos and strengthen dialogue between practitioners and scholars.