In this episode of the All Things Sustainable podcast, we’re taking listeners on a whistlestop tour of several big summer events in Europe that will shape sustainability discussions on the road to COP30, the UN Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil in November 2025.
We cover key outcomes from the 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, France — including progress toward a Marine Biodiversity Treaty.
We talk to Beth Burks, Director on the Sustainable Finance Markets team at S&P Global Ratings, about her takeaways from annual climate meetings in Bonn, Germany.
“If COP is like the big show every year, then Bonn is the dress rehearsal,” Beth explains.
Beth also shares highlights from London Climate Action Week, which in 2025 grew significantly to include more than 700 events and more than 45,000 attendees.
In the episode we also speak to Tom Beloe, Director of the Sustainable Finance Hub at the UN Development Programme, or UNDP. Tom shares big takeaways from the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development, or FFD4, in Sevilla Spain. The conference took place for the first time in a decade this summer and centered around financing for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs.
A unifying theme across all these events is the importance of multilateralism to address sustainability challenges that transcend borders, like climate change, nature loss and ocean conservation. Across these events, we also hear about the rising role the private sector plays in addressing and financing solutions to these challenges.
“I think we're seeing over the last 10 years a very much increasing trend of private sector participation,” Tom tells us. “Frankly, the discussions of finance that happen in these conferences are a little bit meaningless if we're not also convening with the largest financial institutions in the world.”
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