Summary of 2026 UNITAR Green Economic Acceleration: A Japan-ASEAN Strategic Programme for Sustainable Green Finance Fellowship

UN just released a report that the Earth will breach a long-standing target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC before the end of the decade. This means our home will definitely be at least 1.8ºC warmer than pre-industrial levels this century.

I am sorry, but in short: we are fucked.

We have less than 3.5 years from when this summary is written to reverse (or, more likely, adapt to) this rapidly changing climate—or global boiling, in the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Bottom-up and sporadic solutions won’t help us as much. We need to look into this matter structurally and start with how we need to change the economic approach and paradigm.

In short, and no apology: we need to stop infinite-growth-focused late-stage capitalism and the pursuit of short-term profitability. We need to regulate this limitless and, frankly, cancerous growth that has proven to fail to distribute wealth equally while harming Mother Nature.

The green economy model to finance adaptability to climate change needs to be implemented quickly, but first we need to dismantle the old order that maintains the status quo.

Learning the fundamentals of the green economy and sustainable finance makes me realize how important it is to not be complicit in reactionary politics. Meritocracy, technocracy, and competency need to be the base requirements of leadership. This way, it keeps the corrupt and the undeserving away from the money flow needed to save the world while maintaining society.

If these requirements are in place (which is difficult work and conversation in itself), then we can start trying to implement the taxonomies and guardrails for the advancement of the green economy. Albeit, governments all around the world have been doing so in parallel with the ruling oligarchs; changing regimes and interests put progress in jeopardy of being rolled back, regressed, or even worse, diminished.

Hence, dismantling the old order from the top down is a must since diplomacy can only take ‘saving-the-world’ so far. I won’t bother you with the literature on how to do so; my only advice is to find your community and organize.

Now that I’ve bothered you with revolutionary notions, below is what I have learned so far while brushing up on Green Economy ideas from my first-phase fellowship with 2026 UNITAR Green Economic Acceleration: A Japan-ASEAN Strategic Programme for Sustainable Green Finance.

The Foundations of Sustainable Finance is, aside from Ontological, also Axiological

Traditional investment has a problem: it incites people to put money where performance and returns are deemed ‘popular’ and ‘stable’. These notions are taken for granted, masked behind a ‘risk-adjusted’ farce where ‘popular’ is a result of marketing and ‘stable’ means a short-term gain. This puts traditional investment in the eye of the growth hurricane, where companies are expected to always grow exponentially no matter what. Creates an economic ecosystem where evil is permitted, as long as it keeps the stock values up.

Our society used to believe in moral companies. Stock might go down with a personal scandal, let alone an ecocide. But these days, marketing beats us up black and blue. The astronomical environmental cost means nothing if it disrupts our convenience. The most moral got eaten, turned into a ‘politically correct’ alternative, which worsens in quality due to cost-cutting. From the top down, everything turns into ‘survival of the fittest’.

This draconian model is not sustainable. Hence, the necessity to imagine a finance model that helps humanity thrive is more important than ever. We need to tame the hurricane and direct it through a less harmful path.

The finance sector is important; it’s main superstructure is societal support, and it’s infrastructure consists of bureaucrats through and through. It is a necessary instrument of human advancement, which is unfortunately crowded by banality, ignorance, and greed. The finance sector needs to work with a heart. A heart that can listen to Mother Nature’s heartbeat between it’s spreadsheets.

Hence, everyone involved in the finance sector should learn about climate awareness. They need to move beyond the focus on short-term returns. The finance sector needs to work closely with climate and environmental scientists (and anthropologists) on what constitutes a green model. While pushing for a stronger regulatory framework with reinforcing guidelines. This systemic integration will create demand for more green ways out.

We have been doing this with green bonds, but it wasn’t enough. Most financial products are satisfied with funding climate mitigation. With the pressing need for climate action, we need to shift everything into adaptation instead. We already overshot our annual consumption by August this year. And it will keep getting shorter and shorter.

According to the OECD, we need 6.9 trillion USD annually until 2030 to meet climate and development objectives. Yet, the funding gap is still at 4.8 trillion USD in 2026 alone. We only have four more years, and we couldn’t even reach half the target year by year.

Investing in sustainability might not be as sexy, returns-wise. It requires a virtue of patience, a belief that the market is alive and breathing. That the market consists of human beings thriving with nature. That the market, in it’s most pejorative sense, needs to nurture it’s inhabitant to be sustainable. Although sustainability has it’s risks—especially physical disruption in supply chain and infrastructure, also reassessment of value due to transitional policies and technological advancement—those risks are worth taking to suppress negative externalities caused by the climate crisis.

