This special issue examines the multifaceted impact of climate change on business and finance, bringing together eight studies that explore how climate risks, opportunities, policies, and sentiment shape corporate behavior, investment decisions, and market dynamics. Key findings reveal that state ownership and environmental regulations significantly influence corporate environmental investment, while climate opportunity exposure can lower firms’ cost of capital in emerging markets. The research also highlights how climate policy uncertainty drives ESG performance improvements, and how both physical and transition climate risks amplify volatility in cryptocurrency markets. These insights underscore the growing integration of climate considerations into financial decision-making and point to actionable strategies for firms, investors, and policymakers navigating a climate-conscious economy.

With only five years until the 2030 deadline for achieving the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a new international study reveals uneven progress in achieving the goals since their adoption in 2015. The paper, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveals that global progress on numerous SDGs with high initial benchmarks has either stalled or gone into reverse. In contrast, SDG indicators with lower baseline performance continue to register gains. Researchers caution that the vast majority of countries will fail to meet their 2030 SDG targets under current trends.

Price stabilization mechanisms (PSMs), one of a set of key policy elements aiming at supporting increasing and stable carbon prices, may affect the performance of emissions trading systems (ETS) in terms of green innovation. By using the case of China’s regional carbon market pilots and data of listed firms, the research team found that pilots adopting both price-based and quantity-based PSMs significantly induced green innovation activities in covered firms, while a single type does not guarantee the effect. PSMs help to do so by lifting carbon prices and reducing firms’ perceived uncertainties. The above effects would be enhanced in firms with lower asset reversibility, lower ability of cost passthrough, higher ability of innovation, and state-owned enterprises.

The enforcement of the historic United States law to combat international corruption was suspended on 10 February 2025 through a presidential executive order. On the same day, companies under investigation or sanctioned for corruption increased their market capitalisation by an average of USD 160 million. A signal that could also lead other countries to scale back their efforts to fight international corruption