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This month, the balance between progress and peril tipped more visibly than usual. July didn’t just bring another round of climate reports and policy statements, it gave us moments of genuine contradiction.
Let’s start in Pennsylvania, of all places, where Google just signed the biggest corporate hydropower deal in history, a $3 billion, 20-year agreement with Brookfield to supply power-hungry data centres with low-carbon electricity. It’s a staggering scale anthed a clear move to green the backbone of AI and cloud computing.
There’s no net zero without grid-level transformation, and Google just threw down the gauntlet.
Meanwhile, in China, a quieter kind of revolution is underway. The government has announced a push to renovate urban villages and retrofit dilapidated housing, less about building shiny new smart cities, and more about making existing places greener, safer, and better connected.
But perhaps the most quietly seismic story of the month came not from a company or a city, but a court. The International Court of Justice issued a legal advisory opinion with game-changing implications, that countries failing to act on climate may be violating international law and fundamental human rights. That’s a sentence worth reading twice.
The climate crisis is no longer just a moral, political, or economic issue, it’s now a legal one.
In the fashion world, where sustainability rhetoric often races ahead of reality, something different happened, governance took the spotlight. A new initiative, Governance for Tomorrow, backed by the Centre for Sustainable Fashion and Kering, calls for fashion brands to think not just about carbon or cotton, but about power. Who has it, who lacks it, and how decision-making includes (or excludes) intergenerational and interspecies voices.
There were also wins in sport this month. World Athletics released its first sustainability report, scoring over 100 international events on their environmental impact. The Glasgow Indoor Championships and Oslo Bislett Games achieved top platinum status. It’s easy to dismiss this as symbolic, but symbolism matters.
And then came the hard reversals. In New Zealand, the government voted to lift its long-standing ban on offshore fossil fuel exploration, citing energy shortfalls and economic pressure.
Climate groups called it a betrayal. For a country once lauded as a climate leader, it raises difficult questions such as how fragile are our commitments when convenience knocks?
Just days earlier, the Democratic Republic of Congo opened nearly half its territory, including critical carbon-sink peatlands and gorilla habitats, to oil and gas drilling bids. The DRC is rich in biodiversity and resources, but plagued by poverty. Unless climate justice delivers economic justice, many nations will keep choosing extraction over preservation.
So where does this leave us? July showed us that sustainability isn’t just about science or targets, it’s about power. Who holds it. How it’s used. And what happens when the systems we’ve built, both political and corporate, are asked to choose between the future and the now.
We’ve seen progress this month, but we’ve also seen the cracks. And those cracks are where the work must now go.