What I am saying is: the climate crisis devalues assets. Saving the planet=saving the assets. Companies may take some blows, but the bruises are utilitarian. It is for the good of many, and for them in the long-term.

These grievances need to be acted upon fast. And I think addressing policymakers will always be right. It is time (a tad bit too late, even) to enforce guardrails. These are not even demands from environmental organizations and activists; it was a demand from oil and fossil fuel companies!

The role of regulators and policymakers is to perceive risk and opportunity while considering public expectations. Since taxonomy models are already rolled out, the remaining function of the government is to align infrastructure planning, reset the financial system, support and unleash innovations, rethink development priorities and expenditures, ensure fiscal sustainability, and empower municipal governments. In other words, the big government should clear the way.

On the other hand, financial institutions like banks need to deregulate themselves to support the transition into responsible and sustainable finance and investment. By aligning the system to the SDGs and the Paris Agreement, financial institutions can help set the monetary target and assess the impact as part of risk management. All while championing green policies, transparency, and accountability.

Markets also need to be educated when it comes to climate awareness. If we are not speaking morally and purely ‘rational’, stable and certain gains are always better. Yet usually, these ‘informed’ decisions were based on a hunch, a rumor, or even a scam. How many Forbes 30 Under 30 who are currently in jail were being enabled by these ‘informed’ investors? And how many more before these investment behaviours can be held strictly responsible? My complaint doesn’t even include those who profit from war, genocide, and investment in the weapons industry, which I strongly disdain. Hence, it is imminent and significant for the market to engage in more sustainable stock infrastructure, i.e., the Sustainable Stock Exchange.

Investors need to be informed about the approaches in green investment. In the finance ecosystem, smart and forward-thinking investors have to consider the ESG integration of the business while partaking in active ownership to drive the best impact for the market and the public. They can look into and examine further sustainable finance products like green bonds, sustainability-linked loans, and impact-focused business equity. With the ticking clock, investors can take action as such, at the very least.

A Brief Introduction to Sustainable Finance Taxonomy (and What To Do for Policymakers and Businesses)

Why do we need taxonomy? Taxonomy will help everyone, especially policymakers and financial institutions, to make informed decisions. Taxonomies can help define a detailed list of acceptable economic sectors and activities that correspond to a certain set of qualitative and quantitative criteria. It’s basically a rulebook with definitions, including disclosure guidelines and financial product standards.

The users of the sustainable finance taxonomy are everyone! Governments can use the taxonomy to set policies, standards, and track progress aligned with the SDG goals to prevent greenwashing. Companies can use the taxonomy as the basis of their business practices and product development. The taxonomy is also useful for investors for evaluating businesses and helping raise capital in a green economy.

There are a few types of taxonomies:

• Green taxonomies: Pretty self-explanatory. A classification system that defines which economic activities and assets are environmentally sustainable.
• Taxonomies of unsustainable activities: This is the opposite of the green taxonomy. Exist to help push divestment instead.
• Social taxonomies: It’s a taxonomy type that focuses on and emphasizes social impact. This might or might not be exactly aligned with the green taxonomies, since it might require an effort that is not exactly sustainable. The goal is to alleviate poverty and structural issues, i.e., education, access, and welfare.
• Traffic light taxonomies: A taxonomy type that has detailed classifications. Red marks the unsustainable activities, which are then pushed into decommissioning efforts so as to be SDG-aligned. Yellow marks the transitional activities. Green marks sustainable activities.

The core elements of the taxonomy are objectives, sectors, activities, and criteria for alignment. Objectives need to match SDGs, be concrete, and may cover multiple and interdependent activities, as long as they adhere to Do No Significant Harm (DNSH) principles. The green activities (and sector) choice can be as follows: climate change mitigation or adaptation, pollution prevention or control, transition to circular economy, and resource conservation.

But how does one approach determining taxonomy alignment? There are three common approaches: Technical Screening Criteria (TSC), whitelist approach, and principle-based approach. TSC is basically a quantitative/science-based approach and measurement to determine if an activity qualifies as environmentally sustainable. The whitelist, as the name suggests, is a list of ‘good’ activities as a guideline. Different than TSC, a principle-based approach uses qualitative and non-rigid measures to evaluate and categorize the environmental impact of an economic activity.

