“There is an antidote to doom and despair,” the architect of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change posted. “It’s action on the ground, and it’s happening in all corners of the Earth.”

Now a decade since Christiana Figueres accomplished the Herculean task of getting 196 countries to put their differences aside and adopt the accord, the former United Nations climate chief and long-time Costa Rican diplomat remains deeply attuned to the emotional toll the climate crisis has taken on those advocating for action. “The pain of the climate communities is at an all-time high,” she tells Corporate Knights on a call from her coastal home in the Guanacaste province of northwestern Costa Rica. She knows their climate anxiety well. “I used to wake up every single morning with an alarm clock ringing in my gut, because scientists are screaming from the rooftops that we have deadlines right in front of us . . . and we all know we are running out of time.” 

That “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” as she calls it, is only intensifying as administrations in the United States, Argentina and even the green poster child of Costa Rica brandish chainsaws to climate regulations, while Trump is “breaking the very bones of society.” And yet somehow, Figueres manages her trademark mix of “outrage and optimism” (which, by the way, is the name of her popular climate change podcast) from a much more Zen space. Now she’s working on sharing her secret to alchemizing our collective pain into personal and planetary resilience with thousands of climate leaders, at a time when they need it most. 

By the time Figueres took on the role of executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2010, she had been working as a diplomat, renewable-energy advocate and international climate negotiator for three decades. Figueres was in the thick of dealing with the pressures of preparing for the Paris Agreement in 2013 when “out of the clear blue sky” her 25-year marriage fell apart. Overwhelmed by grief, she was wracked with suicidal thoughts, until, she says, she discovered the teachings of Zen master and long-time peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. “It was really – I mean literally – a lifesaver for me.”

She remembers reading and re-reading his calligraphy that said “The tears of yesterday have become rain.” “Slowly I began to understand that I had a choice about the pain that was overwhelming me.” That pain could become the “chrysalis for learning and growth,” she explains – “the mud needed for a lotus to grow.”

Hanh was known as the “father of mindfulness” in the West, but to Figueres, he soon became her spiritual father, without whom, she says, the Paris Agreement may not have happened. For those keeping count, that gives Figueres two high-profile dads. Her birth father, José Figueres, was equally formative in shaping her brand of climate diplomacy: the coffee grower turned revolution leader served three elected terms as president of Costa Rica and is considered the founder of the Central American nation’s democracy.

Is the energy that I bring to myself, to others, to this work stemming from grief, pain and despair, or am I transitioning my energy to one that stems from love and care?

— Christiana Figueres, co-founder, Global Optimism, and former UN climate chief

Before the 95-year-old monk’s death in 2022, Figueres had begun working with the monastics at Plum Village, Hanh’s global community of mindfulness centres/Buddhist monasteries, to share his teachings, through week-long meditation retreats for leaders in the climate and biodiversity space and a seven-week online course for broader reach. During Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet (ZASP), the virtual course based on Hanh’s bestselling book of the same name, a dozen monks, nuns and Zen community leaders – including Figueres – led a cohort of 1,400 participants from 70 nations through a tumultuous fall season. 

ZASP students – myself among them – ranged from activists and scientists to sustainable business consultants and concerned citizens. We were shown a number of daily practices to ground our nervous systems, including mindful breathing and walking. But the teachings go beyond the usual mindfulness techniques that have burgeoned on meditation apps for the last decade. Daily talks and short meditations are designed to cultivate a deep reverence for and sense of interconnection or “interbeing” with the earth, an approach that was quintessential to Hanh, who was exiled from Vietnam for his activism during the war. At Plum Village, Europe’s largest Buddhist monastery, Hanh established his own brand of “engaged Buddhism” rooted in caring for the earth. It’s not just about quieting the mind; the course encourages us to slow down to cultivate the mindset, openness and understanding needed to work collaboratively to address the climate crisis.

Getting out of our judgment box

At the course’s first sharing group two days after the U.S. election, participants are guided to break off into groups of four and practise deep listening – listening without interrupting or commenting. Admittedly, it’s tough not to jump in and turn it into a venting session about Trump’s win. But as Figueres has reminded us in her weekly talks, with practice, deep listening is a gift we can give loved ones and a powerful technique that can transform our work in the world. 

“What I love about the deep-listening skill that we are taught is the fact that it takes us out of our judgment box,” Figueres says. “If I’m in a conversation with anyone, my default is to bring my own prejudices, but when you enter into a conversation from that space, you already enter a dead conversation.”

Figueres confesses that during the last stretch of negotiating the Paris Agreement, she had to check her judgments at the door in conversations with governments that she disagreed with “from the bottom of my gut.” 

“That’s where it got truly challenging for me, to be able to not react immediately but rather stay with my breathing, stay with my listening skills.” Instead of preaching at them, she decided to ask them each about their history, their concerns, their aspirations. Although every country started from a different place, their realities began to merge, she explains, when they each came to the realization that “those future aspirations boil down to a stable, safe planet” – without her needing to sermonize, she adds. “Once you touch the pain or the fear that is behind people’s words and actions, then you have a rich conversation that can move you forward.”

Today, she’s teaching the technique as an antidote not just to the polarization splintering societies, but also to the divisions within environmental communities that can, at times, descend into what she calls “circular firing squads.”

“How many times do we not agree with colleagues who are also doing the utmost to address climate change? So many activists, leaders, scientists, corporates, financial institutions, all of whom are working toward the same direction of decarbonizing the economy with a different view,” she says. “If we have the space within ourselves, the inner space to have these conversations from a sincere non-judgmental perspective, we actually are able to find common ground and move forward together.”

Damned if you’re doomed

Of course, Zen has its limits. All the compassionate listening and mindful breathing in the world won’t stop Trump’s administration from smashing environmental regulations and opening the floodgates to more drilling and tree-felling. What then? Remembering that the world is bigger than the United States is key, Figueres says, and that the clean energy transition is larger than one government. “Trump is not the be all and end all of everything.”

She says to look for tectonic shifts in leadership, from states, from other countries, and from companies. “The largest companies in the United States understand that this is going to be yet another four-year hiatus in efforts to decarbonize the global economy or the U.S. economy, but that four years is not eternity – it is four years,” says Figueres, who launched a coalition of CEOs, investors, mayors, governors, scientists and youth activists last June called Mission 2025, all inviting governments to ratchet up their climate action plans.

“These companies know that they actually have to plan much longer-term than four years, and they know that decarbonizing their products and services is the only path that they can follow because that is irreversible right now.”

Her work with Mission 2025 and Plum Village, along with her Outrage + Optimism podcast and other offshoots of her Global Optimism organization, all ultimately flow into the same river: Figueres is laser-focused on sparking mindset shifts, “radical collaborations” and new narratives that foster the urgent action needed on climate change. 

It’s all part of an effort to “change the narrative in the way that I’m sharing with you now for us all not to succumb to this doomism and think that the world has come to an end,” Figueres says. 

Admittedly, some days, she does find herself overwhelmed by pain and anger, knowing that millions of people are already losing their homelands, their livelihoods to climate change. “That moral injustice is unacceptable to me.” But as painful as it is for us to hear, for instance, a growing number of climate scientists warn that the Paris Agreement’s target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is already “deader than a doornail,” Figueres says that focusing on failure only distorts reality. “The challenge is that we humans are programmed for a negative bias; we’re wired for always being vigilant about the threats. We’re not wired to be vigilant about opportunities.”

And that, Figueres says, is our personal responsibility as climate advocates. “I don’t need to worry about not being informed of the threats. Those are a tsunami that comes at me all the time. I do need to put energy and intention on being much more mindful and conscious of positive things that are happening. That’s how I balance. And that actually is more representative of reality,” she adds, pointing to the momentum behind wind and solar energy and the rise of EVs.

No mud, no lotus

During the last week of teachings, as with every week, Figueres reminds the Zen students “why this all matters.” She challenges us to mirror the change we want to see in our work and in the world. 

“I’ve been reminding myself that yes, I do want policy changes at the level of governments and corporations, and I asked myself what policy changes am I operating with respect to my thoughts and actions? Yes, I do want to accelerate the energy transition, and therefore am I transitioning my own energy? Is the energy that I bring to myself, to others, to this work stemming from grief, pain and despair, or am I transitioning my energy to one that stems from love and care? Am I nurturing and caring for my own personal resilience so that I’m not in constant burnout mode?” 

Seven weeks into the course, my own energy feels more renewable, though some days just following breaking news can still feel like an emotional mudslide. But as Hanh would say, ‘No mud, no lotus.” 

“Lotus flowers only grow in ponds that have a muddy bottom,” Figueres tells students. “And that is the beautiful symbol of how we transform the mud in our life into lotus flowers. We can choose to be overwhelmed by all the mud ponds in our life, of which there are many, or we understand that every mud pond is precisely where the lotus flowers can grow and bloom.”

Adria Vasil is the managing editor of Corporate Knights and author of the bestselling Ecoholic book series.

The post Zen and the art of saving the planet in the Trump era appeared first on Corporate Knights.

THE CITY ELECTRIFIER

Ali Husnain

27, St. John’s, NL

Sustainability coordinator – City of St. John’s

Growing up in Pakistan during an energy crisis, Ali Husnain lived through frequent blackouts and limited electricity access. “Witnessing the disproportionate impacts of climate change – floods, earthquakes and heat waves – deepened my resolve,” he says. While studying electrical engineering, he got excited about renewable energy. “I knew I wanted to dedicate my career to sustainability.” Just three years after immigrating to Canada, the sustainability coordinator for St. John’s has already secured a$6 million in funding for sustainability and climate change projects and is overseeing the deep retrofit of 101 affordable housing units, as well as a corporate energy-efficiency project that will cut 11% of the city’s footprint. “Cities are where climate action truly impacts daily life.” Husnain’s approach to sustainability is driven by the belief that “drop by drop makes the ocean.” While individual efforts, like electrifying a single building, may seem small from the outside, he knows his small team at the City of St. John’s is driving meaningful action and making the coastal city more resilient.

THE RECIPROCAL COLLABORATOR

Freddie Huppé Campbell

28, The Kootenays, BC
Director, Energy & Climate program
Indigenous Clean Energy

“It is not possible to decolonize a colonial system; therefore, new systems must be created that uphold sovereignty,” Freddie Huppé Campbell says. With the teachings of a rural and mountainous upbringing sewn into her ways of being, Huppé Campbell, a proud Two-Spirit Michif, works to uphold reciprocal relationships with human and non-human kin in everything she does. Lately, that has focused on empowering Indigenous communities around the globe to seek control of their own renewable-energy solutions. She established the Energy & Climate program at Indigenous Clean Energy (ICE), fostering collaborations and training with communities and organizations in Colombia, Ecuador, New Zealand and Australia. She has also developed ICE’s National Hub, leading policy endeavours at the federal, provincial and territorial levels. “There are many things I dream of doing that do not fit on a linear timeline. Whatever is ahead, I intend to greet it warmly, nourish what needs to grow and adapt as needed.”

THE RENEWABLE-ENERGY CATALYST

Jasmine Lyn

28, Scarborough, ON
Program manager, Women in Renewable Energy
Project lead, City of Toronto

Jasmine Lyn found her inspiration to safeguard the future by looking to the past, and the knowledge that ancient civilizations held about how to steward the riches of the earth. Equity and equality are at the heart of Lyn’s work. She helped Women in Renewable Energy, an organization that started in Toronto, broaden its reach across the globe, launching chapters in the United Kingdom and Iceland that enable women and underrepresented groups to network and grow their professional skills. In Toronto’s municipal government, Lyn has been focused on meeting the city’s net-zero goal by 2040, working with operators of dozens of affordable housing buildings to help connect them to funding, resources and opportunities for green retrofits, which have lowered energy bills. Prior to that, she led the Climate Change Adaptation Strategy in Orillia, Ontario, implementing new EV chargers and undertaking an energy-management analysis of city facilities.

