Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2026 i Corporate Knights

Scan the contemporary economy and you’ll be struck by the towering giants that loom over the landscape. More than a dozen trillion-dollar corporations account for roughly a quarter of the total value of the global stock market. When you take into account their hundreds of subsidiaries and thousands of suppliers, each of these mega-companies carries the heft and scale of a Group of 20 country – influencing governments and shaping policies to their advantage worldwide. But squint and you’ll start to see something else. While markets may seem to flow only toward greater concentration, there are clear signs of a counter-trend. Varyingly called the decentralized or distributed economy, this movement spreads influence across a wider terrain and restores power to smaller-scale actors. What does it look like? Goods are made…

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria tore through the small island of Puerto Rico, causing massive flooding and destroying thousands of homes. Nearly 6,000 people died in the storm. The power grid, which had been poorly maintained, collapsed. The blackout would become the longest in U.S. history. Prior to Maria’s battering, Puerto Rico’s solar industry did a modest business. That quickly changed. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, solar panel purchases soared. They became so ubiquitous that when Hurricane Fiona landed in 2022, the national grid operator launched a pilot program connecting batteries to residential panels for backup power in the event of future blackouts and as an alternative to using gas peaker plants. Today, solar panels are installed on the rooftops of some 175,000 households; of those, approximately…

Canada’s capital markets were built for stability, not for risk. The country’s financial architecture – from the chartered banks to pension funds and development agencies – was designed to safeguard trust, consolidate capital and avoid the volatility seen elsewhere. That design has served the country well in times of crisis, but that same caution has produced an unintended side effect: a system that prizes safety over imagination. In an economy rooted in Indigenous lands and shaped by generations of immigrants and entrepreneurs, risk aversion can become its own form of exclusion. The results are measurable. Over the past five years, 90% of Canadian venture deals have gone to all-male founding teams, while women-owned businesses received only about 4% of total venture funding. Fewer than 1% of Indigenous or Black entrepreneurs…

Every year in Canada, 30 million tonnes of wheat straw left over from harvesting gets left on farmers’ fields. What if you could turn it into paper products rather than wasting it, and save forests in the process? The founders of Red Leaf Pulp say they’ve figured out how to make pulp from agricultural by-products rather than wood from trees, and they’re ready to start producing at scale. The company’s first-of-a-kind pulp mill, slated to begin construction in Regina, Saskatchewan, in the first quarter of 2026, will manufacture what it calls “climate-positive, non-wood pulp” using a process that consumes 95% less water and 70% less energy than traditional mills – all while running on electricity generated by burning biomass from its own waste stream. “We think there’s nothing in Canada…

Hero: ‘Sowing’ water in the high Andes With a population of 10.1 million, Peru’s capital of Lima is the fifth-largest city in the Americas – and one of the driest cities on Earth. Situated on a desert plain overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Lima receives just nine millimitres of rain a year – less than most Saharan villages. The city draws water mainly from aquifers and the polluted river Rímac, which rises 200 kilometres to the east in the Andes mountains and dribbles weakly through Lima’s shallow gullies. In the shantytowns high up the treeless mountainsides, residents have erected sheets of nylon netting to capture moisture from the fog. Engineers promise more dams and more tunnels to bring water from the Amazon side of the Andes – but the accelerated melting…

Airbnb-style networks of home chargers for electric vehicles are an emerging global trend with many start-ups vying for scale, such as EVmatch in the United States, GoPlugable in the United Kingdom and Ivygo in Australia. So far, none have managed to go mainstream, and community marketplaces for EV charging remain a niche phenomenon. But a Quebec green-tech investor thinks he can break the mould and go mainstream. This winter, François Boutin-Dufresne, a serial entrepreneur based in Montreal, is launching ShareCharge, an app that connects drivers with private EV chargers. In doing so, he hopes to solve the most pernicious challenge limiting EV adoption: range anxiety. A 2024 J.D. Power study found that nearly three-quarters of Canadians described themselves as unlikely to buy an EV, with most citing limited range as…

When it comes to heat, data centres deliver a double whammy. These massive computing hubs generate a constant torrent of excess heat while simultaneously using vast amounts of power to get rid of it. An estimated 38% to 40% of energy used by data centres goes toward cooling. But instead of using energy to cool their servers, some companies are trying to recover heat and put it to use. “What we try to do,” says Sacha van Geffen, a lead engineer at Leafcloud, “is actually see if we can place some of those compute resources that generate a lot of heat really close to a place where heat is needed.” Leafcloud is an Amsterdam-based cloud services company that turns waste heat into warm showers through a distributed network of servers,…

It’s 7:30 a.m. in Nairobi’s Wakulima Market as a pickup truck noses up to crates of sukuma, tomatoes and passion fruit still cool from the night air. Farmers from 80 to 200 kilometres out arrive on trust and tight timing. Weighing takes minutes. Money pings through mobile channels before the dust settles. By midmorning, those crates have atomized acrossthe city – into school kitchens, kiosk counters and hotel storerooms. From a distance it could be classified as “informal.” Up close, it looks like muscle memory – a system that learned to survive by becoming short, distributed and locally governed. Africa’s markets have been pressure testing what the rest of the world mostly theorizes about: resilience through proximity. The vocabulary is “short food supply chains,” but the practice is older than…