Policymakers and businesspeople can look into how the EU handle their taxonomy. The EU pushes direct investment to sustainable activities, while keeping the criteria very detailed and scientific through the TSC approach. This, in turn, gives them the ability to scale up according to the European Green Deal. In the implementation stage, they have several guardrails to abide by: the activities have to contribute substantially, adopt the DNSH principle, comply with minimum safeguards, and be in accordance with the TSC. With the rigid measures to be taxonomy-aligned activities, it gives way to improvisation in the transitional effort and enabling activity (which isn’t necessarily sustainable, but enables green efforts, e.g., creating solar panels to eventually use them at a mass scale).

Chinese taxonomy is also great to look into. They are using a whitelist approach, with objectives: 1) environmental improvement, 2) climate change response, and 3) more efficient resource use. They focused on 6 industry categories: energy-saving and environmental protection industry, clean production industry, clean energy industry, ecology and environment-related sector, sustainable upgrade of infrastructure, and green services. Those categories are broken down into sector classifications, sector specifications, and programmes.

Taxonomy development can be handled from bottom-up (academics and activists) and top-down (policymakers and stakeholders). The development needs to cover the overarching principles, which are: balance interoperability with local usability, not reinvent the wheel, think holistically, be scientific and ambitious, keep it simple, and do not let perfect be the enemy of good.

The process of developing taxonomy itself requires a few guiding pathways: first, establish an appropriate governance structure. Then, determine clear roles and responsibilities. Afterward, define a timeline, then discuss and determine the conceptual design of the taxonomy. Before publishing the taxonomy, the development team needs to conduct an extensive public consultation and validation. After the taxonomy is published, the team needs to oversee the review and update the taxonomy if deemed necessary.

The design of the taxonomy also has a few principles: determining sustainability objectives, priority sectors, economic activities, and SDG alignment. The high-priority sector that should be targeted is a high-impact sector that undermines sustainability efforts and that contributes largely to GDP. If the baselines are covered, policymakers and stakeholders can determine which actors they want to involve in developing the taxonomy, contextual and fitting to their economic condition. Usually, the team consists of a Steering Committee from the Ministry of Finance and central banks, and a Technical Expert Group from relevant parties and experts.

Scaling The Steep Wall of Climate Financing

According to the Climate Policy Initiative, we need 6-10 trillion USD per annum until 2050 if we don’t want…let’s just say, apocalypse. Yet, as I mentioned in the earlier paragraph of this summary, we are far off. There is growth, but it’s not significant enough compared to the harm that is being perpetuated by the ongoing climate crisis. Principally, mitigation is way better than adaptation. But as of 2026, we are way past mitigation and need to start adopting adaptation strategies.

Climate-related events displaced about 25 million people each year for the past decade. The Asia-Pacific region is the most affected. This is especially true for people working in agriculture, fishing, forestry, and tourism. The climate crisis (and impending super El Niño) threatens livelihoods, which also increases the chance of a population catching diseases.

This phenomenon, in many cultures, also widens the gender gap, with women and marginalized groups being affected the most. Because of the climate crisis and withstanding patriarchal/colonialist paradigm, a climate crisis can turn into a resource and information access issue, exposure to violence, loss of livelihoods, greater care burdens, and food insecurity. In short: climate crisis creates compounding climate vulnerabilities, which add to existing inequalities.

Let’s talk data. Over the past 20 years, the climate crisis has caused 2.8 trillion USD in economic damages. This fact apparently hasn’t motivated the finance sector enough to raise much-needed capital to prevent the apocalypse. The funding gap is still great and wide, with five to six times more needed annually. The current climate reality still maintains the status quo, with the removal of subsidized fossil fuel policy requiring strong social protection measures. Most money flows into mitigation efforts, while the fact remains that some communities (specifically in the Global South) are already dealing with adaptation efforts.

Adaptation might not get as good a reputation as mitigation because, for the finance sector, it’s difficult to track and severely lacks immediate returns. The benefit is difficult to quantify for sure. Yet, if we put more money into adaptation, we will all live for it!

Another wall to scale is the challenges of international climate financing. Of all 195 countries in the world, the developed ones can only raise 100 billion USD annually, dedicated to developing nations. As mentioned, the amount is not enough; it is only a fraction. The most affected countries only receive about 2% of those funds. The condition is exacerbated by the complex access requirements, limited capacities to absorb the budget, the debt stress dilemma, and the imbalance between mitigation and adaptation policies. Even with a taxonomy in place, it is frustrating to go through.

And there is another issue in governance. The government has limited spending capabilities and competing priorities at the same time. For developing nations who doesn’t have good social protection, economic growth means decoupling climate mandates at an institutional level. This spells a trolley problem: utilitarian welfare or ensuring the survival of humanity?