THE ELECTRICAL FIREBRAND

Anik Rahman

29, Toronto
Vice-chair, Memorial University of Newfoundland; advisor, Independent Electricity
System Operator

Anik Rahman witnessed firsthand how unfair climate change can be, seeing his homeland of Bangladesh battered by flooding and cyclones when it’s responsible for only 0.56% of global carbon emissions. Rahman graduated from Newfoundland’s Memorial University as a licensed engineer in 2017; by 2021, he was one of three Canadians appointed to the World Energy Council’s Future Energy Leaders program. He is now vice-chair of Memorial University, where he oversees the university’s emissions- and carbon-footprint-reduction efforts, including an electrification project that is removing emissions equivalent to taking 6,200 cars off the streets. Rahman is also an advisor for the Independent Electricity System Operator, the not-for-profit that operates Ontario’s electrical grid, managing the grid-reliability contracts and designing procurement mechanisms for renewables and non-emitting resources.

INNOVATORS

THE CLEANTECH INCUBATOR

Morgan Lehtinen

& Sebastian Alamillo

29, Kingston, ON; 24, Kingston, ON
Co-founders, RXN Hub

When BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig ruptured in 2010, a 15-year-old Morgan Lehtinen watched the disaster unfold and knew her future would be shaped by it. “That propelled me to spin out my PhD research into a company to clean contaminated water systems,” she says. Always destined for science, Lehtinen hit a roadblock in graduate school, frustrated by how much groundbreaking research “never leaves the lab.” Fast forward to today: Lehtinen, a serial entrepreneur, is the co-founder and executive director of RXN Hub, a $15-million, 65,000-square-foot facility designed to pilot and scale sustainable chemical innovations. She and co-founder Sebastian Alamillo, the director of strategic development, have helped more than 100 start-ups navigate commercialization; now they’re bringing vital research and development facilities online, aiming to create more than 400 green jobs over the next three years. “We built the kind of place I wish I had as a founder,” Lehtinen explains. Alamillo echoes this vision: “Chemistry got us into this climate mess, and chemtech will get us out.”

THE SEAWEED ECO-PRENEUR

Majid Hajibeigy

29, surrey, BC
Founder & CEO
Canadian Pacifico Seaweeds Ltd

At 23, Majid Hajibeigy decided to return to his family’s farming roots, but his fields would be the crashing shores of the Pacific; his crop, seaweed. Since then, the founder of Canadian Pacifico Seaweeds has worked with researchers, chefs and food scientists to create products like seaweed gel for locally made hand sanitizer in the pandemic and has partnered with Konscious Foods, a plant-based seafood brand, to put new plant-based sushi products in the marketplace. “My goal is also to unite academia and industry in a powerful alliance, harnessing groundbreaking research and translating it into practical, commercially viable solutions.” The work hasn’t been without its challenges: “Recent environmental changes, such as rising ocean temperatures and acidification, have severely impacted seaweed production.” But Hajibeigy’s company has raised more than $3.5 million to fund projects like KelpSpat, which increases seaweed cultivation productivity by up to 400%, boosting its carbon-storing potential. “I aim to revolutionize the way we approach conservation by creating a scalable, for-profit conservation business model.”

THE INVENTIVE COLOURIST

Iris Redinger

26, Toronto/Waterloo, ON
CEO and founder
Material Futures

Sometimes, climate solutions can be found just by looking at our surroundings differently. You could say that is how Iris Redinger stumbled on one. The University of Waterloo architecture grad founded Material Futures, which uses microorganisms to produce all-natural, biodegradable dyes, instead of chemical ones. Or, as Redinger puts it, turning microbes in food waste “into miniature dye factories” that produce vegan colourants that are longer-lasting than plant-based dyes. The technology is applicable across industries like food, cosmetics, fashion and packaging, Redinger says. “Understanding how different offshoots from one industry can be used as an input in another industry requires interdisciplinary thinking,” she says. “If we want to address our climate crisis effectively, we need to start thinking holistically and not in silos.” Her idea is already turning heads, earning her a Mitacs Entrepreneur Award, which honours students, professors and partner organizations, and some $1.5 million in financing so she can scale up her waste-diversion process to reach her goal of diverting 500,000 kilograms of waste from treatment and landfill by 2030.

THE WASTE WIZARDS

Prishita Agarwal

& Abhiudai Mishra

22, 23, Vancouver
Co-founders, Mosa Technologies

Prishita Agarwal and Abhi Mishra first met in high school at a boarding school in South India. “We became friends and discovered our shared interest in social impact,” Agarwal says. Coincidentally, they both decided to study at the University of British Columbia. “When I moved from India, where resources were scarce, to Canada, a land of abundance, I noticed a stark contrast in the public mindset,” Agarwal says. It was at a house party, seeing glass bottles being tossed in the trash, that the idea for Mosa was born. Since then, they’ve kept 20,000 bottles from landfills by upcycling them into home decor products. “While plastic is often highlighted [as a problem], 78% of recyclable glass ends up in landfills,” Mishra explains. The Mosa founders see business as a force for good: “By integrating sustainability into the core of our operations,” Mishra says, “we can prove that it is possible to be both profitable and responsible.”

THE INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SCHOLAR

Janna Wale

28, Snuneymuxw territory (Nanaimo, BC)
Indigenous research and partnerships lead Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions

The salmon had a message. As a child in British Columbia, and a member of the Gitanmaax First Nation, Janna Wale became attuned to the changing climate as she observed how much harder it was for her family to harvest salmon. She decided early on that she wanted to help ensure that future generations would be able to continue those and other traditions that are rooted in territory. As a policy advisor for the Canadian Climate Institute, the climate researcher demonstrated how Indigenous research can be integrated into climate policy. Her report with the Yellowhead Institute, Bad Forecast, exposed the lack of meaningful Indigenous inclusion in climate-adaptation policy-making in Canada. She is also a CBC columnist and spoke at COP28 in Dubai as a representative of SevenGen, a collective of Indigenous youth energy leaders. “We need more young leaders, more diverse knowledges and more Indigenous people included in policy- and decision-making,” she says. “We are leaders, we are scientists, and we are ready to contribute and make change.”

THE EMPOWERERS

Leïla Cantave

& Tyjana Connolly

27, 26, Montreal & Calgary
Co-founders, Black Eco Bloom

After meeting while interning at COP26 in 2021, Leïla Cantave and Tyjana Connolly couldn’t ignore the reality that they saw no other Black youth at the summit. Frustration quickly turned into action: in 2022 they founded Black Eco Bloom to empower Black women to take on leadership roles in the fight against climate change. “Our work is about more than just environmental sustainability; it’s about redefining who is seen and ensuring that the experiences and knowledge of marginalized communities are not just included but prioritized,” says BEB chair Cantave, who has also been the Quebec lead with Climate Action Network Canada since 2022. Connolly is BEB’s executive director as well as a program officer at United Nations Canada and the co-author of Green Is Not White: Giving Voice to Indigenous, Black, and Racially Marginalized Workers in the Environmental Justice Movement. She explains that BEB has grown to provide guidance on green job pathways and funding for community resilience projects. “This work is very daunting to do alone; there’s so much power in community.” 

THE CONVERSATION SETTER

Nic Raytek

25, Toronto
Senior manager, sustainable programs
GLOBE Series

Nic Raytek wasn’t expecting her internship at a think tank to upend her worldview. But as she sifted through data on global emissions, she recalls, “It was clear that reaching 1.5°C wasn’t going to happen.” That sparked a deep climate anxiety that stayed with her – until she found a way to channel it into action. “I decided that by pursuing a career in sustainability, I could actively shape a more certain, sustainable future for all.” Now, as senior manager of sustainable programs at GLOBE (Global Opportunities for Business and the Environment) Series, Raytek is steering the conversation on sustainability at the highest levels. Whether through her programming at GLOBE Forum in Vancouver, GLOBExCHANGE in Toronto or helping with global events like the Canada pavilion of COP27, COP28 and soon COP29, thousands of leaders and innovators have walked away from her programs armed with the connections and insights to drive change.

THE GREEN CREATIVE

Smiely Khurana

26, Vancouver
founder of The Sustainable Act

As the former sustainability lead at Reel Green, Smiely Khurana was called “the face of the sustainability movement in Hollywood North,” helping major studios and films of all sizes in British Columbia shrink their carbon footprints. In 2020, the creative powerhouse also launched The Sustainable Act, which began as a podcast on greening the film industry and has expanded to empower communities to go greener with tools, workshops and events. Her next act hits even closer to home for Khurana. She’s launching the Climate Wellness Network, offering resources and support for those struggling with climate anxiety. “The 2021 floods in my hometown of Abbotsford caused by an atmospheric river have profoundly influenced my work. Seeing my community struggle through such devastation brought my climate anxiety to its peak.” Khurana says she’s committed to leveraging the power of media not just to amplify environmental efforts, but to ensure that young people have the emotional support needed to navigate an uncertain future.

POLICY PUSHERS

THE GOVERNMENT WHISPERER

Shoshana Pasternak

28, Toronto
Senior associate, government affairs
Invenergy

Shoshana Pasternak had heard the utopic stories of what electrification could do for our economies, our planet and the people on it, but every plan she encountered came with a caveat. “That ‘but’ told me a transition was possible,” she recalls, “but we need to support these innovations with systems that reduce risk.” As policy director for Ontario’s Ministry of Energy and Electrification, Shoshana brought forward policies that advanced hundreds of megawatts of renewable power, including rooftop solar, and expedited the build-out of transmission lines in the province, reaching more clean energy projects. Now overseeing government relations at Invenergy in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, she has advanced more than 30 renewable-energy projects, including wind, solar and energy storage. “Even getting one clean energy project off the ground can power a small town – it’s about those tangible impacts,” she says.

THE PMO INFLUENCER

Harry Orbach-Miller

29, Toronto/Ottawa
Policy advisor
Prime Minister’s Office, Government of Canada

Harry Orbach-Miller is used to being the youngest person in the room. Often, that room is at the centre of decision-making in Canada. For more than five years, he has helped shape public policy as an advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “I feel incredibly privileged to be able to play a small role in the central nervous system of the federal government’s policy-making process,” says Orbach-Miller, who is one of the youngest members of the Prime Minister’s Office. “Working in politics can be a frenetic experience at the best of times,” he notes, so he tries to focus on what he can control, putting his energy into areas where he can actually move the needle. His work on the Electoral Participation Act helped expand advance polls and ensure on-campus voting. He helped to develop Canada’s Public Transit Fund and the $6-billion Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund and to secure $500 million for the Green and Inclusive Community Buildings program, initiatives that are designed to drive climate action and create more sustainable cities. Orbach-Miller also helped steer $77 million in relief funding to Lytton, the B.C. village that was devastated by wildfires in 2022.

THE JUST-TRANSITION WARRIOR

Jodi-Ann Jue Xuan Wang

26, Oxford, UK
Policy analyst, sustainable finance & just transition, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment

Among the mantras that drive Jodi-Ann Jue Xuan Wang is one from Audre Lorde: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” That sums up how Wang, raised in White Rock, B.C., views her own work, which sits, as she describes it, at the intersection of finance and climate justice. “My pursuit of climate justice work is informed by my womanhood, my race, my youth and as a daughter of first-generation immigrants, raised in the diaspora,” she says. She specializes in climate policy and finance, advising investors and governments on an equitable transition to net-zero. She was the lead author on the U.K. Transition Plan Taskforce’s just-transition guidance, serves as a member of the UN Expert Group on Resource Management and leads the Commonwealth Youth Climate Change Network. This year, the PhD candidate at the University of Oxford co-authored a UN report on intergenerational equity in resource management. “Advocacy and activism exist on a spectrum,” she notes. “Many of the most tedious, unglorified tasks are what secure the movement and a better outcome for all.”

