Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2024 i Corporate Knights

Given the recent backlash against environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing in the United States, it’s sometimes hard to tell if society is moving forward or slipping back. How do you measure a global transition that is so massive – and yet hard to see with the naked eye? You follow the money. Tracking the clean revenue of large corporations allows you to cut through the noise and see how the sustainable economy is building momentum. Released by Corporate Knights research and California-based shareholder advocates As You Sow in February, the 11th Clean200 ranking captures the green transition in full flight, cataloguing those public companies that are earning the most from sustainable sources. Crucially, it also signals to investors – venture capitalists, institutions and individuals alike – that a wide…

Montreal is a famously climate-conscious big city. It has an extensive and fast-growing rapid transit system. The neighbourhoods are dense. Mayor Valérie Plante, a reform-minded progressive who’s held office since 2017, has pushed hard to build separated bike lanes, plant thousands of trees and designate pedestrian-only zones. Last year, she embarked on a project to construct “sponge streets” by replacing some parking spaces with permeable landscapes meant to absorb excess rain and reduce flooding. “Everything about the city now has to [be seen through] this lens – what about climate change?” she said in 2020. For all that, Montreal struggles to meet its ambitious carbon reduction targets, says Blaise Rémillard, manager of planning and mobility at Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal (CRE Montréal), an environmental watchdog group. “We have…

When Chris Bryson sees a problem, he has a lot of trouble looking away. In the early days of the pandemic, when pet adoptions were on the rise, he started fostering a cat. That cat quickly became two cats, and then he added another two cats. Eventually, he was fostering eight cats in his apartment. “And then I thought, ‘Wow, I can’t keep doubling this or this is going to be a problem. But how do I help more?’” says Bryson, who founded Unata, a software platform that connects grocers and consumers and was acquired by Instacart in 2018. “I think I just have this addiction to wanting to scale up and do more and try to have a larger impact than what I did yesterday.” That need to do…

THE TRUE COST OF MEAT Some plant-based brands have struggled to lower their prices so they’re on par with meat and dairy products. But while beef burgers, bacon and chicken nuggets might be easier on household budgets, they have all sorts of planetary and socio-economic costs that don’t show up on receipts. FORESIS Livestock farming is responsible for almost 40% of global deforestation, mostly in the vital rainforests of the Amazon and Indonesia. RISKS Increased climate-related natural disasters could lower the profits of the 40 largest livestock companies by almost US$24 billion in 2030 from 2020 levels. DISEASE Meat-heavy diets are linked to higher rates of cancer and heart disease. If upper-middle-income countries reduced their consumption of red and processed meat by 14%, it could prevent 65,000 deaths per year.…

Right on Just read Scott Gilmore’s inspiring “The Right Thing to Do,” posted to a couple of B.C. enviro listservs, and wanted to say thanks. Such good leadership on your part. This long-time climate activist has long believed that there can be no mitigation success without bipartisan, all-on-the-same-page cooperation – cooperation in understanding the climate dangers together and working on possible solutions together. —Bill Henderson, Gibsons, B.C. Putting the conserve back in conservative Love how you’ve framed this: there’s nothing ideological about the clear need to conserve and carefully steward the gifts nature has given us. I also think there are probably lots of conservatives who believe this but are keeping quiet about the issue because it’s not currently on-message for their party. Kudos to Corporate Knights for seeing that…

The sustainable investment industry in the United States has grudgingly endorsed a watered-down regulation on climate disclosure, acknowledging a barrage of lobbying and legal threats that thwarted tougher carbon-reporting requirements. “This rule is a floor, not a ceiling, for companies to report how their business is adapting to a global economy that is transitioning away from fossil fuels,” said Maria Lettini, CEO of the U.S. Sustainable Investment Forum, in a statement. The rule, approved in March by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), will provide “an achievable floor of disclosure” on company climate emissions and physical and transition risks, said the chief executive of the association whose members manage US$5 trillion in assets. When fully in place in 2026, the rule will require large, publicly listed companies to disclose their…

By late February, the Smokehouse Creek wildfire in the Texas Panhandle had become the state’s first ever “gigafire,” a label saved for blazes that tear through more than a million acres. From a region that’s home to more cows than anywhere in the United States, images of cattle running from the “monster” blaze went viral, reminding us, yet again, that bad weather keeps getting worse. Scientists have been sounding the alarm that we need to do more and quickly to help curtail global warming’s catastrophic impacts, pointing out that coal, cars and cattle are top greenhouse gas emitters. The good news is that growth in clean energy was twice that of fossil fuels from 2019 to 2023, and global sales of electric cars surged 31% in 2023 from the year…

We all hold on to shibboleths – long-standing beliefs accepted by a particular group of people that are often no longer true. Like many in the environmental movement, I long thought of political conservatives as a nemesis for the environment. I came by this association honestly: from my grandfather, who co-founded the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the predecessor to the left-leaning NDP, to my mother, who once told me that if we elected the Progressive Conservatives in the 1988 federal election, they would chop down all our trees. Later, however, after I co-founded Corporate Knights magazine and launched a survey, asking leading environmentalists who had been the greenest Canadian prime minister and U.S. president in history, I was surprised that on both counts, conservative leaders won the green star: Brian Mulroney…

