The Climate Expert

The Climate Expert is a five-volume primer series for young professionals working in climate, sustainability, and ESG. Each volume covers one region of the field in plain language: how it works, where it came from, what the law says, and what a careful professional should doubt. The series is published by Climate Expert Publication, an editorial collective committed to unbiased, knowledge-based information for students, young professionals, and everyone.

This is the first volume. Foundations is the entry point. It assumes no prior climate science, no prior finance training, and no prior exposure to environmental law. Its job is to hand a newcomer the vocabulary, the history, the institutional map, the regulatory geography at orientation level, the live critiques, and a set of open questions for the field that goes by the shorthand "ESG," "sustainable finance," and increasingly just "climate."

The book publishes into a moment in which the field is more contested than at any point in its two-decade institutional history. 2024 was the first calendar year on record above 1.5°C of warming. The European Union's Omnibus I package, adopted by the Council in February 2026, narrowed the inner ring of CSRD reporting. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ended its defence of the federal climate-disclosure rule in March 2025. The Net Zero Asset Managers initiative lost BlackRock in January 2025 and relaunched in softened form in February 2026. Foundations equips a reader to follow this terrain without taking a side prematurely.

Inside this volume:

• The working vocabulary of the field, defined in plain language: ESG, sustainability, materiality, double materiality, net zero, scenarios, just transition
• A short history from the 1987 Brundtland Commission through the launch of the PRI in 2006 to the EU Omnibus I of 2026
• The institutional map: IPCC, UNFCCC, ISSB, EFRAG, GRI, PRI, UNEP FI, SBTi, and the GFANZ alliances
• The 2026 regulatory geography at orientation level: CSRD, CSDDD, EU Taxonomy, SFDR, ESRS, UK SDR, the SEC rule, California SB 253 and SB 261, and ISSB adoption across 21 jurisdictions
• Five steelmanned critiques every honest practitioner should be able to argue both sides of: Edmans on "the end of ESG," the Pastor-Stambaugh-Taylor equilibrium, the Friede empirical ambiguity, the political-legitimacy and antitrust critique, and ratings divergence
• Five open questions for 2026 to 2031: materiality convergence, the future of voluntary alliances, the EU model after Omnibus, the role of litigation, and where the field's centre of gravity moves next

Who this book is for:

• Graduate hires and lateral movers entering finance, consulting, law, or the in-house corporate sustainability function
• Graduate students moving into climate-related work from economics, public policy, law, engineering, or the natural sciences
• Journalists, civil servants, and board directors at small or unlisted organisations who need a working fluency without becoming specialists
• Readers planning to continue with Volumes 2 through 5 and looking for the orientation that makes them easier to read

The five volumes of The Climate Expert:

• Volume I: Foundations (this book)
• Volume II: Climate Risk
• Volume III: ESG Reporting and Disclosure
• Volume IV: Climate Law and Policy
• Volume V: Net Zero Strategy

Published by Climate Expert Publication.