THE NET-ZERO DOCTOR

Owen Dan Luo

25, Montreal
Resident physician, internal medicine
McGill University Health Centre

Owen Dan Luo has seen the health impacts of climate change, land degradation and biodiversity loss up close as a medical student treating patients at hospitals and clinics around Montreal. That’s why he’s made it his mission to raise awareness of the impact that healthcare has on the climate crisis and prepare physicians and trainees to decarbonize the Canadian healthcare system. “Our healthcare system is responsible for approximately 5% of our nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions – twice as much as the aviation industry,” he notes. As a past co-chair of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students’ Health and Environment Adaptive Response Task Force, Luo developed national standards for medical education on planetary health. He founded Project Green Healthcare/Project Vert la Santé, which provides funding and facilitates mentorships to launch sustainability projects in Canadian healthcare. So far, more than 100 medical students from 14 medical schools in nine provinces have launched projects, from a personal-protective-equipment recycling program in Saskatoon to composting programs in Trois-Rivières.

THE FOOD-SYSTEM FIXER

Allison Penner

28, Saskatoon, SK
Executive director
Reimagine Agriculture

Allison Penner never imagined that a college paper would change her life. In her second year of an environmental governance degree, she uncovered a startling truth: more than 80% of global fisheries were either fully exploited or collapsing. “I had no idea the food system was in such crisis,” she recalls. Even more shocking? Neither did her classmates. It catalyzed Penner’s commitment to fixing the food system. She went on to found Reimagine Agriculture, a non-profit dedicated to systemic change in the sector, which raised more than $250,000 to tackle food-system challenges, and helped shape new legislation to combat food waste while leading a collaboration with law schools. “We started as a small group of friends with a dream, and now we’re making real change,” she says. Whether advocating for cultivated meat or advancing policy reform, Penner is a rising leader in Canada’s sustainable food movement, ensuring that we can continue to nourish a growing global population.

THE MONEY GREENERS

THE ECO-FINANCE MAVERICK

Mégane Mandruzzato

29, Quebec City
Director of sustainability
iA Financial Group

In three short years, Mégane Mandruzzato rose to a leadership position in one of the largest insurance and wealth management groups in Canada, becoming the iA Financial Group’s first director of sustainability. “Her strategic influence contributed not only to the creation of this position, but also to the establishment of a dedicated sustainability team,” her nominee says. Mandruzzato knows that while financial institutions might serve as the backbone of Canada’s economy, their investment portfolios could contribute to 90% of greenhouse gas emissions. So far she has spearheaded decarbonization targets for a $13-million asset portfolio and 38 buildings across Canada. But her proudest achievement is helping to create a “bridge between the academic and professional worlds.” In addition to her award-winning research on integrating sustainable finance values into insurance companies, she helped forge a partnership for a research chair in sustainable finance at HEC Montréal.

THE GREEN BANKER

Mitch McEwen

27, Montreal
Senior manager, Enterprise Sustainable Finance
TD Bank Group

Mitch McEwen had always envisioned a career for himself in conventional finance. But studying abroad while the Paris Agreement was being adopted changed everything. “Realizing that financial systems could support environmental goals and sustainable development inspired me.” Now, McEwen is at the forefront of sustainable finance, wielding his influence to make change happen. Since joining TD, he has spearheaded the $500-billion Sustainable & Decarbonization Finance Target and leads the TD Sustainable Bonds program, with several-hundred-million dollars aimed at projects that promote climate change mitigation and adaptation across North America – winning Environmental Finance’s Green Bond of the Year in 2024. But McEwen is quick to stress that collaboration is essential: “No one tackles sustainability alone, and it requires all disciplines.” It’s a philosophy he echoes with a quote from author Rachel Carson: “In nature, nothing exists alone.

THE SYSTEMS THINKER

Savannah Sarosiak-Larter

28, Toronto
Manager
Quinn & Partners

Drawn to problem-solving from an early age, Savannah Sarosiak-Larter went into engineering at the University of Toronto to tackle the biggest challenge of our time: decarbonizing the economy. “By influencing companies and investors to pursue low-carbon strategies, we can achieve outcomes that create a positive impact on a national and global level,” she says. At just 28, the rising leader is doing just that for clients of Quinn & Partners, one of Canada’s fastest-growing sustainability firms, getting 13,000 buildings to track their emissions and curb an estimated 100,000-plus tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent and developing strategies for building out 100,000 electric-vehicle charging stations. “The accomplishment I’m most proud of is building the investment criteria to evaluate positive climate and social impacts for the $15-billion Canada Growth Fund” – a public fund set up to accelerate the deployment of carbon-curbing technology. Her advice for up-and-comers: “Adopt a systems-thinking approach to address global sustainability challenges to determine which solutions will alleviate systemic inequities rather than exacerbate them.”

THE CARBON HUNTERS

THE CARBON FOOTPRINT TRACKER

Ben Grande

28, Calgary
Co-founder & chief technology officer
Arbor

Ben Grande’s dad encouraged him to find a mission that allowed him to meet three goals: enjoy what you do, make money and make a difference. He hit the nail on the head with Arbor, a successful global platform that calculates the carbon impact of products, assets and supply chains. “Companies often set reduction targets with no clear direction on how to hit them,” Grande says. As chief technology officer for Arbor, he set out to rectify that, knowing that “most of the ‘sustainability’ data out there was flawed. We knew that we had to be diligent in our pursuit of accurate data and sensible methodology.” To date, Arbor has helped hundreds of businesses – from small “mom and pop shops” to large global companies such as Crocs – identify opportunities to avoid up to 373,000 tonnes of emissions, and Grande has no plans to slow down. “I have a goal to help every willing business measure and communicate the environmental impact of everything they buy, make or sell.”

THE CARBON-CAPTURE CRUSADER

Isabelle Callaghan

26, Toronto
Project manager
Deep Sky Labs

Isabelle Callaghan attended her first climate rally when she was 10 years old, hoisting up a handmade sign of a burning earth. Decades later, she has a key role in the world’s first carbon-removal-technology validation centre. As a project manager at Deep Sky, a Canadian carbon-removal developer, Callaghan is coordinating Deep Sky Labs, a $50-million, 217,000-square-foot facility in Innisfail, Alberta, that is about to break ground. She combed through 50 potential sites across two provinces, conducting assessments, site visits and negotiations. Once operational, the plant will remove 3,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. Prior to Deep Sky, Callaghan was a senior business analyst at McKinsey & Company, working with Fortune 500 companies such as energy utilities and mining companies on sustainability and decarbonization. “In five years, I want to look back and say I played a key role in bringing one of today’s many solutions to life,” she says. “My focus is on scale. We have the solutions; now it’s time to execute.”

THE RETROFIT CHAMPION

Fellipe Falluh

28, Montreal
Founder/president
Retrofit Construction

Buildings account for roughly 18% of Canada’s emissions. While a lot of political attention and legislation focuses on curbing the carbon footprint of new construction, Fellipe Falluh believes the big challenge lies within the built environment we already have around us. That’s why, at the age of 24, the civil and environmental engineer founded Retrofit Construction, a company that tackles retrofits of older buildings to make them more energy efficient. “By doing so, we also make these buildings more resilient, comfortable, healthy and more valuable,” he says. Falluh comes from a family of builders in Brazil and says that the importance of sustainability and the environment was always emphasized as he grew up. The vice-president of Quebec’s passive-building association, and recent recipient of a King Charles III coronation medal, he transformed his own 130-year-old duplex in Montreal into the first certified net-zero-ready building in the province and is now sharing his knowledge in a podcast on high-performance construction and buildings.

THE BUILDING DECARBONIZER

Vit Vimal

28, Toronto
CEO & co-founder
Tuuli

Vit Vimal was studying architecture when he noticed a gap in the curriculum: “There was little emphasis on how our designs would impact the environment.” As a young architect, Vimal was tired of working on the sidelines of the climate change battle, consulting on how to make buildings prettier rather than greener. “I couldn’t accept the direction the building industry was heading, so I made the bold decision to leave my job and step onto the front lines of this fight.” He left to start Tuuli, a firm dedicated to sustainable architecture through software that helps developers measure, reduce and monitor the carbon emissions of their assets. “The fight against climate change starts with how we build,” he says, emphasizing that the Paris Agreement targets can’t be met without rethinking architecture, since buildings are responsible for 40% of global carbon emissions. “I will never stop pushing to make it a reality.”

YOUTH MOTIVATORS

THE GALVANIZER

Aubrey-Anne Laliberte-Pewapisconias

25, Saskatoon, SK
Director of DEI, Leading Change Canada; program manager
ImaGENation

“‘Always remember where you came from.’ My parents always tell me this before walking into new spaces to remind me to stay rooted in my teachings. It allows me to stay grounded in an approach to life and sustainability work that leads with Indigenous values and decolonization in mind,” says Aubrey-Anne Laliberte-Pewapisconias, who is a nêhiyâskwew from Canoe Lake Cree First Nation on Treaty 10 Territory and Little Pine First Nation on Treaty 6 Territory. That means incorporating interconnectedness, stewardship and relationships with the land, water and other living relatives in all that she does. She puts those values into practice as the director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Leading Change Canada and as ImaGENation program manager at Indigenous Clean Energy, where she works with Indigenous youth who are spearheading clean energy projects across Canada. Recently, she helped install an electric vehicle charger on Flying Dust First Nation in Saskatchewan. Laliberte-Pewapisconias also served as Canada’s 2023 Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction negotiator at the G20 YouthSummit.

THE SOLUTIONS COACH

Cameron Toy Kluger

20, Montreal & NYC
Founder, Student Education for Environmental Development (SEED)

Growing up in Brooklyn, Cameron Toy Kluger’s connection to nature was mostly limited to squirrels and pigeons. He began developing a deeper appreciation of conservation through his first job, working as a guide in the Prospect Park Zoo. “I’ve pushed myself to explore how cities and nature can work together to strengthen our communities and build a resilient future,” he says. In 2022, Kluger founded Student Education for Environmental Development, or SEED, an initiative that brings free environmental education to schools, with a focus on underprivileged students in Canada and the United States, using a “hopeful, solution-oriented perspective” to inspire a younger generation. He also serves as a member of the Sustainability Projects Fund at McGill University, where he’s an environmental sciences undergrad, and oversees the distribution of $1 million annually to campus environmental projects.

THE YOUTH ENABLER

Gareth Gransaull

26, Toronto
Co-executive director
re•generation

“Every job should be a climate job, and all employees have a role to play.” That’s one of the key messages behind re-generation, a youth-empowering digital platform co-created by Gareth Gransaull, who has been motivated to tackle climate change since the tender age of nine. He charts his young awakening to the trailblazing Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and the ambivalent reaction he received from a neighbour about it. “I have since spent the rest of my life trying to get adults to change,” he says. That motivation spurred him to co-create re•generation, which connects young people with clean-economy jobs and provides a tool kit for employees to nudge their employers to be more climate-conscious. Gransaull has helped raise more than $1.5 million for their work. “We exist to help the next generation of leaders to develop critical-systems-thinking abilities, particularly by raising awareness about problems of inequality, shareholder primacy, neocolonialism and the structural barriers that exist which prevent the emergence of a more equitable economy,” he says.

THE BRIDGE BUILDER

Justin Langan

25, Winnipeg, MB
Founder and executive director
O’Kanata

Back in Swan River, a rural community in northern Manitoba, Justin Langan was taught by his father and elders about the connection between the land and his people. Starting as an 11-year-old working at his community’s Friendship Centre, he has been involved in various projects promoting Métis political and community engagement. The 2SLGBTQIA+ youth has taken that vision forward, creating O’Kanata in 2023 to support Indigenous youth. His goal is to bridge the gap between traditional ecological Indigenous knowledge and modern sustainability practices. “By empowering Indigenous youth through education and sustainable economic opportunities, I aim to create a future where our communities thrive both culturally and economically,” he says. O’Kanata has provided educational opportunities to more than 1,000 Indigenous youth and led to the reduction of 2.7 tons of carbon emissions in Manitoba.

