2025 reminded us that impact investing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It lives in an intricate overlap between global systems struggling to change and local actors who refuse to wait.
This was a year that tested our resilience — as people, as professionals, as an organisation, and as a purpose-driven community. But it also offered glimpses of regeneration and hope, where ambition was reignited and refined, and alignment began to take shape in unexpected corners of the world. Technology continued to advance, green premiums continued to fall, and talent continued to flow into the areas where it is needed the most.
As we look back over the past year or two, what stands out most is how every setback has so far revealed new paths forward.
Resilience: Holding Ground in a Warming World
2025 has ended with an uncomfortable truth: global temperatures have now stayed above 1.5°C for three consecutive years. We’ve crossed the symbolic threshold the Paris Agreement once framed as our upper guardrail. For those of us who have dedicated our careers around the idea of staying under that threshold, this is sobering news.
And yet, this pressure has catalyzed something else — resilience.
Many people around the world refused to sit idle. While global progress faltered, local action surged ahead. From Pakistan’s rapid pivot to solar to Japan’s $1 trillion Green Transformation Policy, momentum is building where it matters most. China’s early flattening of CO₂ emissions — years ahead of schedule — and the expansion of its national emissions trading scheme reminded us that policy ambition and execution can work hand-in-hand.
These moves form part of a broader, decentralized resilience — a story of mayors, communities, and emerging economies taking the wheel while global coordination sputters. In impact investing, this bottom-up, inside-out renewal reinforces what we’ve always believed: progress on climate is inevitable, human understanding of the problem and solutions will continue to grow, and small groups of committed actors can keep the wheels of progress moving.
Regeneration: Restoring What’s Been Lost
Despite stalled global progress on climate, US climate denialism, continued suffering from war, and the general polarisation of society and politics, some notable wins for nature were still eked out during 2025. In September, the UN High Seas Treaty crossed the critical threshold for ratification, setting the stage for full implementation in January 2026. For the first time in human history, the “high seas” — that vast expanse beyond national borders — is partially protected through a legally binding mechanism, with the goal of protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030.
Despite the disappointment of COP30 — which failed once again to name fossil fuels explicitly — as well as a failed plastics treaty and net zero shipping framework, there were signs of new energy in the form of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). Though not yet funded at the scale needed, it signaled an important shift toward valuing forests for their full role in climate stability and human prosperity. The facility’s design, if realized, could help preserve one of the cheapest and most effective carbon sinks on Earth.
Throughout 2025, we also saw the emergence of new ambitious initiatives to catalyse capital for sustainable, regenerative, and circular systems, including farming practices that prove at-scale how returns can be aligned with Nature, including in food systems, farming and regenerative agriculture with Bramble Partners, NewAg Partners, Maia Venture’s AgriTech fund and many others. We got to know the new team at Aether Capital and their plans to tackle deforestation and launch an ambitious impact funds platform. We followed Cerulean Capital and their deep conviction in oceans and nature-related data and markets. We also saw great hope in the successful close of the first fully biodiversity-positive early-stage VC funds Superorganism, and a new early-stage European cross-industry decarbonisation fund Endgame Capital.
Alignment: Finding Direction in Complexity
Regulatory and policy uncertainty made 2025 another challenging year for many impact-focused startups and funds. We felt that friction firsthand in our advisory work, as many companies had to reset expectations and rework business plans.
And yet, alignment is emerging — not from policy rooms, but from board rooms.
Accenture’s Destination Net Zero 2025 report captured this strikingly: after a yearlong lull, large corporates are once again setting net zero goals. ESG is not dead; it’s maturing. Similarly, Morgan Stanley’s Sustainable Signals 2025 survey offered a dose of optimism: 84% of institutional investors expect sustainability-linked assets under management to increase in the next two years. Given the backdrop, this is certainly not inertia, but rather clear intent.
Europe’s new legally binding target to reduce emissions by 90% by 2040 added yet another signpost of long-term alignment. Fifteen years is right around the corner and is a powerful signal to investors ready to pursue enduring value creation.
These factors affirm what we’ve long held true in our work: alignment between capital, policy, and purpose may be difficult, but once momentum builds, it becomes self-reinforcing.
Collaboration: The Power of Shared Action
If there was one recurring lesson in 2025, it was that collaboration remains our best defense.
New collaborative ventures took shape in the private sector, particularly in the CleanTech and NatureTech spaces, with many new innovations in regenerative and circular business models and continued progress in driving towards an impact economy. The Impact Investing Institute, for example, successfully lobbied the UK government to set up an Office for the Impact Economy, putting collaboration at the centre of growth in the new economy.
2025 saw remarkable growth in Green Economy jobs and entrepreneurship including scalable nature-positive and carbon-negative foods such as Arborea, circular bioconversion innovations in Black Solder Fly farming such as FlyPharma and InsectBiotech, food waste reduction such as Ryp Labs and Mimica Lab, biodegradable fashion such as Purified shoes, Ocean-enhancing seaweed solutions such as Oceanium, and even continued rapid advancement in renewables and battery storage such as UK battery startup Levistor and solar-heat innovator Naked Energy
Talent is flowing into these sectors as more professionals seek purpose alongside profit, and startups such as Goodwall are helping skill up young talent on future digital and green skills while helping brands reach and connect with a growing youth market. Smart purpose-driven entrepreneurs are finding ways of harnessing AI to build new planet-friendly solutions, which we believe will play a significant role in enhancing productivity and will ultimately drive a reduction in resource demands through innovation.
In material sciences, Orbital uses AI to enhance the materials used in carbon capture to remove more CO2 from the atmosphere. In AgriTech, Aigen and others are embedding AI into precision weeders that removes the need for pesticides, thus allowing soil to heal and farmers to reduce costs. It’s also increasingly used in nature restoration, including better understanding biodiversity signals from satellites and other nature-related datasets (e.g. Chirrup).
In supply chains, AI is being used to simplify, enhance, and automate supply chain data (e.g. for carbon reporting, or to enhance traceability), or to improve operations and margins, as Winnow is doing in commercial kitchens to show the value of food being wasted today. And in MedTech, AI is being used to discover new medicines from nature (e.g. Pangea Bio).
Even when high-level politics waver, collaboration thrives in the networks built around shared missions.
Looking Ahead
In the face of planetary-scale challenges, this year reminded us that despair and hope often coexist — and that both are necessary ingredients for progress. The setbacks of 2025 have not diminished our belief in what’s possible. They’ve refined it.
We enter 2026 grounded in the conviction that resilient systems — from investments to ecosystems — are those that regenerate, re-align, and are deeply collaborative. Even in a fragmented world, we find that the threads of progress still weave a coherent, hopeful pattern.
We wish you all a fabulous holiday season, and we look forward to continuing to drive this change forward together throughout 2026!
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