Join SYNI, your hostess with a bounty of wisdom, for today’s discussion of Adaptation, the fastest growing member of the sustainability family and the one that shows up to the party wearing sensible shoes. Adaptation is the biggest buzz for sustainable development and investment headed into 2026 and sounds simple: it is the deliberate strengthening of people, ecosystems, and infrastructure to reduce harm and maintain function as climate hazards and other environmental stresses intensify and shift. If you work in sustainable energy, Adaptation has quickly become a bigger dial on your risk register, design basis, community value proposition, and market thesis. Clean electrons that stay on during stress events are now the objective of the exercise. Project development that qualifies demands the ability to measure, finance, implement, maintain, and update as hazards evolve. It will be an enterprise based upon continued governance.

SYNI, your hostess still going strong entering into Year 2 of the pod, presents our 2026 outlook for sustainable energy development. Consider this episode the de facto Part 2 to last week’s 2025 review, focusing on three key watch topics that sit right at the junction of policy, project delivery, and capital markets for this year. First, data centres and the way digital demand is reshaping power systems. Second, flexibility economics, meaning storage, demand response, and the evolving logic of power markets. Third, grids as the binding constraint, meaning the physical and regulatory reality of getting electrons from where they are generated to where they are needed. Yes this is an outlook episode and such occasions often tempt people into dramatic predictions that are intended to draw attention to themselves, or otherwise be forgotten in a sea of misguided forecasts. We know that energy transition has enough drama already. The interesting question for 2026 is whether the transition continues with less friction, less waste, and more system value. Data centres will test that. Flexibility will enable that. Grids will decide that.

SYNI, your hostess with plenty of gusto, launches into our Year End 2025 episode, reflecting on the three topics that most defined sustainable energy and development trends as we move into the New Year. Before we get into the substance, a quick note of appreciation. This year marks our first full year of podcasting, which in podcast terms is roughly the same as surviving a full year of budget season, just with fewer spreadsheets and more people listening. Thank you for riding with us week after week, for sharing episodes, for challenging our takes, and for staying curious in a field that rewards stamina as much as insight. As we reflect on 2025, we can now see in hindsight that it was a year of untidy narratives. Yet it was a year of the transition becoming operationally unavoidable. Solar turned into baseline infrastructure. Carbon turned into trade compliance. Hydrogen turned into grown up finance. The EU acted like a bloc that wants its transition to be durable, competitive, and enforceable. Global politics made that posture less optional than it might have seemed a few years ago.

SYNI, your host brimming over with Christmas spirit, offers a short holiday message, plus a quick look at what we have been unpacking together this year across our first 51 episodes. And rest assured, we’ll be back with our year-end 2025 episode next week, reflecting on developments both good and bad for sustainability during this year. So Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone listening in from boardrooms, trading floors, policy shops, engineering teams, academic departments, and that special corner of the world where people read consultation papers for fun. Thank you for giving us your attention in a year when attention has become the rarest commodity on Earth, narrowly ahead of grid connection capacity.

SYNI, your hostess with real panache, addresses the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, better known as CBAM, and why at the start of 2026 it will become the most important piece of climate policy that many exporters will only notice when an EU customer emails them with the subject line “Urgent Emissions Data Request.” Once again, the EU has followed the courage of their convictions with legislation that is certain to ruffle more than a few feathers in a world of power politics disguised as trade policy. At the end of the day, it's all about the EU's commitment to lower missions by 55% by 2030. And Brussels is about to flex on sustainable trade in an unprecedented way.

SYNI, your hostess, turns her curiousity to the sustainability story behind big wave surfing contests, with a special focus on the World Surf League TUDOR Nazare Big Wave Challenge and what it means for the Blue Economy and for ocean conservation. The surfing community is officially on watch between now and March for “gigantes” to roll into Nazare, then the klaxon will blow for the start of the 2025-26 vintage of the breath-taking contest. SYNI looks at the history of Nazare, the sustainability efforts of the World Surfing League, the network of World Surfing Reserve designated breaks across the globe, and what the surfing community can do to better walk-the-walk of sustainability and conservation. So let's paddle out together and give us a listen just so you know that 50 is not the new 40 when it comes to SYNI or podcasts!

SYNI, your ever-loyal pod hostess, turns her focus to AI, data centres and an impending power crunch in this new “Age of Electricity.” Can electricity grids manage to stay green amid booming AI demand for power? Forecasted data centre electricity demand will soon begin to outstrip sustainable supply. And this unbalance is forecast to grow quickly and become unmanageable in the not-so-distant future. By the end of the pod, you’ll know SNYI's view on which four pillars are needed to forge a solution. Now, let’s dig into this high-voltage elephant in the room and weigh in with our recommendations on how to cope with this crackling issue. Thanks again for joining us!

SYNI, your hostess that defines podcasting elegance and focus, addresses the events of this week all pointing to being confidently wrong in a wetter world. No prizes for all of us that knew COP30 was always likely to be a bust. SYNI provides a brief discussion of this latest edition of a COP flop, the briefer the better. Yet the political clownshow in Belém dovetails with some extraordinary news about super-computer enhanced climate forecasting a wetter and more volatile world. This very bad COP also demonstrated how the psychology of ignorant over-confidence is framing the current climate debate. Over to SYNI and "bora là" as they say in Brazil!