Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2022 i Corporate Knights

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…

As go our cities, so goes our world. With more than half the world’s people living in cities, and urbanization only accelerating, more focus is rightly coming to the role (and performance) of cities on climate, water, air quality, biodiversity and a host of related social, health and economic outcomes. A city can achieve sustainability goals even if its nation does not, but no nation, nor the world, will achieve its sustainability goals if our cities don’t clean up after themselves. I believed this instinctively when I first ran for Edmonton City Council 15 years ago, but now there is so much more comparable data to work with, and more reason than ever to demand better habitats for ourselves. Almost everyone, regardless of their politics, can agree that they want…

Last fall, an ambitious survey covering 10 countries found that 84% of young people aged 16 to 25 are at least “moderately worried” about climate change – and 59% are extremely worried. They don’t see the “adults” – in business or government – making any of the hard decisions required to avoid the climate crisis. Instead, they see our net-zero targets slipping away and feel betrayed. But daunting challenges bring out the best in people. And that’s what Corporate Knights found when we went looking for the Future 50 – Canada’s fastest-growing sustainable companies. Our objective was to identify outstanding Canadian entrepreneurs and companies that are gaining significant traction in the fight against carbon – with exciting new solutions that most of the world hasn’t discovered yet. The result: a…

Twenty years ago, Corporate Knights launched its quest for a more humane form of capitalism, placing people and planet ahead of profits, with the Best 50 Corporate Citizens sitting at the head of the roundtable to make business a force for good. A lot has changed for the better in that time and a lot hasn’t. Thankfully, the glass ceilings in Canada’s corporate boardrooms have been breached, with non-male members now making up almost a third of directors, double their one-sixth share in 2002. Based on current trends, we are on track for 40% of directors to be non-male by 2030. In order to meet the Government of Canada’s 50% challenge to reach board gender diversity by 2030, we will need to double the pace this decade at which we…

It was a revelation reminiscent of Volkswagen’s 2015 emissions reduction scandal. Last fall, the Daily Mail disclosed the harsh conclusions of a British housing economist who debunked the national government’s “energy performance certificates” (EPCs) – a rating system for commercial or residential buildings that are being developed, sold or rented. Thousands of structures that earned high EPC ratings were still emitting lots of carbon due to shortcomings in the ranking system. “In some instances, they may amount to so-called ‘greenwashing’ with consumers effectively being deluded into thinking their ‘energy efficient’ home represents a better outcome for the environment.” This wasn’t the first time that energy efficiency experts had challenged the EPC rating system. Earlier in 2021, the national government had concluded that an EPC grade didn’t predict how larger buildings…

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 the fight against climate change, cities are proving to be much better combatants than the snoozing generals that are, all too often, national governments. Smaller and nimbler, cities are becoming showpieces of successful climate action, and the protagonists of this spectacle of municipal leadership are increasingly women. The mayors of the top three cities in this year’s Sustainable Cities Index – Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen – are all women, but the trend is not unique to famously progressive Scandinavia; from Bogotá to Mexico City to Accra to Tokyo, female mayors around the world are distinguishing themselves as climate leaders. Indeed, 50% of the top 10 cities in the index are led by women. C40, the network of cities founded in 2005 by then London mayor Ken Livingstone to collectively…

1 Next Hydrogen Growth rate*: 8,800% At the COP26 climate conference in November, the United Nations identified hydrogen as the “backbone” of our clean energy future. But separating hydrogen from water, through a process called electrolysis, takes substantial energy. During the transition, “grey” hydrogen produced with natural gas may be acceptable, but net-zero will require “green” hydrogen produced with emission-free renewable energy. Yet most electrolysis systems today work only with the steady electricity provided by major power grids. Enter Next Hydrogen, of Mississauga, Ontario, a maker of electrolyzers specially designed to produce large quantities of hydrogen using intermittent renewable electricity sources, such as wind and solar. Founded in 2008 by veterans of Stuart Energy, a Toronto-based pioneer of hydrogen power, Next Hydrogen is now scaling up to deliver commercial solutions…

As cities up their game on climate action, they look to tap the expertise of new allies: university-based urban leadership centres whose goals include training future urban leaders. “I believe that a movement of academics, students and city governments can make some pretty profound and needed change,” says David Miller, former chairman of C40, a global network of mayors tackling the climate crisis. “It’s a very exciting moment.” The former Toronto mayor now leads C40’s Centre for Urban Climate Policy and Economy. The imperative to act is not lost on the world’s urban leaders. Cities worldwide consume 78% of the world’s energy and produce more than 60% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations, but are also potential change-makers in the global campaign for a sustainable future. Positioned…

Brands standing with Ukraine Apart from arms dealers, it’s hard to think of corporations with a less sensitive moral and social compass than the world’s commodity traders. By quietly buying and selling hard-to-trace metals, oil, grains and chemicals, companies like Cargill, Glencore and Trafigura have been accused of propping up some of the world’s most odious regimes. So it’s worth noting – and applauding – the decision in early April by Geneva-based Vitol, the world’s number-one independent oil trader, to stop handling Russian oil products by the end of 2022. Researchers at Yale University have counted almost 1,000 companies like Vitol that have voluntarily curtailed or halted dealings with Russia in protest against the invasion of Ukraine. Some pulled out earlier than others. Vitol’s move was revealed more than a…

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…

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…

In March, Jim Hourdequin, the CEO of Lyme Timber – one of the world’s largest suppliers of carbon offsets to companies like Chevron – admitted that lax standards have allowed his forestry company to earn US$53 million over the past two years without making significant changes to business as usual. The company received offset payments from polluting industries on projects that, as Bloomberg put it, “don’t actually change the way forests are managed, and therefore do little to help the climate.” Carbon offsets have a bad name for a good reason. Some of the biggest polluters exploit offsets purely to avoid making cuts to their emissions. And some of the biggest offset sellers rake in profits while failing to achieve equitable or even tangible climate benefits. With a fifth of…

1 Eavor Technologies Growth rate**: 17,175% The Romans heated baths with water from the earth, but attempts to commercialize geothermal energy from hot springs have generally failed for lack of scaling potential. Still, there’s lots of heat beneath our feet: Earth’s molten core will keep warming the planet for billions of years. Founded in 2017, Calgary-based Eavor Technologies plans to tap that heat. Using the oil patch’s latest drilling technologies, its “Eavor-Loop” projects would drill deep into bedrock, where the temperature is 75°C or more. By continuously flowing cold water through the rock (where the water heats up), and then running that water through a heat exchanger topside, the company can produce emission-free energy, 24/7, for 100 years. CEO John Redfern says Eavor can bring energy security anywhere: “We’re going…

The number of satellites that circle the globe is expected to rise dramatically over the next few years. Some of the current cohort of satellites bounce signals to our phones; others gather imagery of Earth’s surface. A growing field of satellite technology will be gathering information about greenhouse gas emissions. The satellites using this technology won’t be offering pretty pictures; they’ll be doing chemistry, analyzing spectral fingerprints, and telling oil and gas investors where all the leaking methane is coming from. And their data is getting snatched up by firms that analyze the environmental credibility of corporations. Raw, unstructured satellite data has become an essential tool for investors in the oil and gas sector. Energy companies have a reputation for poor disclosure on their emissions of methane, the number-one anthropogenic…