The world of ESG and sustainable finance saw some truly eye-popping numbers last year, such as $130 trillion via the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) committed to using science-based guidelines to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, or the $35 trillion invested in some form of ESG strategy by mid-year.

Big numbers should foster commensurately big changes, right? Well, the Mauna Loa observatory read 420 ppm of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere; the International Energy Agency (IEA), a group not historically known to align with activists, stated that coal development must cease quickly if we’re to meet the goal of net-zero emissions by midcentury. Meanwhile, the world’s largest asset manager continues to hold an exposure of around $1.2 billion in India’s largest coal firm.

As the highly contentious Carmichael mine gets its first shipment of coal ready for export, BlackRock has, as of this writing, not changed its position. This set-up encapsulates a theme I’ll be hyper-focused on in 2022: substantive actions from the ESG ecosystem of institutional investors, ratings agencies, corporate reporters and financial institutions that yield measurable progress in line with their lofty, and commendable, commitments.

Sustainable finance is one of the most quickly evolving fields within sustainable business today, and arguably the most impactful. A Code Red for humanity renders Band-Aid approaches to climate solutions useless. I’m hopeful, even a little confident, that 2022 will see a clearer division between laggards and leaders than ever before, with more serious penalties for the laggards and bigger rewards for the leaders.

Wikipedia identifies greenwashing as "a form of marketing spin … deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims, and policies are environmentally friendly." Investopedia describes it as "the process of conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company's products are more environmentally sound." Do those resonate?

Read the full article about the future of ESG by Grant Harrison at GreenBiz.