Z Internal Repository

For years, researchers and founders have said $100 per ton is the key target at which using machines to capture carbon from the ambient air becomes cost-competitive. But costs remain stubbornly high and now companies are beginning to move the goalposts, which risks undercutting trust in an industry the world will almost certainly need to limit global warming.

When a heat dome shattered temperature records across the Western US and Canada in June 2021, the resulting fatalities exposed a pattern. In Portland, Oregon, and surrounding Multnomah County, 56 of the 72 people who died were aged 60 and up. In British Columbia, people 60-plus accounted for 555 of the 619 fatalities. Just over a year later, a sizzling June, July and August in England caused roughly 2,800 excess deaths among people 65 and older. More than 1,000 of them occurred over four days in late July. Intense heat waves in recent years offer a stark warning of what’s at stake for humanity. The planet just endured its 12 hottest consecutive months on record, and this summer threatens to be hotter than ever. But those stakes are not experienced equally across age groups. Older adults are more at risk of experiencing dangerous health impacts during periods of intense heat. “Older adults are one of the populations that we classically see as being more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, specifically to effects of extreme heat,” says Catharina Giudice, an emergency physician and climate change and human health fellow at Harvard’s FXB Center. “As we age, our ability to adapt to heat diminishes.”

If things move at that pace, disclosure on nature issues could be almost as common as climate reporting in less than six years. Nature, in other words, could be the new climate when it comes to priorities for the world’s biggest financial institutions.