Today: Leveraged finance dominates talks at COP30 to fuel developing countries; a lawsuit over a Ritz-Carlton safari camp; workplace watchdog ramps up DEI fight.

Welcome back: In the week preceding this year’s United Nations climate negotiations, hurricanes and typhoons battered countries including Jamaica and the Philippines. The storms left a wake of destruction that summit organizers used to highlight the need for more climate finance.

But unlike previous years, where state aid budgets, grants and other forms of concessional finance dominated negotiations, talks at this year’s conference headed in a new direction, Yusuf Khan reports for WSJ Pro Sustainable Business. Donors were offered a return on their investment, even when that investment was targeting the world’s poorest countries.

“If we have scarce resources, the question we are asking is what can we do differently so that we can continue supporting” climate and development investments, said Leonardo Fleck, managing director of sustainability at Santander Brasil, a branch of the Spanish bank.

“The private sector is going to look at things [investments] that make a profit, so that they are sustainable and that they are scalable. We need to focus much more on that,” he said. “How can we monetize and make those models work so they’re self-sustaining and less dependent on philanthropic support?”

At the U.N.’s COP30 climate talks, the focus was on “catalytic capital,” a type of leveraged finance where a small pool of capital is used to attract a much larger one.

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Leaders of the Maasai ethnic group are seeking a court order to demolish a new Ritz-Carlton luxury safari camp they say blocks a key route of the famous Serengeti migration, the WSJ’s Caroline Kimeu reports.

Meitamei Olol Dapash, a Maasai elder with an American Ph.D., said the camp sits astride a path that some migratory wildebeest and zebra use to cross the Sand River in search of green grass.

Dapash, director of the Maasai Environmental Resource Coalition, has sued Marriott International, which owns the Ritz-Carlton brand, and Kenyan authorities in a local court, a legal strategy backed by some other Maasai leaders.

Dapash, who did his doctorate in sustainability education at Arizona’s Prescott College, reports instances of wildebeest turning back to avoid the camp, which opened in August during the height of the annual migration. One elephant was spotted struggling to find a new path after using the location of the Ritz-Carlton as a crossing for more than a decade, Dapash said.

Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel chain, declined to comment on the lawsuit.

As President Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chair, Andrea Lucas is sharply shifting the agency’s focus to give priority to allegations of religious discrimination, WSJ's Lauren Weber reports.

It is bringing lawsuits on behalf of a truck driver who asked to wear a skirt on the job because of her Apostolic Christian beliefs and a ski-area employee fired after writing faith-related social-media posts. And it recently settled with a staffing agency that didn’t hire a Muslim job applicant after he asked for an accommodation to attend Friday prayer.

The 39-year-old Christian conservative has opened investigations into law firms’ diversity practices and universities’ handling of antisemitism. The EEOC asked a judge to enforce a subpoena against the University of Pennsylvania. Lucas has said she is attacking the identity politics she believes has permeated workplaces and the broader culture.

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WSJ Pro Sustainable Business gives you an inside look at how companies are tackling sustainability. Send comments to bureau chief Perry Cleveland-Peck at perry.cleveland-peck@wsj.com and reporters Clara Hudson at clara.hudson@wsj.com and Yusuf Khan at yusuf.khan@wsj.com. Follow us on LinkedIn at wsjperry, clara-hudson and yusuf_khan.