Finance
Carbon markets could finance green wastewater infrastructure for a huge win-win-win
Green wastewater-treatment infrastructure could save billions of dollars and avert millions of tons of carbon emissions in the United States in the coming decades, according to a new study.
To facilitate this, wastewater treatment could be folded into carbon markets, moving water quality from a local to a globally traded resource, the study suggests.
Conventional wastewater-treatment facilities such as sewage plants that remove nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater are known as “gray” infrastructure. Such facilities currently account for 2% of U.S. energy use and 45 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually.
Wastewater-treatment standards are likely to become more stringent in the future, which will increase the power needed for water treatment, and the corresponding carbon emissions—especially because gray-infrastructure technologies able to meet these standards are energy-intensive and not terribly efficient.
In the new study, researchers investigated the potential for different forms of green wastewater-treatment infrastructure to contribute to water quality standards. Green approaches range from reducing the amount of fertilizer spread on farmland to creating human-made wetlands to filter water before it enters a river.
As well as reducing the need to beef up wastewater treatment plants, such approaches could address non-point source pollution from fertilizer runoff, urban development, and wildfires.
The researchers gathered data on nutrients coming into more than 22,000 wastewater treatment facilities throughout the contiguous United States. Then they calculated the emissions, costs, and treatment capabilities of standard wastewater treatment plants compared to green infrastructure of various sorts.
Utilities in the United States are already allowed to trade point-source for non-point source water quality improvements. But these mechanisms haven’t been used very widely. So the researchers investigated the potential for carbon markets to provide a source of capital to finance green wastewater infrastructure.
Essentially this approach would trade on the carbon-reducing potential of green infrastructure, with the water quality benefits coming along for the ride.
Green wastewater-treatment infrastructure could save $15.6 billion and 30 million metric tons of carbon emissions over four decades, the researchers report in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
Green wastewater infrastructure designed to achieve the most stringent water quality standards could sequester more than 4.2 million metric tons of carbon emissions per year and generate revenue of $679 million per year via carbon markets.
The main limitation on green treatment methods’ ability to remove nutrients is a lack of agricultural land in some areas, and the fact that not all green technologies can be used in all areas. “While green treatment methods can only treat less than 40% of nitrogen and 25% of phosphorus needed in the United States, this would still represent a large decrease in infrastructure compared to the scenario where green treatment methods are not used,” the researchers write.
Green wastewater-treatment infrastructure has lower carbon emissions than gray infrastructure in every water basin across the country—although it is not carbon-negative everywhere.
Nor are green treatment technologies cheaper than gray ones everywhere. But when potential carbon financing revenues are accounted for, basins where green technologies are cheaper account for 94.6% of nitrogen and 91.9% of phosphorus treated in the contiguous United States. Much of the cost of green infrastructure comes from the need to pay farmers to implement the technologies, in some cases yearly.
“As the grid evolves with less environmental impact, carbon credits generated by offsetting gray infrastructure with green infrastructure will be reduced,” the researchers write, “which mean that the window of opportunity for leveraging carbon markets to incentivize a shift from gray to green infrastructure may be limited.” They are now conducting additional studies to develop the carbon-credit methodology.
Source: Limb B.J. et al. “The potential of carbon markets to accelerate green infrastructure based water quality trading.” Communications Earth & Environment 2024.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine
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TORONTO — Insurance provider Intact Financial Corp. says it had higher catastrophe losses and large losses in the second quarter than it initially expected.
Intact Financial reported that its combined catastrophe and large losses were $247 million above its expectations for the second quarter on a pre-tax and net of reinsurance basis.
The combined higher losses amount to $1.08 per diluted common share after tax.
Total catastrophe losses reached $416 million on a pre-tax basis during the second quarter and net of reinsurance.
The company says catastrophe losses in Canada were due to weather events, while commercial fires drove losses in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Intact Financial says the increase in large losses included higher-frequency fire claims as well as other property losses across different geographies.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 8, 2026.
Companies in this story: (TSX: IFC)
The Canadian Press
For a company navigating one of the most consequential transformations in its history, financial clarity is not optional—it is essential. Natura &Co, the Brazilian personal care and cosmetics group behind iconic brands such as Natura and Avon, has long been committed to combining purpose-driven business with commercial performance. After a period of strategic portfolio reshaping, including the divestiture of its Aesop and The Body Shop holdings, the company is now sharpening its focus on profitability and operational excellence across Latin America and global markets.