The infrastructure needed to scale climate finance is Public Financial Management, which is responsible for climate-responsive budgeting. Policymakers need to enable the conditions that can facilitate this responsibility. Such as: creating sound policies and legal frameworks, adopting the correct diagnostic tools to inform strategies, and integrating budgets to align with the SDGs.

Green Fiscal Policy and The Required Involvement of Private Sector

Private investment drove climate finance growth, with flows exceeding USD 1.2 trillion and a 19% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the years from 2019 to 2024. Yet, the growth still proves insufficient for supporting climate action. With the recent news, it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. Including capital providers, i.e., asset owners, asset managers, and hybrid providers.

The private sector can support climate action by meeting the climate finance gap between mitigation and adaptation, providing solutions, and becoming sustainable and resilient. Yet, they have been held back due to political uncertainty, inconsistent regulatory and policy frameworks, and the disconnection between climate realities and the objectives of the private sector.

I think we are way past making the climate crisis ‘sexy’ and ‘marketable’. Private sectors need to see more of the cost of inaction rather than the benefit of adaptation and the attractive risk-return profile. Fiscal policy, on the other hand, also needs to create the right conditions for private investment: by developing pipelines of bankable projects, providing sustainable finance taxonomies, incorporating climate disclosure standards, all while providing incentives and robust climate data.

By providing robust climate data, regulators can help the private sector create a sound climate information architecture. The private sector can refer to the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) and the International Sustainability Standards Board to build corporate disclosure standards. Which in turn, informs the taxonomy.

While developing bankable green projects, the stakeholders need to check if the risk-return profile meets the criteria of investment-ready and finance-ready. The private sector can use tools such as Climate-Responsive SDG Investor Maps and Climate Venture Accelerators and Incubators.

There are a few financing instruments that the private sector can help develop: thematic bonds, blended finance, results-based climate financing, and debt-for-nature/climate swaps. Thematic bonds, or sustainable bond types, can be tied to use-of-proceeds or tied to key performance indicators. Blended finance comes from private capital and public/philanthropic funding. Public funding mobilizes private capital, while private capital seeks a market match in the structure. Results-based climate financing, as the name suggests, relies on performance and clear metrics. It’s flexibility lies in the agreement between the funder and the service provider, while being audited by an independent agency. Lastly, debt-for-nature and climate swaps have been implemented as carbon pricing, i.e., carbon tax, Emission Trading System (cap-and-trade system), and fossil fuel subsidy removal.

The involvement of the private sector means jack shit if there is no sound green fiscal policy in place. The rationale that policymakers have to follow is: allocation, stabilisation, and distribution. Allocation means the provision of basic public goods, while stabilisation means smoothing out the business cycle and macroeconomic control. In addition, distribution ensures equality of opportunity.

Green fiscal policy needs to be put in place to address ‘market failure’ that hides hidden costs, i.e., human suffering and perpetuating the wealth gap. This fiscal policy is trying to solve two particular challenges: the overuse and the inefficient use of resources. This policy also tries to reduce the externalities—which are effects of economic activities that are being carried out by an agent and enjoyed by others without compensation. In other words, another form of stolen surplus value. For example, the coal-burning effects from factories are being covered by expenditure from the public health sector.

The goal of the green fiscal policy (or reform) is to clearly define issues, address solutions, adopt and implement a taxonomy, then monitor and evaluate said implementation. Concocting a policy needs to follow the cycle, which accounts for the relevance of public perception and time. Started from agenda setting, which will help define the problem, issues, and challenges. The setting also clarifies the desired outcomes, while mapping and engaging the stakeholders.

After agenda setting, policymakers can put together policy options. Whether using Cost Benefit Analysis, Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, Multi-Criteria Analysis, or Economic Modelling, whichever fits the context. Then comes the decision-making process, which, when implemented, will be a zero-sum. Some parties might not be happy; hence the main reason for putting down policies. Afterwards, the monitoring and evaluation cycle. This brings four key questions: what happened (to measure desired outcomes), what can we do better (to assess the side effects), was the policy successful (to determine the impact), and what have we learned (to get the value as the basis of reform).

Reshaping Our Economies: A Revolutionary Notion

The goal of the economy is to help humanity thrive. That’s it. That should be the baseline. The eternal thirst for profit only brings us to doom. Unregulated capitalism creates our own teleology. The rising neo-feudalism, neocolonialism, and neo-fascism are the direct side effects of unchecked greed. This was, in part, a failure of imagination and lack of empathy.