NATURE TRAILBLAZERS

THE QUEEN OF INCLUSIVE GREEN SPACES

Kiana Bonnick

29, Whitby, ON
Climate change and community engagement specialist, Womxn of Colour Durham Collective

As a child exploring her Jamaican grandfather’s garden, Kiana Bonnick was captivated by the love he poured into nurturing his plants. For the last five years, she’s poured her own love of nature into the Womxn of Colour Durham Collective, promoting access to green spaces for racialized women through programs she has spearheaded like Get Outdoors, We Outside and Reclaiming Our Roots. “Understanding the technical and scientific aspects of climate change and the environment is important, but it tells us one part of the story,” Bonnick says. “Social aspects of climate change and different forms of knowledge are equally essential in this story.” Her community-building approach has also been reducing “eco-anxiety,” all while challenging the barriers faced by racialized individuals in outdoor spaces. She’s also been busy training the next generation of climate leaders, educating eight- to 16-year-olds to take the reins as part of the Lead Like a Girl program at DYLOTT (Developing Young Leaders of Tomorrow, Today).

THE CONSERVATION HAWK

Calder Schweitzer

27, Gananoque, ON
Executive director
Thousand Islands Watershed Land Trust

Calder Schweitzer’s passion for the territory stewarded by the Thousand Islands Watershed Land Trust is palpable. The trust is located within one of the most biodiverse areas in the world. “This means that you find species here living next to one another that don’t co-occur anywhere else in Canada,” Schweitzer says. His passion supercharged his rise through the ranks, moving from field biologist at the land trust in 2019 to executive director five years later. The trust protects and manages land donated by private owners for the purpose of conservation. Schweitzer has led the protection of 850 acres of conservation land, preserving ecosystems that prevent floods and droughts while safeguarding vital habitat for biodiversity and carbon sequestration. “Fighting for conservation can often feel like an uphill battle,” he says. “My advice is to stay balanced and maintain your passion in the face of this adversity.”

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And on 200 acres of woodlands and forest gardens an hour outside of Ottawa, Diana Beresford-Kroeger is trying to seed a revolution to save the global forests. “This is a living planet. We will not have a living planet without those trees,” says the 80-year-old Irish botanist and medical biochemist over tea in the home she and her husband built by hand half a century ago in Merrickville, Ontario.  

Beresford-Kroeger has been called “the Jane Goodall of trees,” though she’s also an old-school renaissance woman: over the years, she’s conducted scientific research on organ transplants and open-heart surgery, cloned endangered trees for her forest genome project, and studied the plant aerosols that she says make forests a “living library of medicine.”  

Having just published her eighth book, Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests, she’s made it her life’s work to educate the rest of us – from schoolchildren to world leaders – on how none of us would be here without trees. “They are the top and the bottom of the pyramid of life,” she writes, explaining how the molecules of decaying leaves reach the oceans to feed fish and whale calves and how the “fingers of the forest touch the atmosphere and dip into the human heart to keep it pumping.”  

In early September, speaking at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival an hour outside Toronto, she’s frank about what’s at stake in a world with fewer trees. “The oxygen that is in the atmosphere does not come from a mysterious place. It doesn’t come from fairyland. It comes from the bloody trees over your head right now,” she says to a chuckling audience. 

The problem: “We’ve only been so stupid as to cut down the global forests . . . So it means there’s less oxygen in the air and more carbon dioxide. Today, we have [roughly] 420 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The last time it was like that was millions of years ago. We’re heading to danger.”  

Beresford-Kroeger was first warned about climate change in the ’60s by her uncle Pat. As an orphan growing up in Ireland, the self-described “aristocratic mongrel” immersed herself in her uncle’s library and spent summers on her great-aunt’s farm in the Lisheens valley.  

“I inherited knowledge rather than money,” she laughs, explaining that she received an ancient Druidic education, instructed in Celtic knowledge of plants, nature and the sacred importance of trees. Later, she was told to go to the New World to become “as educated as she possibly could” and teach people about the value of nature to help humanity shed our destructive ways. 

Roughly 10 million hectares of forest are cut down every year around the globe, according to the United Nations. Foresters would make the case that they’re replanting trees, sometimes at a two-to-one rate. The hitch: “We are planting the wrong trees in the wrong place.” It’s like, she says, hoping for a donkey to win the Kentucky Derby.  

And, she explains, we’re paying the price with more destructive fires. Up the western seaboard, for thousands of years, giant redwoods acted as a great green firewall – until they began to come down and get replaced with non-native trees like eucalyptus in California and Scots pine in Canada.  

“The species of North America are used to fires, but not to eucalyptus fires, not to Scots pine fires,” she says. “It’s an inferno.” 

She knows from experience the impact of planting the wrong trees in the wrong place. A decade after Beresford-Kroeger moved up to Canada from the United States in the 1970s to work at the University of Ottawa as a research scientist, she and her husband bought a neighbouring plantation of Pinus banksiana – a non-native Jack pine from the Boreal north – hoping to put an end to chemical pesticide use on the property

The species of North America are used to fires, but not to eucalyptus fires, not to Scots pine fires. It’s an inferno.

“They’re not trees. They’re a fire hazard,” she says of the monoculture woods lining her kilometre-long driveway. Being the scientist she is, she also sees them as a bigger blackboard for her research on the climate crisis. For decades, she’s been tinkering in her research garden, planting what she calls a Noah’s ark of thousands of rare and endangered trees, like the native pawpaw, the cucumber tree (Canada’s only native magnolia) and the mighty kingnut (which she says would double the plant-based protein of any farming operation). The kingnut was wiped out in wartime for use as sailing masts, she says, pointing to the “little darling” she grew from seed on a tour of her forest gardens. She’s gathering seeds from the most climate-resilient of her trees. “I’ll find people to take them and to grow them.”

 It all plays into the larger “bioplan” she has for us. Step one of the bioplan: stop cutting down ancient virgin forests. These mother trees are survivors – they are grandparents that hold in their DNA the knowledge of how to weather hundreds, even thousands, of years of climate hardship, as well as vital medicines still being discovered by scientists. But in British Columbia, for instance, ecologists say that just 3% to 20% of old-growth trees – more than 250 years old – are still standing, despite promises from the provincial government.  

Step two: plant the right trees in the right place; one native tree per person per year over the next six years for a global total of 50 billion trees by 2030. “That will start reversing the CO2 in the atmosphere in parts per million down into the three hundreds.”  

In recent years, politicians in Canada, the United States and other countries have promised to plant billions of trees to counter rising carbon in the atmosphere, but, Beresford-Kroeger says, they’re failing. “Climate change is too important [to be left to] politicians. It has to be in the hands of people.” 

We must plant native trees, one per person per year for the next six years. That will start reversing the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Our Green Heart weighs in on solutions for industry, too. Beresford-Kroeger is optimistic about direct carbon capture – nascent technology pulling carbon from the air – to turn planet-warming gases into hydrocarbon fuels for cars, planes and tractors. “All of nature’s currency is carbon. So what you’re doing is you’re using some of nature’s carbon currency. As long as you’re not abusing it, it can be managed harmoniously.”  

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But she slams geoengineering – climate engineering that involves the likes of shooting fine dust into the upper stratosphere to reflect sunlight back to space – as arrogance of the highest order. Especially when the very service of shielding the earth against sunlight is easily provided by the clouds that form in part through moisture released from the globe’s forests. Although in places like the Amazon, so much forest has been cut down that rain clouds have been vanishing, drying up riverbeds and dragging out a historic drought that’s fuelling South America’s fires. 

When I ask what she thinks of companies using tree-planting as a shell game to offset their polluting emissions, she says that if carbon-intensive industries are having a hard time curbing emissions, they should be tapping young minds at universities for the most innovative solutions.  

Education is step three of her bioplan. She’s looking for ambassadors to help her spread her message. “I’ve written all of these books,” she says. “I can only do so much. I want to get the message out there to people: they’ve got to pay attention to nature. It tears me apart that I know that window of opportunity is closing and I won’t be around.” 

As we finish our tea, I ask if she has hope for us. “Oh, yeah!” she says, lighting up. “What I have is hope in the young people. There are some extraordinary young people who are doing incredible things.” 

And for the rest of us, there is still time to turn over a new leaf.

Adria Vasil is the managing editor of Corporate Knights and the author of the Ecoholic book series.

The post The soul and science of forests appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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 impact of livestock farming back in 2006, the trillion-dollar global meat industry has been on the defensive. The report concluded that cars and coal plants weren’t the only ones spewing out planet-warming greenhouse gases: cattle-rearing was also a top contributor to the climate crisis. The backlash was intense, with FAO staffers recently revealing that pressure from Big Ag led to their work being censored and undermined. 

Two decades later, the meat and dairy industries have spent millions on counter-research and marketing, including creating an “MBA” for beef industry advocates. The world’s biggest meat-packers have announced net-zero targets, as the industry tries to reassure the public that despite the urgency of the climate emergency, there’s no need to cut back on our burgers and steaks. Even beef can be part of a balanced planet-friendly diet, they claim. 

In one of the latest attempts to quell consumer demand for more sustainable protein, Tyson Foods, America’s largest beef exporter, launched a “climate-friendly” product line, Brazen Beef, under the slogan “Better beef, better planet.” With the help of US$61 million in grants from the US Department of Agriculture, cattle are enrolled in Tyson Foods’ “Climate-Smart Beef Program,” according to the product website, “for emission reduction from pasture to production.” As Tyson’s VP of fresh meats marketing told Progressive Grocer magazine, “We are trying to be upbeat and different, with something that speaks definitively to [millennial and Gen Z consumers].”

And Tyson isn’t the only one banking on planet-friendly meat to keep consumers coming back to the butcher. Walmart Canada stocks 2.5 million pounds of beef patties certified by the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. Nestlé is paying ranchers for regenerative grazing practices that get sold as carbon credits. General Mills makes a regenerative-beef protein bar that it claims offsets 80% of its greenhouse gas emissions through regenerating soil practices.”

The practice of branding meat as climate-friendly isn’t new. Many of Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf Foods’ products have carried a “carbon zero” label since 2019, when it declared itself to be the “world’s first major carbon neutral food company.” Its Greenfield Natural Meat pork products are cleverly marketed as part of a “low carb(on) diet,” including “planet-based” bacon.

But while these multinationals have made apparent efforts to reduce their environmental impact – from limiting deforestation in their tropical supply chains to retrofitting plants with LED lighting, and even restoring a few thousand acres of grasslands – there is no indication they have reduced production of the products at the heart of the climate quagmire. And as emissions from the world’s 20 largest publicly listed meat and dairy companies keep ticking upwards while global meat consumption swells, some major meat producers and retailers are playing with the metrics that measure them – and lobbying governments to help them make climate-friendly claims that have the appearance of adding up. 

Skewering the stats 

In the air-conditioned corridors of Dubai’s COP28 climate summit in December, a record-breaking number of meat and dairy delegates descended to soft-sell a new way of measuring their sector’s contribution to the climate crisis. The livestock industry is responsible for nearly a third of heat-trapping methane (the world’s second-biggest driver of climate change). To date, the UN and global governments have been measuring “global warming potential” (GWP) over a 100-year time frame using a metric called GWP100. Since methane breaks down in the atmosphere much sooner than carbon dioxide, which will warm the planet for centuries, an additional metric known as GWP* was proposed by Oxford University scientists in 2016 that factors in methane’s potent short-term impacts, taking 2016 methane emissions as baseline. With one caveat: it was never intended to be used as the sole way to measure animal emissions. But the meat and dairy industry is eating it up. 

