Sustainability capitalism: Investing in climate transitions

Abstract

Private finance has become the dominant monetary response to climate change, growing nearly twice as fast as public finance between 2018 and 2023 and surpassing $1 trillion annually. This introduction to the theme issue “Sustainability Capitalism: Investing in Climate Transitions” situates this expansion within the longer trajectory of sustainability capitalism, defined as the subsumption of sustainability principles under capitalist logics. We argue that the rise of private finance for climate transitions functions as a socioecological fix, stabilizing capital accumulation while alleviating certain harms, yet frequently reproducing or displacing others. Contributions to the issue examine how climate finance operates across diverse sites—from carbon markets and mangrove conservation to agri-tech, hydrogen economies, and urban housing—revealing both the hegemony and limits of private finance. These cases show that investment remains uneven and fraught with technological, political, and profitability barriers, while producing new socionatures that reshape relations between capital and nature. By mobilizing the concept of sustainability capitalism, we highlight the contradictions of climate finance: it can generate material transformations with some benefits, but often reproduces existing inequalities. Understanding these tensions is crucial for assessing how climate finance is remaking socioecological relations today.