On 4 May 2026, the European Parliament published a draft report on SFDR 2.0, proposing further amendments to the Commission's November 2025 proposal. The Commission's proposal would remove entity-level disclosure obligations, take financial advisers out of scope, significantly reduce product-level disclosures, and introduce a new three-category product classification system replacing the current Article 6, 8, and 9 framework. The Parliament's draft retains these core elements while proposing additional improvements.

Eurosif welcomed the draft as a step in the right direction but flagged important remaining gaps around greenwashing prevention and workability across asset classes. Final agreement on the text may take considerable time given the parallel Omnibus simplification work running alongside the SFDR review in the legislative calendar.

On 4 May 2026, the EU Commission published a simplification package for the EUDR including a draft delegated act that proposes removing leather and retreaded tyres from scope, adding soluble coffee and certain palm oil derivatives, and introducing exemptions for packaging, product samples, and second-hand goods. The Commission confirmed it will not reopen the core text of the regulation and that compliance costs are expected to fall by around 75% versus the original set-up. The draft act is open for public feedback until 1 June 2026.

The EUDR will apply from 30 December 2026 to large and medium-sized enterprises, and from 30 June 2027 for micro and small operators.

Green energy producer BioCirc and Microsoft announced a 7-year agreement for Microsoft to offtake credits representing up to 650,000 tonnes of carbon removal from BioCirc's bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) platform in Denmark. The deal is the first major carbon removal purchase agreement for Microsoft since reports last month that the company had paused purchases, with Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa acknowledging the programme "may adjust the pace or volume" of procurement.

The SBTi's new 2026-2030 strategy, published 21 May, marks a significant expansion in focus: from target validation toward supporting companies in delivering on climate pledges, with sector-specific guidance, benchmarking data, and advisory services at the core of the model. Close to 11,000 companies have used SBTi guidance for near-term targets; roughly 2,600 have set corporate net-zero targets. Europe accounts for more than 60% of companies with validated targets, but Asia is an increasingly close second.

The strategy follows a quietly released April update to the Absolute Contraction Approach that allows companies to set significantly less ambitious near-term goals, reducing required Scope 1 and 2 cuts by 2030 from around 42% to as low as 21% for some companies using a 2025 baseline. The net-zero standard revision is due to be finalised in 2026.

Singapore-based Circulate Capital, which focuses on plastic circularity across South and Southeast Asia, announced a new green loan facility with HSBC aimed at accelerating capital deployment across circular economy investments. The facility follows the first close of Circulate Capital Asia II, which raised $220 million for circular supply chain and recycling businesses across India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

A study published 21 May in Nature Climate Change by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research finds that redirecting investment away from new coal-based steel plants before 2030 is 53%, or roughly $800 billion, cheaper than cutting the equivalent emissions later elsewhere in the economy or through carbon removals. Steel production accounts for 7% of global emissions, and coal-based steel represents around 70% of global production, with roughly half of all planned new capacity still coal-based. Once built, plants will likely operate for decades, locking in emissions well into the 2060s.

The study finds that the feasibility of a rapid transition in India is highly sensitive to financing conditions, and that international climate finance reducing investment risk could enable the scale-up of hydrogen-based steel. Recent auctions under India's National Green Hydrogen Mission have delivered lower-than-expected prices for green hydrogen-based ammonia, suggesting hydrogen steelmaking costs could fall faster than anticipated.

BloombergNEF's New Energy Outlook 2026, published 19 May, finds that global energy transition investment reached a record $2.3 trillion in 2025. If countries continue on their current trajectory of deploying economically competitive clean technologies, they stand to substantially cut reliance on imported fossil fuels and strengthen energy security. However, investment required to achieve a net zero scenario reaches $235 trillion by 2050, meaning annual investment would need to rise dramatically from current levels.

Tropical rainforest loss fell 36% in 2025 from the record high of 2024, according to data from the University of Maryland's GLAD Lab published via WRI's Global Forest Watch. The world still lost 4.3 million hectares of tropical primary rainforest, an area roughly the size of Denmark, disappearing at a rate of 11 football fields every minute. Non-fire forest loss declined 23% to its lowest level in a decade, suggesting that targeted government policies, particularly in Brazil and Colombia, can drive real progress.

Despite the improvement, global forest loss remains 46% higher than a decade ago and 70% above the pace needed to meet the 2030 goal of halting and reversing deforestation. With a potential El Nino developing in 2026, fire risk may rise again. WRI's global forests director Rod Taylor notes that forests are becoming less resilient under increasingly intense fires and droughts, requiring active management even in countries making progress.

Brazil has released a first outline of a global voluntary roadmap away from deforestation, under which countries would produce their own national pathways to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. The framework is a compromise following COP30 in Belem, where 93 countries called for a deforestation roadmap as a formal summit outcome but failed to agree on one, leading Brazil to commit to a voluntary process instead.