“Imagine a house is on fire, and someone is actively pouring gas on the fire. They then pour a little less gas and want credit for doing so, despite still feeding the fire. Perhaps they claim they are now ‘fire neutral,’” writes University of California, Davis, researcher Caspar Donnison, co-author of a study published in Environmental Research Letters in December on the use of GWP* in climate-neutral livestock research. “That is more or less what some influential supporters of the livestock industry have done.”

A report by Changing Markets, a U.K.-based foundation, found that, using 2021 as the baseline, Tyson could “use GWP* to claim that a 30% reduction in emissions by 2030 means it is removing 82.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere a year, yet calculations using GWP100 suggest it would still be emitting 58.5 million tonnes annually – similar to the annual emissions of Peru.”

Nusa Urbancic, director of the Changing Markets Foundation, said that using 2021 as the baseline means “GWP* will penalise poor countries that are expanding livestock production from a low base while rewarding the world’s biggest industrial livestock producers with millions of heads of cattle.” 

In the case of Tyson’s Brazen Beef, the metrics have yet to be made public. How Tyson got to the claim of “the first climate friendly beef with 10% greenhouse gas reduction” – becoming the first meat company to use the USDA-backed climate-friendly label – remains unclear. “In order to claim a 10% reduction, you need to establish scientifically a baseline that everyone agrees is the common amount that beef produces,” New York University environmental scientist Matthew Hayek explains. “There doesn’t seem to be any data that the company itself, or the government who it created that certification in conjunction with, is able to provide.” 

Corporate Knights reached out to the USDA and Brazen’s certifier, Where Food Comes From, but reps directed us back to Brazen Beef to elaborate “if they choose.” Tyson Foods did not respond. 

Either way, Brazen has critics raising the question: should a burger that still generates 90% of the emissions of a regular burger be allowed to call itself climate-friendly? 

Regenerative reset

In the face of mounting pressure to get a handle on food systems’ enormous emissions, Big Ag, Big Food and Big Meat have all been leaning into climate-smart agriculture, aka regenerative agriculture or carbon farming, to save the day. Big Meat, in particular, has a hefty amount of emissions to draw down, and they’re hoping to sequester as much as they can into the soil, particularly the rich soil under ranch grasslands. Whether it’s Burger King investing in grassland projects or Maple Leaf, Nestlé and Brazil’s JBS (the world’s biggest meat-packer) buying carbon offsets from farmers that are paid to shift to regenerative practices, bucolic images of animals grazing in the open air are being used to lull conscious consumers into believing that buying meat can be beneficial for the planet.

But quantifying just how much carbon is drawn into the soil when every company uses different definitions of “regenerative” has been messy and the subject of heated debate, with some meat advocates claiming that grass-fed beef, in particular, has little to no effect on climate change. 

Then scientists in the Netherlands, the U.K. and Sweden began looking into it. In a mic-dropping study released in November, the researchers concluded that there is no plausible way for the global livestock industry to ever sequester enough carbon to offset its planet-warming emissions. In order to counter annual methane emissions from ruminants such as cattle, the authors explain, 135 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of carbon would have to be returned to soils – a colossal challenge, equivalent to all the carbon lost as a result of agriculture over the last 12,000 years. Their conclusion: “The claim that ruminant systems can have a negative annual GHG balance via soil C-sequestration is overly optimistic and could be misleading.” 

Don’t have a cow offset

Grasslands aside, for most meat and dairy companies, claiming carbon neutrality and getting to net-zero is still largely a matter of basic omission. To call itself carbon neutral, including its Greenfield Natural Meat line, Maple Leaf (which does not sell beef) says it “eliminated, reduced and neutralized” its Scope 1, 2 and a portion of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is that Scope 3 emissions (those from raw materials, feed and ingredients it buys and emissions associated with packaging and distribution) account for about 88% of Maple Leaf’s total emissions, according to the company. That includes emissions from animals and meat purchased from suppliers. “In 2023, we purchased carbon offset credits from 16 projects that neutralized approximately 7% of our Scope 3 emissions,” Maple Leaf spokespeople tell Corporate Knights – specifically for products that carry the “carbon zero” marketing label. As NYU’s Hayek points out, the Scope 3 emissions that Maple Leaf doesn’t include are “the largest slice of their supply chain.”

According to a report by the Freedom Food Alliance (FFA) released this winter, Maple Leaf isn’t alone. “Over 90% of most major meat and dairy companies’ emissions – representing Scope 3 third party supply chain emissions – are mostly omitted from their climate goals.” That includes those of meatpacking giant JBS, who, according to the report, “continues to make ‘net zero by 2040’ statements despite the National Advertising Review Board advising to discontinue this misleading claim,” along with marketing phrases like “Bacon, chicken wings and steak with net zero emissions. It’s possible.” In February, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, alleging that the company made deceptive statements in presentations, ads and on its website regarding its climate commitments. JBS denied the allegations.

The smoke and mirrors use of “net-zero” is just one of the tactics Big Meat uses to “deny, derail, delay, deflect and distract” meaningful discussion, as the FFA lays out. Meanwhile, the meat industry’s efforts have been focused not only on boosting their own products, but also on turning consumers away from plant-based meat alternatives. During the pandemic, brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods surged in popularity. Touted as more sustainable and ethical, their sales soared. But by 2022 the narrative had shifted. Skepticism grew as critiques around the “ultra-processed” ingredients in plant-based options gained traction. 

Full-page ads were taken out in major newspapers by a PR company working for the meat industry, which also ran Super Bowl spots in select markets, all to turn people off foreign-sounding ingredients in “synthetic” meat. The tactics used to dissuade consumers from turning to alternatives worked to complement the meat industry’s move to market its products as climate-friendly. 

Rhetoric and marketing play a major role in the rebranding of meat as climate-friendly, explains Jason Hannan, editor of the book Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial. “One of the most important contributions of environmental scientists and activists has been to introduce critical terms like ‘global warming,’ ‘climate change,’ ‘sustainability,’ ‘tipping points’ and ‘net-zero’ into our public vocabulary,” he says. “These terms have shaped how we assess governments and industries for their responsibility in our environmental and climate crises.” He notes that “carbon-neutral meat” has become a key term that the industry has appropriated to provide the veneer of environmental responsibility: “It’s like painting a gas station green and claiming it’s environmentally friendly.”

Over in Europe, lawmakers voted in January to outlaw the use of terms such as “climate neutral” for products that use carbon offsets, like, say, Maple Leaf’s bacon (which is not available in Europe). A few weeks later, the European Commission recommended ambitious new greenhouse gas emissions cuts. It had, however, quietly dropped a call for agriculture to curb non-CO2 emissions by at least 30%, compared to 2015, by 2040. All references to livestock farming, methane and a recommendation that Europeans eat less meat had also been taken off the table as a concession to protesting farmers. 

It’s another indication that the meat industry has turned climate change into red-meat politics.

Adria Vasil is the managing editor of Corporate Knights. 

Jessica Scott-Reid writes about animal welfare and plant-based food. 

This story is part of our Spring 2024 Plant Power package.

The post Cooking the books: The magical math of ‘climate-friendly’ meat appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Kayah George

25, Vancouver

Tulalip and Tsleil-Waututh Nation water protector and filmmaker

Kayah George used to play in a creek behind her grandmother’s house, but the water has become so contaminated by upstream construction that people started developing rashes. “Many of the places where our family traditionally held ceremonies are now too polluted to be able to use,” George says. Carrying the teachings of her Tulalip and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, George has been on the front lines fighting against the Trans Mountain Pipeline for more than half her life, defending her people’s sacred inlet and the southern resident orca whales from a sevenfold increase in tanker traffic. She recently cowrote, directed and produced a short film entitled Our Grandmother the Inlet on the intrinsic connection the Tsleil-Waututh people have to the “Burrard” Inlet; it premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival this falll. “It’s the artist’s job to make the revolution irresistible,” George says, referring to a quote from Toni Cade Bambara that “changed everything” for her. “I set out to create art that did just that.”

Alex Lidstone

29, Calgary
executive director,
Climate Caucus

When climate emergency strikes, it’s not the federal government that shows up first. Local governments are the ones on the front lines of wildfires, floods and droughts; they’re also proving to be the fastest to act when it comes to taking bolder climate action. “That’s critical during this decade of transformation,” Alex Lidstone says. As someone who grew up in a province ravaged by smoke and fire, she joined Climate Caucus, a non-partisan network of elected officials, with the hope of driving system change. “We began experiencing intense fire seasons unlike those I had seen before, and I decided to dedicate my life to this work.” Since she took the reins at Climate Caucus, Lidstone has proudly helped grow the network from roughly 300 to more than 650 elected leaders, helping them work together in times of crisis and make building back better easier. As for the fires, they may be growing stronger, but so is Lidstone’s resolve to find solutions. Making partnerships, she says, is critical: “Don’t leave yourself to tackle this challenge alone!”

Julien Beaulieu

29, Gatineau, QC
law lecturer, Université de Sherbrooke

Almost half the world’s largest corporations have pledged to go net-zero, but far too many of them are “climate-washing,” Julien Beaulieu says. In 2021, the competition lawyer worked with the Québec Environmental Law Center to file one of the first-ever climate-washing cases in Canada, aiming to reform Canada’s consumer protection laws to better regulate net-zero pledges and carbon-neutrality claims. He’s also teaching one of Canada’s first graduate law courses on responsible investment, shareholder activism and environmental disclosures to help “shift the way a new generation of legal practitioners thinks about the role of corporations.” Impressive for a person who readily admits that “sustainability was never really my thing” until friends convinced him of the urgency of the environmental crisis. “Their engagement made me realize how much sustainability is a foundational issue that is intertwined with every other social issue that we’re facing right now.”

Kristen Perry

26, Toronto
managing director, Spring Investing Collective

Kristen Perry is blazing a trail for under-represented Canadians to participate in impact investing. “I work to help our growing portfolio of predominantly women-led and BIPOC-led sustainable businesses to grow and thrive,” says Perry, who happens to be the youngest leader of an angel network in Canada – Spring Investing, the largest early-stage impact investing network in the country. “I’ve been drawn to entrepreneurship and sustainability from a young age,” she says. “Studying business, I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied in my career if I wasn’t leveraging my skills, resources and time to work towards something beyond myself.” Over the course of her career, she has supported hundreds of entrepreneurs through incubation, acceleration, investment readiness, fundraising support and founder coaching. Spring has been able to catalyze more than $22 million into early-stage impact ventures. “There is a $4-trillion annual gap in addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. I believe that private markets have a big role to play in making the world a better place.”

Sabrina Kon

29, Vancouver
head of community and impact, ChopValue

Making a difference, one chopstick at a time. That is the ethos at ChopValue, a Vancouver-based company that repurposes used chopsticks into furniture and design products. As head of community and impact, Sabrina Kon has built and oversees the company’s chopstick-recycling program, working with more than 1,500 partners across more than a dozen cities on three continents. The company has so far given 120 million chopsticks a new life. “By repurposing used chopsticks into furniture, this is just one example of giving a new life to a disposable item that is typically ordered from Asia, travels to the rest of the world and is used for only 20 to 30 minutes before being discarded,” says Kon, who started her career managing a portfolio of philanthropic funds to enable the execution of climate projects at ClientEarth, an environmental law firm. “There’s a lot of work to be done to advance the circular economy and ensure that we are moving away from a linear ‘take-make-waste’ system.”

