Knowledge ecosystems for impact, sustainability and impact communities of practice are blurred where scientific research, academia, public sector regulators, investors, think tanks and corporates collaborate in often non compartmentalised manner as the issue at hand of the transition is wicked and no linear SOPs exist.

Each of the stakeholders have their own incentive architecture but survival bias led to a just and purpose led transformation is a layered process. No clean contours will lead the cartographies of transition, h-index hegemony will lead to open access science and hopefully consultants will embrace the critical thinking of academics and academics the cost pragmatic approach of the private sector.

ESG is essentially a layer of non financial risk data to aid better understanding of investments and will not save the world itself unless linked to the larger purpose of a meaningful transition. The next explosive asset class for the investor tribe are transition linked businesses and financing the transition needs a new Marshall Plan of a new scale. As the leading climate finance leader in a Bloomberg Zero Podcast (Avinash Persaud) said that climate change is a finance problem, I would go a step further, the transition is not a multiple PE opportunity yet. It is not a retail business yet, such as digital which took a quarter of a century, cheap phones and even cheaper data to transform culture.

ESG is seeping into regulatory culture and business as usual which is a welcome change. Paying customers particularly the elites need to think of the transition as a must need product, then the cultural shift will occur and an opportunity to be attractive to the retail investor.