Capitalism is a linear economy. It’s a take—make—waste system. This ideology molded the earth we currently live on, creating a climate crisis under the Anthropocene. We need to imagine and implement the alternatives promptly. We need to apply an inclusive, green, and circular economy.

By adopting a circular economy, products retain their value by recycling, remanufacturing, refurbishing, and reusing/redistributing. Instead of destroying value as a result of disposal, the circular economy treats every stage of production, distribution, and consumption as a closed ecosystem, much like in nature!

We need more radical transformation of the economic system. My suggestion is to abolish private property altogether. Yet, we need more transitional policy in place before that happens. We can start by setting upstream policies, reshaping sectoral and thematic policies, and building human/institutional capacity. We can make it more expensive to be environmentally harmful and create an incentive to attract more sustainable activities.

At the industrial level, green policy can adopt tools such as command-and-control, market-based, and voluntary-informational tools. The command-and-control tool is regulation-heavy. It relies on a strong political will. Market-based tools are more volatile, since it’s based on the supply-and-demand mechanism. The voluntary and informational tool is, as the name suggests, voluntary. It requires an institutional-level conscience. But the fact is that industry is a Kafkaesque monster, devoid of empathy and in need to be regulated. Policymakers can look into models such as Computable General Equilibrium or Integrated Green Economy Modeling. This will ensure a just transition by maximising opportunities and minimising risks.

Yet, a just transition creates it’s own burden: unequal distribution of impact. These misalignments vary: temporal, spatial, sectoral, and educational. A transitional policy may not promptly create the livelihoods needed to continue one’s survival (temporal), or the opportunities may appear at another place far from one’s roots (spatial). A just transition might also require a sectoral pivot, which usually comes with skill mismatches among the workers. Hence, there is also an educational misalignment while the economy is building upon another sector, which might succeed or not. These misalignments need to be managed so as to not deepen inequalities.

These transition efforts need to answer the questions of creating more decent jobs, developing the working class skills, engaging stakeholders through social dialogue, and providing universal protection. It’s not a social cost. All of these are climate investments for a better future.

On How Businesses and Finance Actors Conduct Climate-Related Disclosure

The investment report is great. It works as financial data to make sound investment decisions. But it doesn’t fully reflect the pluses and minuses of sustainability-related practices and impacts. Hence, in this day and age, it is more important than ever to accompany investment reporting with impact reporting.

Impact reporting functions as a new investment insights provider while allowing stakeholders to see and recognize the ESG performance of businesses. The report allows clients and customers to look into how effectively businesses manage and handle ESG issues. In turn, the report practically conflates ESG impact with financial impact, and it’s a good thing!

The core guiding principle for creating an impact report is transparency. This means the report needs to consist of the scope of reporting, data and methodology, frameworks, and frequency. A good impact report features quantitative metrics, a list of projects funded, and transparency on methodology, scope, and assumptions. Other features that need to be in an impact report are an external review, a detailed impact report of the share, and clarity on the proportion of the impact.

Businesses and finance actors can look into the TCFD recommendations, which garnered support from 2,000 organizations and over 110 regulators. These recommendations can be used by banks, insurers, and investors.

My Thoughts on This Fellowship While Trying to Finish My Capstone Project

This summary actually only covers the first phase. The fellowship will further filter the participants through a capstone project proposal for the second phase. Whatever the result, I am glad to be part of this fellowship because I learned a lot about the Green Economy and Climate Financing.

Learning about Green Economics and it’s infrastructure these past few weeks has reminded me of Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism and what a Kafkaesque nightmare it is to ‘enforce’ climate financing so we can save our collective bottom. What I meant by capitalist realism, there was this talk where Mark Fisher tells us about major oil companies who wrote a letter to the UN that basically says, “we can take faster climate action, but the UN and governments need to have a policy and laws in place and enforce it on us.” They have been known that what they are doing is contributing heavily to climate change, but business must go on because they have shareholders to consider.

We can blatantly see how absurd that large organizations need a governing body (who are also supposed to be rule enforcers) to sort out their priorities and keep their greed in check. But the government, with sets of loops full of holes, creates this incessant crisis of policymaking, half-effort implementation, and ultimately a failure in policy communication. The climate crisis hasn’t entered the minds of policymakers, let alone companies or even the public. Measurements and metrics like B Corp and GREENSHIP are known to few; even then, it had been treated as a checklist instead of a genuine sustainable investment and awareness through branding/marketing effort.

Lack of checks and balances in the governing body creates an uncommitted government. Policies then also become a checklist they can conveniently abandon if politics says so. Business still must go on while the rest of the public are trying to survive and save themselves.