Michael Mousa

29, Toronto
sustainability consultant, DIALOG; chair, Carbon Leadership Forum Toronto

As a second-generation Egyptian-Canadian, there was a lot of pressure on Michael Mousa to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer. “I chose engineering school,” Mousa says. “That’s where I started to understand the complex issues facing our built environment, environmental justice and the connection between health, equity and sustainability.” Clearly, he chose wisely. Today he’s the Canada chair of the Carbon Leadership Forum, where he leads a team in empowering the building industry to address an issue it long ignored: the embodied carbon lurking in building materials. Through his work as a sustainability consultant at the architectural, engineering, interior design and planning firm DIALOG, Mousa says he tries “to centre equity in all my efforts by addressing the impacts of the built environment on humans.” But recent climate events have given his work a greater sense of urgency. “Our built environment was designed for a climate that no longer exists.”

Sophia Mathur

16, Sudbury, ON
activist and lead plaintiff in climate lawsuit

Sophia Mathur can’t vote yet, but she has spent more than half her life making her voice heard on the defining issue of our time. The high-profile climate activist was the first Canadian student to join Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future climate strike in 2018, has lobbied politicians on a host of environmental matters, and helped convince her hometown of Sudbury to declare a climate emergency in 2019. Perhaps most notably, she is the lead plaintiff in a legal case (Mathur v. Ontario) in which seven Ontario youths are suing the Ontario government for weakening the province’s 2030 climate target, arguing that it violates the fundamental rights of youth and future generations. No climate lawsuit like it has advanced as far in the courts in Canada. Although a judge dismissed their case this year, the group is appealing. “If you are young, it is important that we share our voices about the climate crisis and talk to parents and people that can make those decisions,” Mathur says. “Spread the word about how important it is to vote for climate-concerned politicians and empower people to vote.”

Tyler De Sousa

25, Waterloo Region, ON
co-founder and COO, Circulr

Tyler De Sousa’s first brush with the ethos of circular living came through his grandparents, Portuguese immigrants who understood that nothing is truly “waste.” His grandfather made things out of scrap metal, and his grandmother sewed frayed clothing back to life. “That’s the mentality that brought me to Circulr and that influences our approach,” he says of the start-up he co-founded that works with grocery-store brands to return glass jars dropped off by customers so they can be reused. “We know that everything we call waste could be a valuable resource.” Circulr has worked with 22 brands and facilitated the reuse of 25,000 jars, which helped eliminate 3,932 kilograms of carbon dioxide that would have been expelled in creating new glass. “A lot of measures today are band-aid-style solutions for problems that have been ingrained in our existing systems,” De Sousa says. “What we do at Circulr is try to reimagine our relationship with packaging to change the system itself.”

Zaffia Laplante

26, Toronto
chief strategy officer, SkyAcres Agrotechnologies

As an Indigenous woman from Northern Ontario, Zaffia Laplante grew up spending her summers by the lake or in her grandmother’s garden. “It is something I cherish deeply and has had a large impact on who I am today,” she says. A member of the Métis Nation of Ontario, Laplantefounded Hempergy, an award-winning hemp-waste insulation start-up, in 2019. Now she is the chief strategy officer of SkyAcres, which is bringing vertical farming technology to rural and First Nations communities to increase food security. SkyAcres has grown more than 40 different types of fruits, vegetables and herbs using 90% less water than conventional farming. It’s also helped drive down the cost of food in pilot locations. “If you have an idea, no matter how big or small, find like-minded people and work together,” she says. “It’s better to create a community of impact than try to do it yourself.”

Lena Courcol

28, Montreal
acquisitions manager, New Market Funds

Growing up in Shanghai, Lena Courcol witnessed a city transform under the forces of globalization. “It drove my curiosity for sustainability in the built environment, our sense of place, social justice and how our neighbourhoods can shape the way we live,” she says. Developing partnerships to establish hybrid solutions to complex problems, like the affordable housing crisis, is her specialty. “This takes a lot of work, but getting everyone in the same room to collaborate on a project is extremely rewarding.” As the acquisitions manager at New Market Funds, she led the fund’s largest transaction to purchase more than 500 units of affordable housing from the private sector through non-profit ownership. More than 800 additional units are in the pipeline to be acquired by the end of the year. Next on her to-do list: reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% or more for all of New Market’s building acquisitions. “This work is only just beginning . . . and it’s my role to figure out how to get us there.”

Rita Steele

28, Vancouver
sustainable operations manager and climate action instructor, Simon Fraser University; founder, BIPOC Sustainability Collective

Rita Steele spent much of her childhood and teen years as an avid West Coast backcountry explorer. “My love for the environment was a hobby for a long time,” she says – until she went to Ghana for a three-month trip studying fair trade cocoa. “The producers shared with me how climate change affected their crops and lives. I realized climate change exacerbated the social issues I cared about, and these impacts would continue to worsen.” She pivoted, dedicating herself to climate action. Today, she’s the youngest instructor in Simon Fraser University’s Climate Action Certificate program, and, as SFU’s sustainable operations manager, she’s transforming the school top to bottom. Steele is also the founder of the BIPOC Sustainability Collective, where she’s fostering a capacity-building community for racialized professionals in the sustainability sector. As she notes, “Climate change and environmental degradation disproportionately impact people of colour, yet we are underrepresented in the organizations tackling these issues.”​​​​

Marley Alles

27, Toronto
founder, Rax

Once Marley Alles understood the scope of the problem, she set out to fix it. The problem was fast fashion and the crushing amount of waste and pollution created by a culture of insatiable consumption. The fashion industry produces up to 10% of the world’s emissions, and those emissions are expected to surge 50% by 2030. One way to attack that number is through sharing. So Alles created Rax, a peer-to-peer wardrobe rental app that connects people who want to make money off their wardrobes with people who rent the clothes for up to 90% off. In less than a year of operation, Rax has attracted thousands of users. The goal is to chip away at the tonnes of textile waste that end up in Canadian landfills every year. “Anyone can become a sustainability leader,” Alles says. “It’s not about being 100% sustainable. It’s about doing your research and figuring out how to embed eco-friendly swaps in our daily routines.”

Serena Mendizábal

25, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, ON
just-transition lead, Sacred Earth Solar; co-chair, SevenGen Energy

As a Cayuga Panamanian Wolf Clan woman from the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Serena Mendizábal thinks about how to centreIndigenous-led climate solutions in her work every day. She co-founded SevenGen Energy, a not-for-profit focused on empowering Indigenous youth in the clean energy sector, bringing together more than 500 youth from across Turtle Island for community building and funding youth-led clean energy projects. Now at Sacred Earth Solar – led and operated by Indigenous women – she shepherds efforts to implement a just transition by bringing solar power to Indigenous communities. “Not only do I advocate towards a just transition through being critical of mainstream climate discourse, but I also implement one by centring Indigenous-led climate solutions through education, research, project development, policy and land-based teachings,” she says. “You need community now more than ever – find your people and start working!”

Rodrigue Turgeon

29, Val-d’Or, QC
national program co-lead, MiningWatch Canada

Growing up in Amos, Quebec, Rodrigue Turgeon saw firsthand the “vicious cycle of destruction” his region was trapped in, depending on an economy almost exclusively based on forestry and mining. He studied science and law to equip himself to defend nature. Since 2017, Turgeon has provided legal advice to First Nations and has helped hundreds of individuals and organizations with environmental mobilizations. He obtained an environmental assessment for a proposed open-pit lithium mine in Quebec, and he led a pro bono team that won a case against Glencore’s Horne Smelter for access to data on its contaminant emissions. “Everyone we support in Canada and around the world is affected by the consequences of the climate crisis. It’s fascinating to see the mining industry trying to capitalize on these disasters to justify even more greenwashed destructive projects,” he says. He urges young people to “doubt the possibility of changing things ‘from within’ polluting industries and their accomplice firms.”

Anna Harman

28, Ottawa
senior advisor for decarbonization strategy, JLL Canada

As a young mechanical engineering grad from Queen’s University, Anna Harman got the chance to help the Government of Canada strategize on making its buildings carbon neutral. “I was immediately hooked by the breadth of impact I could have.” Buildings make up nearly 40% of global emissions, Harman says, “which is why I have dedicated my career to reducing emissions in this industry.” The former vice-president of the Association of Energy Engineers Canada East now leads a team of 10 building engineers and strategic thinkers at JLL to decarbonize commercial real estate portfolios across Canada and around the globe. In her short career, she’s contributed to plans to avoid 18 million tonnes of emissions in more than 2,500 buildings in Canada and another 350 buildings across 80 countries. Harman knows that a mountain of work remains to meet our climate goals, but as a mentor of women in the energy sector, she says staying positive and punching above your weight class are essential: “Push past the boundaries of what people believe is possible for you.”

Jonathan Serravalle

26, Markham, ON
program manager, Competent Boards

In the face of intense scrutiny around corporate sustainability efforts, it’s vital to be well-informed, Jonathan Serravalle says. “Let your stand be the result of your own informed perspective, not just popular sentiment.” Serravalle is laser-focused on driving ethical behaviour in the private sector. After he completed the University of Waterloo’s Master of Climate Change program, he hit the ground running at Competent Boards, where he oversees the climate- and biodiversity-education programs for senior executives and business leaders in 17 countries. “Incorporating ESG considerations into board decisions, I help drive change that doesn’t just boost financial outcomes but also looks out for the planet’s health.” Serravalle had originally planned to study medieval history but changed the course of his own history to dedicate himself to creating a better future. “He is a huge asset to the sustainability movement,” says Competent Boards COO Nancy Wright. “His impact can be felt in boardrooms around the world.”

Emily Kroft

26, Winnipeg
youth engagement and water policy officer, International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)

There’s a proverb that Emily Kroft grew up hearing: it is not your responsibility to solve the world’s problems, but neither are you free to avoid them. Now it’s become her mantra. “Sustainable policy can be a very daunting field to work in,” Kroft says, especially if you’re trying to change things through individual action. “But if we each do our part, we can get somewhere.” Connecting youth who want to make a difference and empowering them to have a meaningful impact on climate policy is her specialty. Kroft is the creator, coordinator and facilitator of IISD-Next, which has trained more than 500 students and youth in 61 countries on effective engagement in sustainable policy, including advancing a sustainable economy. “Being able to facilitate those connections brings me so much joy,” she says. “I’m one drop in the ocean, but what is the ocean if not a bunch of little drops?”

Carl Botha

28, Toronto
senior manager of sustainability and packaging, Tim Hortons

More than a coffee shop, Tim Hortons is a Canadian institution, serving millions of double-doubles and doughnuts every day. “My work makes each of those visits more sustainable,” Carl Botha says. In his four years with the company, Botha has led changes that helped eliminate 1.3 billion single-use plastics from Tims restaurants annually, as well as 2,600 tonnes of virgin paper packaging. He also led the company in banning persistent PFAS chemicals in food packaging and is currently working on developing a lid that’s recyclable, compostable and 100% plastic-free. The key, he says, is to “always ask ‘Why.’ If you don’t get a good response, keep asking, and you’ll be surprised how many times the answer is ‘Because we’ve always done it this way.’ Whenever I hear that, I know I’ve found a great opportunity to make a change for the better.”

Shakti Ramkumar

27, Surrey, B.C.
senior director of policy and communications, Student Energy

For Shakti Ramkumar, the trick in this time of “frustration, despair and rage” around the climate crisis is to channel that energy. “Youth can take action now, by building our own community energy projects, by galvanizing our peers or fighting for policy change,” says Ramkumar, a skilled climate-science communicator. She leads the communication strategy for Student Energy, a youth-led organization with more than 100,000 followers, and has grown the reach of its open source energy education tool, the Energy System Map, to 17-million users. Since joining Student Energy in 2018, she has helped grow the network to 50,000 youth from more than 120 countries, and launched a Research and Youth Engagement Portfolio that included over 43,000 young voices. She recruited and managed a volunteer team of more than 50 young leaders in energy from around the world to research, write and update energy education pages so that the content is rigorously researched but still written by young people for young people. “We hope that working with young people to get a few of those transformational learning-by-doing experiences under their belts early in their lives will set them up for a lifetime of confident, values-driven service,” she says.

