The end of 2025 marks the close of another chapter in which much of the global discourse appears to have grown comfortable with ESG (Environmental Social Governance) messaging, even as its tangible impact remains uncertain. What was once framed as a pathway toward an eco-friendly and socially responsible future increasingly risks stagnating as an idealistic, almost utopian concept.

Corporations, meanwhile, have become adept at constructing environments where ESG strategies are articulated confidently but seldom questioned. Sustainability reports are published, climate targets are announced, and long-term commitments are projected — yet the link between these narratives and measurable environmental outcomes often remains unclear.

As debates around ESG continue to unfold in the background, it becomes crucial to ask a more fundamental question: does corporate ESG practice genuinely seek to serve society in a holistic sense, or does it primarily operate to protect vested interests? Examining ESG narratives and their real-world implications is therefore essential, particularly given the immediacy and evolving nature of today’s climate and sustainability challenges.

Current Relevance and Importance

The relevance of this discussion intensifies amid the ongoing COP30 controversy, where the participation of major contributors to environmental instability has drawn global attention. Many of the actors shaping climate discourse continue to represent high-emission industries, raising concerns about how environmental threats are increasingly reframed as economic opportunities.

Factual investigations by Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) offer a close-range view of how digital platforms were leveraged in the run-up to the summit. Their recent report documents how major oil companies made extensive use of Google’s advertising ecosystem, pursuing an aggressive strategy to influence online climate narratives. As of October 2025, oil company advertisements increased globally by 218%, while ads specifically targeting Brazil surged by 2,900%.

Company-level data further illustrates the scale of this intervention. Advertising activity by Saudi Aramco rose by 469.2% month-on-month in October, alongside significant increases by TotalEnergies (106.5%) and ExxonMobil (156.3%). Together, these patterns highlight the extent to which corporate actors can shape climate discourse during moments of heightened political attention (CAAD).

Parallel concerns were reflected in the Statement of Commitment on Climate Information Integrity in Digital Advertising, launched at COP30, which drew attention to climate-related advertising that disseminates misleading narratives, erodes public trust, and operates with limited transparency. The issue of climate disinformation is no longer abstract; it is observable, measurable, and increasingly consequential for public understanding and democratic accountability.

COP30, as a global stage for climate action, therefore also exposed the limits of information transparency in digital ecosystems. The prevalence of paid green narratives and strategic messaging raises questions about whose interests are amplified and whose are marginalised. In such settings, sustainability narratives function less as instruments of accountability and more as strategic proclamations designed to preserve influence and legitimacy, widening the distance between climate ambition and climate action.

Net Zero Commitments vs Net Zero Outcomes

Data from the Net Zero Tracker — a joint initiative of the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), Data-Driven EnviroLab, the NewClimate Institute, and the University of Oxford — illustrates this imbalance clearly. The analysis indicates that 62.7% of companies actively communicate net-zero intentions through strategy, pledges, or proposed targets, yet fail to provide verifiable evidence of achievement. In contrast, only a negligible fraction of firms can demonstrate externally validated net-zero outcomes, based on an assessment of the world’s 2,000 largest publicly listed companies by annual revenue (Net Zero Tracker, 2024–2025 dataset).

This disparity suggests that ESG communication, in many cases, operates as a narrative exercise rather than a performance-driven framework. The widening gap between declared intent and measurable delivery makes it imperative to examine what can be described as the “Talk–Walk Gap” — the divergence between sustainability messaging and substantive environmental action.

Combining Next-Generation AI and ESG Accountability

Artificial Intelligence, particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP), offers a practical mechanism for analysing this gap. Repetition across CSR reports, sustainability disclosures, and corporate press releases can be systematically examined to identify patterns of narrative reuse rather than strategic progression.

Through techniques that assess verbal mimicry, keyword recurrence, and semantic similarity, NLP can help distinguish genuine ESG evolution from recycled sustainability rhetoric. When ESG language remains largely unchanged across reporting cycles, despite shifting climate risks and regulatory expectations, it raises questions about whether commitments are being operationalised or merely reiterated.

Such analytical tools allow consumers, investors, and policymakers to make more informed decisions. Importantly, they reduce the likelihood that green financing instruments and green bonds are used merely as tools of financial leverage rather than vehicles for genuine environmental transition. In this sense, AI does not replace accountability; it strengthens transparency by exposing inconsistencies between communication and action.