The race to seize the opportunities from the green transition is heating up As the global economic transition accelerates, more companies are recognizing that sustainability isn’t just good marketing – it’s good for business, too. The global effort to align our economic systems with the planet’s carrying capacity has lately acquired newfound urgency. We need to transition faster. This was the animating spirit of the new methodology behind the Corporate Knights Global 100 ranking. The revised methodology introduces “sustainable revenue momentum” to measure how fast companies are increasing sustainable revenues. This metric now accounts for one-third of a company’s score, with overall sustainable revenues and sustainable investments accounting for the other two-thirds. “We’re firing a shot across the bow that speed matters,” Corporate Knights CEO Toby Heaps says. “We’re firing…

In a bohemian neighbourhood of São Paulo, Carla Guindani was preparing to cross an important threshold in the struggle to get small-scale farmers the recognition they deserve. Days before COP30 launched to great anticipation in the Amazonian city of Belém, Guindani’s team at Raízes do Campo was ironing out the final details of their participation in the Green Zone of the international climate conference, an area that was open to the public, with kiosks, conversation sessions and food. “For us, it’s very important,” says Guindani, an advocate of cooperative food systems who comes from a family of farmers. The shelves of Raízes’s modest showroom were stocked with the fruits of their labour: organic white rice, chocolate made from Bahian cocoa and coffee beans from the southern reaches of Brazil’s Minas…

On November 27, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a memorandum of understanding with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to try to get a pipeline built from the oil sands to the coast of British Columbia. The “grand bargain,” as Smith dubbed it, introduces two sets of promises: Ottawa commits to-opening every door it can to pump heavy diluted bitumen to tidewater, so long as a private backer and Indigenous partners get on board; and oil companies will spend billions to reduce upstream greenhouse gas emissions and earn their barrels the moniker “low carbon” – something climate experts say is little more than a pipe dream. One year earlier almost to the day, then-UN Special Envoy on Climate Action Mark Carney gave the keynote address at the Sustainable Finance Forum in…

Don Tapscott, the author of numerous books on blockchain and a soon-to-be-released book on artificial intelligence, points out that only 5% of the world’s computing power is used at any time. SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – is a great example of leveraging unused capacity. Instead of buying one giant supercomputer, the SETI@home project at the Berkeley SETI Research Center asked millions of people to let their home computers help when they weren’t being used, like while they were sleeping. Each computer received a small piece of space data to analyze, then sent the results back to the research team. When combined, those computing efforts worked like a huge virtual supercomputer. At its peak, the performance of SETI@home rivalled systems that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to…

Today’s most pressing climate problems require expert attention. But who, really, are the experts? U.S. climate researcher Victoria Herrmann has a doctorate in geography and a specialization in polar studies, and she’s an official National Geographic “Explorer.” But when she worked on America’s Eroding Edges, a 2017 study of shoreline communities facing rising sea levels, she learned to shut up and just listen. Herrmann was the so-called expert on climate change, but the 350 community leaders interviewed for her study knew their communities best – and they pointed her toward local threats and crises she’d never studied in school. The story Herrmann most likes to tell is of an activist in the U.S. territory of American Samoa, who showed her how climate change and culture are indelibly linked. He described…

In 2021, all the blockchain-based cryptocurrencies combined used somewhere between 190 and 250 terawatt-hours of electricity, which is just about 1% of global electricity demand that year, or roughly the same as Taiwan’s consumption. Critics called blockchain technology fundamentally unsustainable. Then, in September 2022, Ethereum underwent a major transformation it called “The Merge,” shifting its consensus mechanism from “proof of work” to “proof of stake.” This cut the network’s energy consumption by 99.9%. The network’s annual energy use dropped from 80 terawatt-hours – the same amount of electricity that Austria or Finland uses in a year – to just 0.01 terawatt-hours. Proof of stake achieved these gains by eliminating wasteful competition. Instead of miners racing to solve puzzles, Ethereum now relies on validators who are chosen to create new blocks…

Even before Donald Trump took office and declared his war on renewables, the wind industry was fighting an uphill battle. The Biden administration helped fast-track low-carbon energy in the United States, but other factors like persistent inflation, supply chain challenges and rising interest rates – exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – changed the economics of once-promising wind projects. Adding insult to injury, Trump has eliminated incentives for the industry, barred new solar and wind projects from federal land and waters, and delayed nine alreadyapproved offshore wind projects that were set to provide electricity to nearly five million households. “Windmills,” Trump said in August, “we’re just not going to allow them. They are ruining the country.” It is in this adverse context that the seven wind companies on Corporate Knights’…

On a sunny September afternoon in 2023, the Laura Maersk sat stationed in the harbour of Copenhagen, dwarfing everything around her. With a gleaming blue prow, colourful nautical flags and the words “ALL THE WAY TO ZERO” blazed across her forecastle, Laura prepared to set forth across the Baltic Sea: the world’s first ocean-going container ship to run on green methanol. The Laura Maersk says a lot about her country of origin. Denmark, the Nordic nation of some six million people, is a leader in clean technology, emission reductions and the energy transition. It is home to an extraordinary number of sector-leading companies whose sustainability performance soars above global standards. And as much of Europe and the world walk back or water down their climate ambitions, Denmark just keeps steaming…