Robert Raynor

27, Toronto
net-zero coordinator, TAS

Toronto, like many Canadian cities, is in a housing crisis. It has to build housing for millions of new residents while simultaneously hitting net-zero targets. That won’t happen without the work of people like Robert Raynor, who is net-zero coordinator for TAS, a real estate developer that aims to have a net-zero carbon portfolio by 2045. He has been working to ensure that project teams are salvaging, sorting and adaptively reusing deconstructed materials from old buildings in new projects. “One of the greatest challenges of our generation is the need to build more while polluting less, and meaningfully achieving anywhere close to ‘net-zero’ requires a pointed and coordinated collective effort,” he says. Raynor’s work calculating the greenhouse gas emissions from new materials and transportation led TAS to divert 21,000 tonnes of concrete, brick and wood from an old building into a new condo project in Toronto. “Your vision of how the world should be will evolve as you grow and learn, but don’t let yourself compromise it,” he says.

Zein Hindawi

29, Toronto
manager of youth engagement, Plan International Canada

Zein Hindawi’s first step toward advocacy came through reflections on her childhood, as a new immigrant to Canada, confronting other children who made fun of her Arabic accent or joked about not being able to hang out with her because she was Muslim. She wished she knew then about where she could turn for support in the face of discrimination. For the last 10 years, her work has been about filling that gap, empowering young people by providing them with the tools, resources and confidence to take action in a meaningful way. She’s created Plan International Youth Councils to support young leaders to start their own initiatives and has travelled to places like China, Senegal, Jordan and Kenya to understand the range of challenges facing youth today. “Achieving one’s advocacy goals requires a collective effort: asking for support from mentors, questioning the status quo, connecting with like-minded changemakers and more,” she says.

Mihskakwan James Harper

28, Winnipeg
business development manager, NRStor Inc.; co-chair, SevenGen Energy

Every project Mihskakwan James Harper works on has a single goal: designing renewable energy sources that benefit Indigenous communities. As a member of the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, Harper knows his responsibilities as a future ancestor. And as co-chair of SevenGen Energy’s Indigenous youth council, he helped set up a new program called ImaGENation, which mentors Indigenous youth on implementing their own clean energy projects. “My work tries to advocate from a young person’s lens and make it very clear that we have to do more, faster.” To do that, the business development manager for NRStor energy-storage developer says, “We need warriors. That doesn’t only mean people out on the front lines, defending their territories. We also need warriors in boardrooms. We need lawyers. We need engineers to design the energy systems of tomorrow.”

Jessica LeBlanc

28, Vancouver
program director, Foundation for Environmental Stewardship

It’s frustrating to come up against the persistent tokenization of young people as “learners now” and “leaders later,” especially when the “later” is under threat, Jessica LeBlanc says. So her work at the Foundation for Environmental Stewardship (FES) has centred on equipping those young changemakers with the education, resources and support they need to act on climate, never mind the naysayers. “Youth leadership and influence are crucial for our ability to achieve the climate-resilient Canada we all desperately need,” she says. Her team at FES has delivered more than 80 sustainability training workshops to more than 5,500 students and educators across Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. “The most significant impacts I’ve witnessed are when students learn and demonstrate empathy for a cause or a group of people that they hadn’t considered before. This culture of kindness is what will bring us a healthier and more sustainable planet.”

Xia (Alice) Zhu

28, Toronto
PhD candidate, University of Toronto

“If you have a vision for your planet, don’t be afraid to make it a reality.” That’s Alice Zhu’s message to young sustainability leaders today, and one she has embodied. She recalls the first time she heard about the North Pacific garbage patch as a high school student. It was such a startling image, a mass of plastic in the ocean, that it drove her to action. She founded Climate Impact Network, her first of three environmental organizations, which has delivered climate-science workshops to more than 300 middle- and high-school students across Ontario. Her doctoral research has shed light on how plastic pollution moves through the environment and identified which ecosystems are affected the most. Her peer-reviewed research has been cited hundreds of times, and she has spoken about it at dozens of conferences, workshops, panels and speaker series. “One person is not going to solve climate change or end plastic pollution,” she notes. “We need everyone working together to overhaul our broken system.”

Emily McIntosh

28, Paris, France
student, Sciences Po Paris; former climate action coordinator, New Glasgow, N.S.

As a kid growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, almost all of Emily McIntosh’s free time was spent playing and learning in nature. Once she turned 18, she spent her summers in the forests and rivers around Ontario’s Temagami Island, where she worked as a backcountry canoe trip guide. These were formative explorations that forged a connection with the natural world that guides her today, as she pursues a master’s in environmental policy at Sciences Po Paris. Before relocating to Europe, Emily was the climate action coordinator in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, where she worked to embed climate and sustainability goals into all aspects of the municipality’s operations. She led two community-wide consultations, steered the Climate Action Volunteer program, and co-led the region’s inaugural Pictou County Climate Summit. “The more people involved, perspectives included and needs considered, the more likely we are to develop policies and projects that are meaningful, impactful and grounded in equity and reconciliation,” she says.

Miranda Wang & Jeanny Yao

29, Menlo Park, California
cofounders & CEO/COO, Novoloop

Vancouver high school students Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao were inspired to take action after visiting a municipal waste station and seeing the staggering amount of plastic trash. “We were shocked to see how much plastic was in the garbage,” Wang says. They had an idea: what if you could use bacteria to break down all that plastic? Yao went on to pursue biochemistry and environmental science at the University of Toronto, while Wang studied molecular biology and engineering entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania. The duo, both daughters of entrepreneurs, reunited to found Novoloop (formerly BioCellection), a start-up that breaks down polyethylene waste to create high-performance materials. Their newest product, Lifecycled, is a thermoplastic made from up to 50% post-consumer waste, and it’s being used in shoemaker On’sCloudprime running shoes. Novoloop’s innovative approach has earned them a spot in the World Economic Forum’s 100 most promising Technology Pioneers of 2022 and raised US$21 million in funding.

Siobhan Finan

26, Whistler, B.C
manager of real estate sustainability, Canada Post

Siobhan Finan is playing a key role in getting one of the biggest and most recognizable Crown corporations to its waste-diversion goal. She led the creation of Canada Post’s first zero-waste baseline, a detailed inventory of all waste generated in operations through durable goods and construction, and she developed the company’s first zero-waste strategy, which serves as a roadmap so it can hit its 90% diversion target by 2030. Canada Post already diverts 67% of its waste from landfill through reduction, recycling and reuse – which represents 27,000 tonnes of material. “It can be challenging working in the field of sustainability, as you often hear fresh news stories about a new environmental disaster,” she says. “I try my best to focus on my slice of the pie where I can make a difference.”

Jordan Lin

23, Toronto
energy and sustainability consultant, Arup; co-founder, ReImagine17

At just 23, Jordan Lin has been busy. His focus? “Empowering the enablers of change with the knowledge, resources, connections and opportunities to achieve scaled impact,” he says. The Beijing-born mechanical engineering grad co-founded University of Waterloo’s Impact Alliance to amplify the UN’s sustainable development solutions before starting the non-profit ReImagine17, raising $150,000 in financing and providing 24 young people paid opportunities to learn about, contribute to and make an impact on sustainability across Canada. Now, through his work as an energy and sustainability consultant at Arup, he’s helped clients slash 8,100 tonnes of annual greenhouse gas emissions in their buildings. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the size of the world’s problem, Lin says. “Cultivate positive energy that builds a sense of purpose in your work and encourages perseverance to overcome challenges in the face of adversity.”

Ashoke Mohanraj

25, Halifax
author; law student, Dalhousie University

There are a few mottos that Ashoke Mohanraj lives by. One of them comes from his parents, Sri Lankan refugees who escaped the civil war and made it to Canada thanks to the kindness of others. Living in Markham, Ontario, they taught their son to work hard and be kind. “Nothing more and nothing less,” Mohanraj recalls. And so for him, “sustainability has never really been about saving the birds and the bees. It was always about kindness, both towards the planet and people.” He wrote Pollinator Man, a children’s book that teaches readers about different environmental issues and how they can be part of the solution. He has reached more than 5,000 youth through live readings and educational workshops, and another 10,000 through sales of the book. Mohanraj, a former environmental advisor for the RCMP, says the book promotes representation in the sustainability space and encourages people of colour to become engaged. His message to other young people: “Your personal and lived experiences are what make you a leader, so make sure you use that as an asset.”

Brighid Fry

20, Toronto
artist; co-founder, Music Declares Emergency Canada

Growing up in a queer, feminist, climate-focused family of activists, Brighid Fry spent a lot of time at marches and sit-ins as a child. But music was her calling. “My first-ever concert was performing at a Greenpeace fundraiser.” People can be moved emotionally and spiritually by music, Fry says, and that’s often missing from a lot of political activism. Today the singer-songwriter will humbly tell you that she’s not a musician with a lot of celebrity status but she is getting the music industry to sit down and listen through the non-profit she co-founded during the pandemic: Music Declares Emergency Canada. She’s since helped organize the inaugural Canadian Music Climate Summit and has worked with a number of festivals to reduce their carbon footprints. “I think we have really moved the needle,” Fry says. Having just turned 20, she adds, “I feel like I am just getting started.”

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The prototype was heralded as a victory on the road to breaking our collective addiction to the fossil-fuel-based material, at a moment when hundreds of companies were tripping over themselves pledging to chop their virgin plastic use.

Then Lego confessed it had hit a wall. Last month, the company said its big plan to go all-in on recycled bricks by 2030 would have made Lego Group’s carbon footprint worse when it’s trying to reduce carbon emissions by 37% by 2032.

Tim Brooks, Lego’s head of sustainability, told the Financial Times in September that the recycled plastic was softer and needed more energy to process it. “It’s like trying to make a bike out of wood rather than steel,” he said. “In order to scale production [of recycled PET, or polyethylene terephthalate], the level of disruption to the manufacturing environment was such that we needed to change everything in our factories. After all that, the carbon footprint would have been higher. It was disappointing.”

Industry observers are wondering if Lego is tackling its sustainability targets all wrong.

“Many had high hopes that Lego was setting a positive example by actively taking steps for the sustainability of plastics,” says Tiz Mekonnen, with the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Polymer Research. “Sustainability in plastic production extends beyond carbon emissions. Reusing PET plastic waste for products could address pressing waste-management issues while simultaneously reducing reliance on virgin and petrochemical plastics for Lego parts.”

To be sure, emissions from the plastic industry are a massive problem. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says that plastics generated 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – or 3.4% of global emissions – in 2019. By 2060, emissions from the plastics life cycle are on track to more than double.

And plastic-recycling infrastructure has been a hot mess for years. Ever since China banned imports of most plastic waste in 2017, recyclers across North America and Europe have been scrambling for solutions. At this point, just 9% of Canada’s plastic is recycled. That stat isn’t much better in Lego’s home base of Denmark, where most plastics are incinerated.

Like Lego, a lot of private sector players are “hesitant to invest in new facilities and long-term, impactful research, prioritizing short-term profitability for their shareholders instead,” says Mekonnen, who suggests mandating recycled content as one solution.

Other major consumer brands such as Nestlé have said that recycled-content targets have been hampered by “a lack of government recycling infrastructure globally,” as Reuters reported.

Lego might shave emissions down a notch with plans to add solar panels to factories in China, Hungary, Mexico, Vietnam and the United States, where grids are often far from clean. But Lego Group operations only account for 2% of total emissions. The remaining 98% come from their scope 3 emissions – from the production of raw materials, distribution and transportation and the treatment of Lego products when they’re no longer wanted.