Aftermath

The implications of weak ESG accountability extend beyond corporate strategy and into everyday life. Sustainability narratives increasingly shape consumption patterns, influencing how products and technologies are marketed and normalised within ordinary lifestyles. From energy-intensive appliances to digitally driven conveniences, ESG claims often accompany commodities whose environmental alignment remains unclear.

Whether such practices genuinely contribute to global sustainability objectives — including UN Sustainable Development Goals 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) and 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) — remains uncertain within the current corporate landscape. Society itself becomes an unwitting participant in this system, reinforcing narratives without adequate mechanisms for verification.

In an era increasingly shaped by generative AI, the need to detect misalignment between corporate objectives, policy commitments, and actual performance becomes more pressing. While these technologies can be used to amplify corporate messaging, they can also be deployed in the public interest — as tools to flag inconsistencies, assess credibility, and strengthen accountability across ESG ecosystems.

The integration of AI into ESG governance is not without risk, and it requires clear ethical boundaries, institutional oversight, and internationally aligned standards. Frameworks developed by internal governance bodies, alongside external institutions such as the United Nations, can help ensure that AI serves as a mechanism for transparency rather than a vehicle for strategic distortion.

This underscores the growing importance of collective scrutiny and informed engagement with ESG principles. Understanding how sustainability is communicated, validated, and implemented is not merely a corporate concern, but a societal one. Addressing the Talk–Walk Gap therefore requires sustained evaluation, improved verification, and transparent progress — not abrupt disruption, but deliberate and accountable change.

For decades, long spells of suffocating heat followed by explosive thunderstorms were largely confined to the tropics. But that pattern is now spreading into the planet’s midlatitudes, and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe they know why.

In a new study published in Science Advances, MIT scientists have identified atmospheric inversions — layers of warm air sitting over cooler air near the ground — as a critical factor controlling how hot, humid, and storm-prone a region can become. Their findings suggest that parts of the United States and East Asia could face unfamiliar and dangerous combinations of oppressive heat and extreme rainfall as the climate continues to warm.

Inversions are already notorious for trapping air pollution close to the ground. The MIT team now shows they also act like thermal lids, allowing heat and moisture to accumulate near the surface for days at a time. The longer an inversion persists, the more unbearable the humid heat becomes. And when that lid finally breaks, the stored energy can be released violently, fuelling intense thunderstorms and heavy downpours.

“Our analysis shows that the eastern and midwestern regions of U.S. and the eastern Asian regions may be new hotspots for humid heat in the future climate,” said Funing Li, a postdoctoral researcher in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, in a media statement.

The mechanism is especially important in midlatitude regions, where inversions are common. In the US, areas east of the Rocky Mountains frequently experience warm air aloft flowing over cooler surface air — a configuration that can linger and intensify under climate change.

“As the climate warms, theoretically the atmosphere will be able to hold more moisture,” said Talia Tamarin-Brodsky, an assistant professor at MIT and co-author of the study, in a media statement. “Which is why new regions in the midlatitudes could experience moist heat waves that will cause stress that they weren’t used to before.”

Why heat doesn’t always break

Under normal conditions, rising surface temperatures trigger convection: warm air rises, cool air sinks, clouds form, and storms develop that can eventually cool things down. But the researchers approached the problem differently, asking what actually limits how much heat and moisture can build up before convection begins.

By analysing the total energy of air near the surface — combining both dry heat and moisture — they found that inversions dramatically raise that limit. When warm air caps cooler air below, surface air must accumulate far more energy before it can rise through the barrier. The stronger and more stable the inversion, the more extreme the heat and humidity must become.

“This increasing inversion has two effects: more severe humid heat waves, and less frequent but more extreme convective storms,” Tamarin-Brodsky said.

A Midwest warning sign

Inversions can form overnight, when the ground cools rapidly, or when cool marine air slides under warmer air inland. But in the central United States, geography plays a key role.

“The Great Plains and the Midwest have had many inversions historically due to the Rocky Mountains,” Li said in a media statement. “The mountains act as an efficient elevated heat source, and westerly winds carry this relatively warm air downstream into the central and midwestern U.S., where it can help create a persistent temperature inversion that caps colder air near the surface.”

As global warming strengthens and stabilises these atmospheric layers, the researchers warn that regions like the Midwest may be pushed toward climate extremes once associated with far warmer parts of the world.

“In a future climate for the Midwest, they may experience both more severe thunderstorms and more extreme humid heat waves,” Tamarin-Brodsky said in a media statement. “Our theory gives an understanding of the limit for humid heat and severe convection for these communities that will be future heat wave and thunderstorm hotspots.”

