Providing information empowering markets to foster a better world. Corporate Knights produces editorial at the intersection of business and society, with news and analysis about sustainability and corporate sustainability rankings
Oh, Canada Thank you for the story “Stumbling toward Net-Zero” by Shawn McCarthy and other contributors. I am glad to see the inaugural presentation of the Earth Index and I look forward to next year’s. Monitoring is a crucial component of change management. I am dismayed that Canada’s promises ring hollow and that we rank dead last among the G7. [There’s] room for improvement, for sure. —Victoria Barclay, Toronto, ON CK: We, too, were disappointed to see Canada trailing the G7 on our Earth Index, despite the promises made by successive governments to make meaningful emission reductions. Let’s hope that the federal government’s recent Emissions Reduction Plan will correct our path so we can meet our 2030 targets. My beef with ‘The Beef with Fake Meat’ I understand that headline…
It’s official: ESG has hit the big time. It’s not the purported $40 trillion of assets invested in environmental, social and governance strategies or that leading Republican candidates for the U.S. presidential nomination are railing against ESG as a left-wing Trojan horse, or even that the world’s richest man has taken to his favourite medium to tweet that ESG “is an outrageous scam.” The most tell-tale sign that ESG has hit the big time is that ESG “data requirements and reporting standards” are keeping executives “up at night.” Those are the words written last year by Stefan Hoops on his LinkedIn profile. Hoops was recently named CEO of DWS, Deutsche Bank’s majority-owned asset manager, which has just under $1 trillion in assets under management. Hoops knows what he’s talking about,…
Preventing global temperatures from rising 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels has been a rallying cry for scientists and activists hoping to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis. That goal may no longer be obtainable, as scientists say we will likely blow past the 1.5°C mark in at least one of the next five years. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released a report in May that said there is a 50–50 chance the planet’s annual temperature will exceed a 1.5°C rise between now and 2026. Seven years ago, the probability of this happening was close to zero. “A single year of exceedance above 1.5°C does not mean we have breached the iconic threshold of the Paris Agreement, but it does reveal that we are edging ever closer to a situation…
Citizens of Western democracies have gotten used to seeing courts expand their rights. And yet, if the U.S. Supreme Court follows through on its notorious leaked draft decision to overturn the landmark 1973 ruling, Roe v. Wade, the right to abortion will vanish in many states. In an age of corporations taking stands on social issues, some companies reacted to the news with strong statements supporting a woman’s right to choose. Before the draft decision leaked, a growing list of companies, including Apple, Sales-force, Citigroup and Yelp, had already spoken out against new state laws restricting abortions or announced they would change their benefits to help employees travel to ensure access. On the same day of the leak in early May, Amazon announced that it would provide up to $4,000…
A key business bromide is “What gets measured gets done.” But there’s an even older business truth: “You get what you pay for.” As businesses struggle to meet the United Nations’ net-zero goals, more companies are realizing that their success will hinge on tying executives’ compensation packages to achieving sustainability targets. In response to heavy lobbying by institutional shareholders who see climate change as an existential risk, some 25% of U.S. public companies now include some form of environmental or social metric as part of their executive incentive plans, says proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis & Co. That’s up from just 16% two years earlier. How fast are things moving? Just a year ago, U.S. financial giant Mastercard said that it would tie bonuses for its senior executives to three…
In late April, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a first-of-its-kind investigation into the recycling claims made by Big Oil. Said Bonta in a statement, “For more than half a century, the plastics industry has engaged in an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.” The truth, he added, is that the vast majority of plastic cannot be recycled. The bombshell investigation was announced on the heels of a damning report released by the U.S. Department of Energy a few days earlier, which concluded that only 5% of plastic has actually been getting a second life through recycling. That’s particularly bad news considering the United States generates more plastic waste than any other country. But the whole world is having a…
