Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2022 i Corporate Knights

Eighteen years ago, Corporate Knights set out to determine whether the world’s most sustainable companies could also outperform financially. It turns out, they can. For decades, businesses focused primarily on creating shareholder value, and as a result, they actively ignored the needs of one of their most important stakeholders: the planet. The resulting climate crisis is already being felt worldwide. To ensure a sustainable future in which both people and the planet can thrive, we need a holistic approach to ensuring that our ecological, social and economic priorities carry equal weight. While polluting industries have fuelled the crisis we face today, business is also key to unlocking solutions. Fortunately, a new wave of companies is working to leverage our inherent capacity for cooperation and ingenuity in service of a more…

The sustainable finance industry is facing a growing battle on two fronts as Republican lawmakers ramp up a culture war against “woke capitalism” and investors demand more decisive action on climate change. The squeeze is causing the environmental, social and governance (ESG) industry to push back against conservative attacks by asserting that its only goal is to protect investors from social and environmental risk. But some industry leaders say the conflict demands a new approach based on real-world impact – particularly on CO2 reductions – and away from the sole reliance on environmental and social risk. Recently, Republicans have focused their attacks on BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world and a high-profile proponent of ESG investing. Nineteen Republican-led states accused the company of ignoring investor needs by supporting…

For years, human-rights watchers have accused China of waging a war of repression against the Indigenous residents of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. China has rejected those accusations, saying it’s just protecting itself from extremists and terrorists. But that veil of deniability was pierced in September when the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a painstaking report that identified thousands of acts of cruelty and violence in Xinjiang, including the “arbitrary and discriminatory detention” of up to a million people. The report was welcomed by activists who feel the Uyghur cause has been soft-pedalled by world leaders. And it caused a commotion in Canada, as advocates pushed the Liberal government to punish China for crimes against humanity. Mehmet Tohti, the executive director of the Toronto-based Uyghur Rights Advocacy…

Jennifer Lewington is an intrepid reporter who writes regularly on business school news. A business course that once focused on maximizing shareholder profit now teaches how to measure purposeful value creation. A risk-management class, once strictly concerned with fiscal threats to corporate profits, now assesses climate impacts on bottom-line decisions. These are just a couple of the upgrades that have made Australia’s Griffith Business School the most sustainable MBA program in the world, according to Corporate Knights, for the third year in a row. “The key is to never get complacent,” says Stephanie Schleimer, Griffith’s MBA director, of the school’s commitment to curriculum renewal. Of the 160 schools assessed in this year’s Corporate Knights Better World ranking of the most sustainable MBA programs, several trends stand out. On a positive…

A great event can have a great impact — it can change how you see a problem, make connections in your industry, and essentially, how you do business. The trouble is, most cities, venues, and event producers focus entirely on the event outputs and not nearly enough on the impact it has on the environment. It’s hard to know where to begin in making an event more sustainable. Between all the travel, food, accommodations and supplies, events can use a lot of resources, but they don’t need to — that’s where we can help. Explore Edmonton — the city’s Destination Marketing and Management Organization (DMMO) — has made sustainability a top priority in events. We are looking at events differently from the way we plan, prepare for and deliver an…

Building our way forward Reading John Lorinc’s recent article “Green Building Labels Need Renovating,” you would think the green building sector has stagnated for decades, and only regulation will save the planet. The article argues for progressive building codes while diminishing the role of voluntary green building certifications in shifting the market. That’s misinformed and short-sighted, as voluntary standards are generally the innovators that encourage better codes. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Certifications tend to push codes further and then must overlap them to ensure voluntary standards are advancing what it means to be a green building. Outside of the green building world, not many people know that voluntary programs like LEED tie certification to a specific year and rating-system version and that those versions change over time. We shouldn’t be…

Predictions for the total cost of the clean energy transition range from an incremental US$1 trillion per year to a total of US$10 trillion per year – but everyone agrees it won’t be cheap. The real question is, are the world’s banks ready to fund the development of renewable technologies at scale, and updating all the infrastructure in between? And which banks will take the lead? 2022 Sustainable Banking Revenues Ranking All figures in U.S. dollars. For the first time, we can see a pattern emerging. Corporate Knights has teamed up with the U.K.-based financial publication The Banker to produce the world’s first list of green-ish banks ranked by the percentage of revenues they earn through sustainable lending, underwriting and investments. The 2022 Sustainable Banking Revenues Ranking shows global bankers…

Shawn McCarthy is an Ottawa-based writer who focuses on climate change and the low-carbon energy economy. Governments around the world are promoting clean-burning hydrogen as a critical component of our net-zero drive to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. In Canada, the federal government’s 2020 hydrogen strategy posits the fuel could supply as much as 30% of Canada’s final energy consumption by 2050. That may be wildly optimistic: the Canadian Climate Institute released a report in February 2021 that found that hydrogen could supply 3 to 10% of energy demand by 2050. Still, several provinces have their own hydrogen strategies. And companies are looking for government assistance to help finance projects that would build out a hydrogen infrastructure, from production to consumption. In the great debate over the…