At the center of that effort sits a deceptively complex challenge: understanding, in real time, which revenue and cost factors are driving or eroding gross margin across a highly diversified business. For years, answering that question meant manual reporting, delayed insights, and finance teams spending valuable time on data gathering rather than analysis.
That’s now changing, thanks to a co-innovation initiative developed together with SAP and Numen, a global SAP partner specializing in digital transformation and enterprise software implementation.
From manual reporting to proactive decision intelligence
The project’s goal was to replace a labor-intensive gross margin analysis process with a generative AI application embedded directly into Natura &Co’s financial workflows. Built on SAP Business AI Platform, SAP’s unified foundation integrating business technology, data, and AI capabilities, the application connects directly to data in SAP S/4HANA to provide finance teams with automated insights and narrative recommendations in real time, without the need for manual data pulls or offline reporting.
The application enables users to explore revenue, cost, and margin drivers interactively, identifying at a glance which elements are protecting or eroding margin performance across markets and product lines. Crucially, human oversight remains central to the design: the AI application generates insights, while finance professionals retain full control over interpretation and decisions.
“The implementation of gross margin analysis using AI in SAP S/4HANA marked an inflection point in the analytical capability of our finance area,” said Rogério Dias Garcia, tech manager, ERP Latam, Natura &Co. “We overcame delays and raised the standard of insights by integrating margin analysis from SAP S/4HANA with a large language model connected via the SAP AI Core layer. This architecture allowed us to provide, in an agile, secure, and completely anonymous manner, a stratified and precise view of gross margin offenders and protectors—discriminating exactly which revenue or cost elements were driving market performance.”
A collaborative architecture for scalable AI adoption
Natura &Co’s application derived from a prototype SAP partner Numen created in early 2024 at SAP’s global Hack2Build on business AI, leveraging the generative AI capabilities of SAP Business AI Platform. The solution was designed and developed through close collaboration between Natura &Co, Numen, and SAP. From the outset, the approach was to align AI adoption with concrete business priorities, ensuring the application would be scalable and production-ready rather than a standalone prototype.
Numen brought deep SAP implementation expertise to the project, combining knowledge of SAP S/4HANA architecture with hands-on experience in building solutions on SAP Business AI Platform. The technology stack—SAP S/4HANA, SAP AI Core, SAP Fiori, and SAP Business Technology Platform—provided the secure, integrated foundation needed to connect financial data with generative AI capabilities in an enterprise context.
“SAP enabled the transformation by providing the technological foundation and expert support,” said Carlos Aravechia, head of Data Design & Intelligence at Numen.
The success of the project has validated a broader conviction at Natura &Co: that generative AI, embedded directly in ERP workflows, can fundamentally reposition finance from a transactional function to a strategic business partner.
A blueprint for other businesses
The Natura &Co project demonstrates a pattern that other organizations can replicate, particularly those running SAP S/4HANA. The combination of structured ERP data with the contextual reasoning capabilities of large language models creates a foundation for decision intelligence that goes well beyond traditional business intelligence tools.
The project was built within a six-month co-innovation sprint and went live in August 2025. It is currently in use across Natura &Co’s Equador operations.
Looking ahead, Natura &Co is already planning the next phase: integrating Joule Agents to further automate the extraction of standard analytical content and deepen the AI-driven optimization of financial processes.
“The success of this initiative validates the transformative potential of embedded AI within our ERP,” Dias Garcia noted. “We are now ready to move forward—deepening these insights and integrating the capability of Joule Agents to maximize the extraction of standard content and further optimize our business decisions.”
For SAP customers evaluating how to move from AI experimentation to AI in production, the Natura &Co project offers a concrete, replicable model: start with a high-value, well-defined business process, embed AI directly into existing workflows, and build in human oversight from the start.
A girl from a disadvantaged rural family in central China topped this year’s gaokao, attracting numerous live-streamers eager to finance her education, which she declined.
The home of 18-year-old secondary school graduate Han Yaping in a Henan province village was recently bustling with live-streamers.
This attention came after Han achieved an impressive score of 699 out of 750 in the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam.
She has received offers from China’s two leading universities, Tsinghua University and Peking University.
Han’s accomplishment is particularly remarkable given her family’s impoverished circumstances.
Her mother suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory arthritis affecting the spine, preventing her from working. Her father, who earns a living through farming and odd jobs, serves as the family’s sole provider. Han also has a younger sister.
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