The study offers climate scientists a new way to assess regional risk — and a stark reminder that climate change is not just intensifying known hazards, but exporting them to places unprepared for their consequences.

Extreme weather events intensified across the globe in 2025, disproportionately impacting vulnerable communities and pushing many regions close to the limits of adaptation, according to the latest annual report by World Weather Attribution (WWA). Despite the absence of a strong El Niño, global temperatures remained exceptionally high, making 2025 one of the hottest years on record and underscoring the growing influence of human-induced climate change.

The report, Unequal Evidence and Impacts, Limits to Adaptation: Extreme Weather in 2025, analysed 22 major extreme weather events in depth, selected from 157 climate disasters that met humanitarian impact thresholds worldwide. Floods and heatwaves were the most frequent, with 49 events each, followed by storms (38), wildfires (11), droughts (7) and cold spells (3).

Although 2025 occurred under weak La Niña conditions—typically associated with cooler global temperatures—the three-year global temperature average crossed the 1.5°C warming threshold for the first time. Scientists attribute this persistent heat to rising greenhouse gas emissions, which continue to override natural climate variability.

“Each year, the risks of climate change become less hypothetical and more brutal reality,” said Friederike Otto, Professor of Climate Science at Imperial College London and co-founder of World Weather Attribution, in a statement. “Our report shows that despite efforts to cut carbon emissions, they have fallen short in preventing global temperature rise and the worst impacts. Decision-makers must face the reality that their continued reliance on fossil fuels is costing lives, billions in economic losses, and causing irreversible damage to communities worldwide”

Heatwaves: the deadliest disaster of 2025

Heatwaves emerged as the deadliest extreme weather event of the year. In Europe alone, an estimated 24,400 people died during a single summer heatwave between June and August, across 854 cities representing nearly 30% of the continent’s population.

In South Sudan, human-induced climate change made a February heatwave 4°C hotter than it would have been in a pre-industrial climate, turning what was once a rare event into one expected every two years. Schools were closed nationwide after dozens of children collapsed from heat exhaustion, highlighting how extreme heat disrupts education and deepens gender and social inequalities.

Floods, storms and data gaps in the Global South

Floods were the most frequently triggered hazard studied by WWA in 2025, with devastating impacts reported in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Botswana and the Mississippi River Basin. However, nearly one-quarter of attribution studies remained inconclusive, largely due to poor weather data and limitations in climate models, particularly in the Global South.  

This uneven scientific evidence mirrors broader climate injustice. Many regions experiencing the most severe impacts lack dense weather station networks, making it difficult to quantify the role of climate change precisely—even when human suffering is evident.

Wildfires and storms pushed adaptation limits

The report also documented record-breaking wildfires, including the most economically destructive fires in modern US history in Los Angeles, which caused an estimated $30 billion in insured losses and were linked to around 400 deaths. Climate change increased the likelihood of extreme fire weather by 35%, driven by hotter, drier, and windier conditions.  

Tropical cyclones further illustrated the limits of adaptation. Hurricane Melissa, which struck the Caribbean, produced rainfall intensities at least 9% higher due to climate change. While early warnings and evacuations in Jamaica and Cuba saved lives, the storm still caused widespread damage, demonstrating that preparedness alone cannot fully offset intensifying extremes

A new era of dangerous extremes

“2025 showed us that we are now in a persistent new era of dangerous, extreme weather,” said Theodore Keeping, researcher at Imperial College London, in a statement. “The evidence of the severe, real impacts of climate change are more clear than ever, and it is essential that action is taken to stop fossil fuel emissions, and to help the world’s most vulnerable prepare for the devastating impacts of increasingly extreme weather.”

Echoing this concern, Sjoukje Philip, researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), noted in a statement that natural climate variability alone cannot explain the year’s extreme heat. “The continuous rise in greenhouse gas emissions has pushed our climate into a new, more extreme state, where even small increases in global temperatures now trigger disproportionately severe impacts”

Emissions cuts are non-negotiable

While the report emphasises the importance of adaptation—such as early warning systems, urban planning, and ecosystem restoration—it concludes that rapid and deep reductions in fossil fuel emissions remain essential to avoid the worst climate impacts.

As the WWA scientists warn, without decisive global action, extreme weather events like those seen in 2025 will no longer be exceptions, but the defining feature of a warming world.