New York City architect Jared Della Valle began his career buying and redesigning existing buildings. In 2002, he invited three other architects to cooperate on a project to transform five vacant lots in Brooklyn into 10 attractive low-cost homes – demonstrating his profession’s power to lead social change. After two decades of designing both millionaires’ penthouses and socially conscious housing projects, Della Valle’s firm, Alloy Development, is turning heads again, with a gleaming tower in downtown Brooklyn called 505 State Street: New York’s first all-electric skyscraper. The 44-storey building with 440 market-rate residences is a three-sided landmark (like the famous Flatiron Building in nearby Manhattan) amid a full city block that Alloy is redeveloping. The super-efficient, fossil-fuel-free tower has integrated improved insulation and triple-glazed windows, as well as residential heat…

In Bolivia, a tax on hydrocarbons pays for a healthy meal program in schools. Paris is putting up €10 million to help farmers shift to organic production, while California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta has rewilded its rice production. From new nitrogen policies in the Netherlands and China to early-warning weather systems in Bangladesh, the seeds of a food-system revolution are being sown across the planet. But this rethinking of agriculture needs to go bigger and bolder, fast, according to a study, released recently by the Food System Economics Commission (FSEC), that spells out in sobering detail the social, economic and environmental costs of the current global food system – and the potential savings of a radical food-systems overhaul. “In short, our food systems are destroying more value than they create,” says…

The car has long reigned supreme in North American cities. As car ownership took off in the 1950s, urban planners and engineers designed streets and roads around automobile travel, allowing suburbs and sprawl to proliferate along highways. Many parts of Europe avoided this car-centric approach. The Netherlands, which was quite car-friendly in the 1960s, rethought its roads after more than 400 children died in car accidents in 1971 and widespread protests called on the government to “Stop de Kindermoord” – or stop the child murder. During the 1973 oil crisis, Denmark figured it was better to use transportation methods that reduced its reliance on oil-producing nations. Ever since, both countries’ cities have led the world in their cycling infrastructure. A growing number of congested cities in North America are now…

A convoy of tractors was making its way to a Dutch government building in February when Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted out his support for farmers revolting against the EU’s regulatory push to drive down climate emissions: “I’m pro-environment, but I support the farmers! Farming has no material effect on climate change.” The online reaction was swift, with stats, charts, links and memes filling replies from all sides. While overwhelming scientific findings consider agriculture, particularly livestock farming, a significant source of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, conflicting measurements, marketing and misinformation have been making the facts more difficult to decipher. And it appears the meat industry has been capitalizing on all the confusion. Ever since the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) first dropped a bombshell report on the “enormous” ecological…

The narrative surrounding plant-based diets often centres on Western experiences, inadvertently sidelining the rich, diverse culinary traditions of other regions. It’s an oversight that becomes increasingly significant against the backdrop of demographic shifts predicting that by 2050, one in four people on the planet will be African. While demand for beef, chicken and pork are on the rise on the continent, Africans consumed just 9.6 kilograms of meat per capita from 2020 to 2022 compared to North Americans’ 78.6 kilos. Grains like millet and maize form the backbone of African cuisine, but they merely hint at the continent’s diverse culinary landscape. Take Nigeria, where okra, fufu (made from yam or cassava) and vibrant leafy greens like ewedu and spinach grace daily meals. In Ethiopia, teff injera, a gluten-free flatbread, pairs…

With the nuclear calamities of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl fresh in the public mind, the 1980s saw a number of socially responsible investment funds pledge to keep nuclear energy out of their portfolios. The trend quickly spread, and soon the exclusion of companies that were involved in nuclear became the bedrock of socially conscious investment funds. Decades later, that consensus is now breaking down. The environmental and economic risks of nuclear power are being overshadowed by mounting anxiety around the climate crisis. Pushed by governments in Europe and North America, the responsible finance industry is revisiting the nuclear energy exclusion. “Nuclear energy will be an essential source of fuel in the transition to the renewable sources required to support a low-carbon economy,” said Marian Macindoe, head of ESG stewardship…

Hero: ‘Sponge city’ guru is climate-proofing China From the hanging gardens of Babylon to the fountains of Versailles, landscape architecture was always an elite activity, creating ornamental gardens for palaces and princes. In the 1850s, New York’s Central Park popularized the idea that green spaces could benefit ordinary folks, too. Now we’re finally realizing that creative landscaping can also be a vital tool for designing better parks, neighbourhoods and cities, using natural elements such as plants, forests, ponds and wetlands to create greener, safer environments in the long battle against climate change. The hero of this revolution: Beijing-based landscape architect Kongjian Yu, whose ideas have been implemented in more than 70 Chinese cities. Yu has pioneered the concept of “sponge cities” – urban landscapes designed to soak up stormwater, that…

On the world stage at Davos 2024, Canada’s minister of finance, Chrystia Freeland, declared that “right now we’re living through a moment which is comparable only to the Industrial Revolution.” She was referring to the green transition, and the opportunities and challenges that lay before us as world leaders race to decarbonize their economies. In her pitch to convince foreign investors to put their money in Canadian industries, Freeland said, “We now have a suite of policies for the industrial transformation worth about $120 billion,” pointing to major federal climate initiatives such as the $15-billion Canada Growth Fund and more than $80 billion in clean investment tax credits. But there’s a major caveat to all this: no one is tracking actual investments in the green technologies and infrastructure we need.…