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer. Like its spot on the Monopoly board, the electricity company has not typically been considered anything special: a property of mediocre value, often state owned, that serves a necessary but not particularly creative role in the function of modern society. No longer. In an era of increased electrification and decarbonization, electric utilities are playing a decisive role in shaping the clean economy of tomorrow. Enel, Europe’s largest utility and the second-largest power company in the world, is leading the charge when it comes to slashing carbon emissions, as its top ranking on the Corporate Knights Carbon Reduction 20 list suggests. Established in 1962 as Italy’s National Electricity Board (Ente nazionale per l’energia elettrica) and privatized in 1992, Enel now operates in more than 30…

At business schools worldwide, topics on sustainability, climate risk and income inequality are popping up in MBA programs, with new content, certificates and research. Laudable, say youth activists, sustainable business leaders and those tracking school performance, but still not good enough to equip tomorrow’s corporate leaders for purpose beyond profit. “The pace of change is definitely not as fast as it should be given the climate crisis and the social crisis we are in, and the ambition is not high enough,” says Maxime Lakat, executive director of Re_Generation, a youth-led campaign for business schools and companies to incorporate human and ecological wellbeing in decision-making. No less impatient is Mette Morsing, head of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education, the largest global initiative on transforming leadership to address the…

Ralph Torrie is the research director at Corporate Knights. Pakistan, a country whose contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is tiny by Canadian standards, knows the fury and the injustice of climate chaos. One-third of the country was flooded by an extreme monsoon season this summer that has directly affected more than 33 million people and killed more than 1,500 (as of early October), many of them children. The economy is devastated – more than a million homes lost, 5,000 kilometres of roads and thousands of bridges destroyed, 800,000 livestock killed or washed away, millions of acres of crop damage. The dollar seems a feeble metric for measuring the scale of the devastation, but the costs are in the tens of billions of dollars. American conservationist David Brower ironically observed that…

6 green investments to take Canada into a clean future. Canada is investing only around 1% of GDP on climate response. Corporate Knights calculates that the country needs to spend roughly 5% of GDP, or $126 billion per year, from 2023 to 2030 (with up to 80% of that coming from the private sector) if we’re to reach our climate targets. Here’s our plan: There’s no place like green homes. To make this country’s buildings more comfortable, affordable and energy efficient in all weather, we’ll need to spend $57 billion a year on retrofitting and electrifying 10 million homes, plus $22 billion on commercial buildings. That includes phasing out old heating and lighting systems for modern, efficient systems with smart energy management. This transition will run on batteries. We need to…

Yvon Chouinard has had a 60-year love hate relationship with business. So it came as no surprise to some when the founder of Patagonia and his family announced in early September that they would give the outdoor apparel brand to a trust and non-profit to fight the climate crisis. “The Chouinards are renouncing their status as one of the wealthiest families in America,” said The New York Times – noting that “it felt like a very un-billionaire-like way to fight climate change.” Chouinard has never accepted conventional labels, describing himself as a misfit, dirtbag, rebel and craftsman. As a young man he embraced the mountains, living rough in the woods of Yosemite and British Columbia while pioneering new climbing routes and techniques. At first, he funded his lifestyle by blacksmithing,…

Grey hydrogen Most hydrogen produced in North America today is made by the steam methane reforming process, in which natural gas is reconstituted into hydrogen and CO2. Emissions occur across the life cycle except when the hydrogen is actually used as fuel. Blue hydrogen Blue hydrogen is produced using the same processes as the grey variety, with the addition of carbon capture facilities at hydrogen-making plants. Green hydrogen This designation typically refers to hydrogen made using renewable power. Hydrogen is produced through electrolysis by using non-emitting electricity to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in water. Pink hydrogen Hydrogen derived from nuclear power. While nuclear reactors don’t generate carbon emissions in producing electricity, the life-cycle carbon intensity can vary dramatically depending on uranium extraction and processing and the amount of…

“The oceans are rising and so are we,” chanted a chorus of climate strikers marching through Manhattan. On the same day that Pakistan’s prime minister was pleading with world leaders gathered at the United Nations General Assembly not to leave his country “alone high and dry” to cope with the catastrophic impacts of flooding, outside, thousands of young people were marching to Wall Street demanding climate reparations for poor countries. With the latest round of global climate strikes planned in roughly 450 countries in late September (including nearly 40 in Canada and 134 in the United States) members of Generation Z and millennials were once again gathering in the streets to make their voices heard. Placards and microphones weren’t the only tools they used. Ten days earlier, seven Ontario youth…