Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2025 i Corporate Knights

Re: Who are Canada’s top international corporate citizens? At first glance your publication looked interesting and promising. But really?! Including Apple Inc. and Unilever PLC in your top 10 International Corporate Citizens is a travesty. Did your researchers not know that both these companies donate millions of dollars to the Trump organization, which has clearly said they want to remove 58 million acres of forest for building and construction, and open up Alaska to more drilling? And I could go on. How can we trust anything in your publication when you err on the side of the biggest enemy to the environment that there is? —Dr. Robin Alter, Toronto, ON CK: Thank you for your email and for your interest. While there is no perfect company, both Apple and Unilever…

Mikaela Loach’s career plan was to become a doctor and do searchand-rescue in the Mediterranean. Instead, organizing in the climate justice movement for the last 10 years has taken a dominant role in her life, leading the 27-year-old former medical student – who now has hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram and TikTok – to write It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World. The book charts the intersection of climate and racial justice and offers context and tools for how to change things on the ground. This year, she released a book for kids, Climate Is Just the Start. Loach says she wrote It’s Not That Radical because she felt it was missing from the climate movement canon. She has been surprised, and encouraged, to see…

As a form of property, the condominium is an exceptionally long-lived species, with evidence of buildings in ancient Babylon whose ground floors were owned separately from the rest of the structure. Despite the ancient pedigree, the view that prevailed over many subsequent centuries was that it made no sense to separate buildings into legally self-contained entities, much less divorce them from the land upon which they sat. After all, a building is a cohesive object, with common areas and infrastructure, as well as shared exposure to risks like fires or floods or deadbeat tenants. What could it mean to “own” the title to a cube of space in the sky that happens to be surrounded by walls and floors? All that began to change in the 1950s in Puerto Rico,…

What’s the best way to have a genuinely positive impact on the world? It’s a question of growing urgency for many young people as our global challenges intensify. For many, the answer leads them to business school. The “impact” metric was introduced to the Corporate Knights MBA ranking several years ago as a bonus, but this year is the first that it has become part of the official ranking. Corporate Knights evaluated 179 programs and ranked the top 40 for their focus on sustainability. Ninety percent of the score these rankings are based on is awarded for the content of the curriculum, and now 10% has been awarded for impact – what schools’ alumni are doing postgraduation. The school with the highest score on this measure this year was Bard…

One July morning this year, offices across Ethiopia closed their doors. By mid-afternoon, nearly 15 million citizens – students, farmers, civil servants, even priests – had put down pens and tools to take up shovels. In that single day, they planted some 355 million seedlings. One of those green ambassadors was Ayanaw Behailu, 15, who said he was “very happy to see the creation of greener areas across Addis [Ababa],” the capital city. The urgency is clear. More than 70% of Ethiopia’s territory faces desertification, threatening more than 40 million people. Launched in 2019, the Green Legacy Initiative (GLI) is the country’s audacious response: a bid to plant 50 billion trees by 2026. But more than a reforestation drive, the GLI is ecological statecraft – an attempt to braid the…

In June, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney joined other NATO leaders in declaring that Canada will spend 5% of its gross domestic product on defence, mostly on core military expenditures. Spending will reach $63 billion this fiscal year, growing to an eye-watering $150 billion per year a decade from now. We will gain an expanded arsenal of fighter jets, armoured vehicles, submarines and warships, but will we be more secure? It is a “spend first, ask questions later” approach that does not pretend to be based on any systematic, thoughtful analysis of how to best defend ourselves against the clear and present dangers that are eroding our security. Paramount among those dangers are unstable and collapsing global ecosystems. From climate change alone, Canada has sustained tens of billions in economic…

What would the economy look like if governments trimmed back bureaucracy to let innovators innovate? The opening pages of Abundance: How We Build a Better Future paint one vision. Authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson envision a Jetson-esque future: clean energy, lab-grown meat, new medical advancements, less time spent working, more time enjoying cheaper, eco-friendly intercity travel. The life described in the book is like today’s but run through an Instagram filter that shows a more bountiful world, and one that’s further down the green-energytransition pathway. If you haven’t heard about abundance yet, you probably will. The concept is having a moment and shaping policy discussions in North America and around the world. Titles like Klein and Thompson’s, Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck and Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works all make versions…

It can be tempting, in the face of the U.S. government’s all-out war on climate progress and the inertia of fossil fuels in the energy system, to succumb to despair on behalf of future generations. But that is a luxury we cannot afford, and young people know this best of all. When we look to youth, we see a defiance that should make petro-powers nervous. We see creativity coupled with practicality. We see realism and inventiveness together. In short, we see the kind of power that real change actually requires. At Corporate Knights, we have the privilege every year to open a window on some of the brightest and most creative young minds that are rising to the climate and energytransition challenge. From Indigenous renewables champions to healthcare advocates; from…

Hero: Ford’s new ‘Model T’ moment With Donald Trump in the driver’s seat rolling back emission regulations, and consumers’ sagging interest in high-priced electric vehicles, it’s no wonder that U.S. automakers have cut back plans for EV sales and production. GM delayed the opening of a new truck plant and slowed EV assembly at other factories, Ford scrapped plans for a big electric SUV and cut EV spending, and Stellantis paused manufacturing of some EVs while putting new emphasis on hybrid vehicles. But from this dumpster fire of reduced expectations, one automaker has developed a new vision. In August, Ford unveiled its “Universal EV Platform,” a new concept in affordable production that it labelled “a Model T moment,” in a nod to its origin story. Ford’s iconic Model T motor…