Hamish van der Ven is an associate professor of sustainable business management of natural resources at the University of British Columbia. He says Lego is too narrowly focused on addressing production instead of consumption. “Instead of making Lego moderately less carbon intensive, why not focus on reducing the need for new production through innovative sales strategies like renting Lego instead of buying it?”

van der Ven notes that plastic alternatives always come with downsides and additional cost (think paper straws). “Ending fossil fuel subsidies would be a good way to reduce the price difference between plastics and plastic alternatives while funding both infrastructure and research.”

Lego’s sustainability chief has acknowledged that “it’s better to reuse than recycle.” He said the company plans to expand its Lego Replay program, which donates used bricks to children’s non-profits. But Lego, like other companies trying to green themselves, will need to go beyond feel-good pilot programs. “We’re looking at a circular business model — how do we earn revenue from recircling bricks. It’s quite a shift in thinking and ideas,” said Brooks.

Greenpeace Canada’s head of oceans and plastic campaigns, Sarah King, is glad to see Lego talking circular. But, she says, “unless they begin to reduce production overall, their model does not lend itself to circularity . . . A continued reliance on fossil fuels for its products is not compatible with a sustainable or just transition for the business or the wider economy.”

The toymaker has clarified that it’s still “fully committed to making Lego bricks from sustainable materials by 2032,” adding that the company will “triple spending on sustainability initiatives to $1.4 billion in the four years to 2025.”

Environmental advocates will be watching closely to see whether Lego’s definition of sustainability stacks up.

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Back in 1986, an ecologist on a research trip to Fiji reportedly coined the term “greenwashing” in an essay critiquing a beachfront resort’s towel reuse policy. Four decades later, greenwashed marketing claims, did not, it turns out, come out in the wash. They’ve permeated nearly every product category, from “carbon neutral” burgers and disposable cola bottles made with “plastic from the sea” to net-zero oil companies and ESG labels slapped on trillions of dollars in poorly regulated investment funds.

But the Wild West era may be coming to an end. As The Atlantic put it in March, “The world is finally cracking down on ‘greenwashing.’”

On May 11, the European Parliament voted to ban carbon-neutral claims that are based on carbon-offsetting schemes. At the same time, the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority also said it would begin stricter enforcement of “unqualified” carbon-neutral, nature-positive and net-zero claims; companies will now have to prove that offsets, which have come under heavy fire, are effective. Meanwhile, Gucci dropped the use of the term “carbon neutral” from its website this spring. EasyJet and JetBlue backed away from carbon offsetting schemes in December.

“Climate-related claims have been shown to be particularly prone to being unclear and ambiguous, misleading the consumer,” EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius told The Guardian. “We need to set things straight for consumers and give them full information.”

In North America, both agencies in charge of overseeing marketing claims are retooling their approaches. For the first time in a decade, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is revamping its Green Guides, guidelines for environmental advertising and labelling claims. The FTC first published the Green Guides back in 1992 to “help marketers avoid making misleading environmental claims,” which had flourished.

The agency only issues greenwashing fines every few years. In 2022 the FTC went after Walmart and Kohl’s for deceptively marketing rayon bedding, clothing and towels as being “eco-friendly and “made from bamboo” (the U.S. Textile and Wool Act requires that they be labelled as “made with rayon,” since bamboo is converted to rayon using hazardous air-polluting chemicals). The companies agreed to pay the FTC US$3 and $2.5 million, respectively, in penalties. Now environmental and consumer groups want the agency to go after a wider array of claims, including plastic companies claiming that their “advanced” and “chemical” recycling methods are sustainable, as well as financial products purporting to be net-zero or “Paris aligned.”

“The explosive rise of the ESG investment space has raised new questions about what constitutes fair and faithful marketing and disclosure around financial products and services,” said Americans for Financial Reform in an April letter to the FTC.

Across the border, the federal Canadian government has launched a review of the Competition Act after it became clear that the Competition Bureau, like its American cousin, has been hamstrung by limited enforcement powers and funding. In the meantime, the regulator has been more active than ever on the greenwash file. After fining Keurig $3 million for misleading coffee-pod-recycling claims last year, the Competition Bureau is currently investigating the climate claims made by Canada’s largest bank (RBC), six largest oil companies (operating under their umbrella organization Pathways Alliance) and the Canadian Gas Association, as well as a greenwashing complaint against North America’s largest forestry certifier (Sustainable Forestry Initiative).

“The Canadian government should set standards and enforce against greenwashing, not only for the good of consumers and the planet, but also so our marketplace is not distorted by false or confusing green claims.”

 

–Former environment minister Catherine McKenna

Still, agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have been accused of using a whack-a-mole approach to a widespread problem. While multiple studies have found that more than half of green claims are misleading, vague or unfounded, in Canada investigations are opened only after complaints are formally lodged by groups such as Ecojustice, Greenpeace and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

The EU’s proposed Green Claims Directive would deliver a stricter framework, one that former Canadian environment minister Catherine McKenna wants Canada to emulate in tackling greenwashing “head on.”

“The Canadian government should set standards and enforce against greenwashing, not only for the good of consumers and the planet, but also so our marketplace is not distorted by false or confusing green claims,” McKenna said in a press release.

In the U.K., industry insiders are hopeful. One senior brand advisor told The Guardian that “the era of unspecific claims such as ‘environmentally friendly’ is over.”

Depending on how this year in regulatory overhauls shakes out around the globe, they may be right.

Adria Vasil is managing editor of Corporate Knights and the bestselling author of the Ecoholic book series.

The post ‘Carbon neutral’ and ‘net-zero’ claims face global greenwash crackdown appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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“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 appeared in court virtually to challenge the provincial government’s decision to gut its climate targets in 2018.

“We are here today to address the dire situation we find ourselves in [so we can] tell our children that we did all we could, while we could, to change our trajectory,” said co-plaintiff Shaelyn Wabegijig of the Rama First Nation at a press conference ahead of the hearing.  

They’re in good company. Whether they’re legal advocates, entrepreneurs, activists, engineers-in-training or policy geeks, Corporate Knights’ 2022 Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders are using their collective skills to challenge the status quo and bend the arc of history toward a more just and sustainable future.  

Earlier this year, 29-year-old Anishinaabe lawyer Stephanie Willsey helped First Nations communities win an $8-billion class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government to address the ongoing water crisis on reserves. Sanch Gupta and Milton Calderon Donefer have saved 52,000 pounds of food from going to waste and delivered more than 70,000 meals to homeless shelters in eight cities. At 28, Kurtis Layden, senior policy advisor in the Office of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, has been a key advisor on the federal ban on some single-use plastics, taking effect in 2025.

More than half the world’s population is now under 30 years old. The largest youth generation in history is coming of age while inheriting a planet marred by extreme climate events, a lingering pandemic, armed conflicts and sharply rising inflation. For its 11th annual youth survey, Deloitte surveyed 4,808 Gen Zers and 8,412 millennials across 46 countries and found that they’re “deeply worried” about the state of the world, but Gen Zers and millennials are putting in the work to drive change.  

They’re pressuring their employers, their schools (including MBA programs) and the businesses they support to take environmental action more seriously. (Only 15% of Gen Zers and 14% of millennials strongly agree that businesses are taking substantive actions to address the climate emergency, according to Deloitte.) The two generations marked by rising climate anxiety are also advocating for stronger support for workplace mental health.

For this year’s cohort of Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders, saving the world while safeguarding their own mental health has become critical to making sure their own leadership is sustainable for the long haul. That’s also central to their advice for up-and-coming sustainability leaders.

“I have seen far too many people in the field, including myself, burn out,” says Kait Tyschenko, founder of the Queer Infrastructure Network. They encourage youth in the sustainability space to “listen to their minds and bodies and to take care of themselves.”

Helen Watts, senior director of global partnerships at Student Energy, knows what it’s like to run on fumes while growing an organization to have a million-dollar budget. “We physically, mentally and spiritually cannot sustain this version of ourselves without committing to rest and recovery, taking time to stay connected to our communities and our motivators.”  

One thing the Top 30 Under 30 have in common is that they’re channelling their energies (including climate anxieties) into inspiring, needle-moving solutions, whether that’s fighting for Indigenous rights, building greener buildings and cleaner power, closing the loop on waste, or boosting corporate and government sustainability. Ultimately, they’re standing up for the well-being of all life on this planet – and they’re showing us all how it’s done.

How we found the top 30:

Every April, Corporate Knights opens the 30 Under 30 nominations to the public. An internal team narrowed the list of submissions down to a shortlist of 60, then our panel of judges each submitted their top 30 picks, and we tallied the votes.

Judges

Tabatha Bull | President of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business  

Shilpa Tiwari | Founder of Her Climb and global executive vice-president of social impact and sustainability at Citizen Relations  

Phil De Luna | Sustainability expert at McKinsey, mentor at Creative Destruction Lab, and a 2021 Corporate Knights Top 30 Under 30

Adria Vasil | Managing editor of Corporate Knights and bestselling author of the Ecoholic book series

Want to be on next year’s 30 Under 30? Visit corporateknights.com in April 2023 to nominate any change agents under 30 that you think should be considered for next year’s list.

Stephanie Willsey

29, Toronto/Rama First Nation
Lawyer, McCarthy Tétrault LLP

Roughly 60 Indigenous communities in Canada don’t have access to clean water. But thanks to Stephanie Willsey, a proud Anishinaabe lawyer and active member of the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, three First Nations received a historic $8-billion settlement agreement earlier this year to rectify their water crises. “To our people, water is life. Water is more than a basic resource. It is a medicine. It is part of ceremony,” says Willsey. She mentors other Indigenous lawyers and law students, as well as Indigenous high school students, so they too can see themselves in the profession. Willsey also provides legal advice at Pro Bono Students Canada’s Indigenous Human Rights Clinics and is a delegate at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Recently named one of Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers, Willsey says, “My goal has always been to use my law degree to help people, and I am so proud to be doing just that.”

Kat Cadungog

27, Calgary
executive director, The Youth Harbour

As an Albertan with friends and family tied to the oil and gas industry, Kate Cadungog feels like she has an “inside scoop” on how to create a more inclusive climate-resilient society. “I’ve always been inspired by narratives that bring people along and unite people, and I owe a lot of my perseverance to the Albertan ‘grit’ that I’ve learned from my peers,” she says. Armed with that experience, Cadungog wants to completely reimagine philanthropic systems and the way we support young climate mobilizers. Under Cadungog’s leadership, The Youth Harbour has raised $1.5 million to support youth-led climate action projects. In just its first year, the group has supported 15 such projects and committed $205,500 in funding to them. “I’m most proud of being able to raise the funds to regrant to youth-led climate movements across what’s currently referred to as Canada and actually getting it to the hands of youth,” she says.

Katie Wheatley

29, Montreal
Head of Canada, UN Principles for Responsible Investment

Incremental progress is Katie Wheatley’s priority. She looks at what she can accomplish in the next week or month as opposed to the next few years. And that’s probably a healthy perspective given that her work focuses on helping pension funds, universities and other institutional investors become responsible investors – a task with challenges that are systemic and long-term. But that doesn’t mean that Wheatley’s work doesn’t have a massive impact. “Changing the way that our financial system works to foster greater transparency and address social and environmental externalities is critical to improving collective well-being in the long-term, and institutional investors can play a significant part in that, given their size and worth,” she says. Her work has included helping Indigenous trusts and investors with aggregate assets of more than $480 million under management to harness their capital for collective good.

Catherine Marot

26, Toronto
CEO, CASE

There’s a story Catherine Marot heard growing up about a man trying to save starfish that had washed up onshore by throwing what he could back into the sea. “A boy comes up to him and asks him why he is bothering, because he’ll never save them all,” she recounts. The man simply bends down, tosses another into the sea and says, “I made a difference to that one.” “This story inspired me on a personal level to take action where I can.” Marot started a solo project saving one takeout container at a time. The daughter of waste-conscious immigrants from South Africa and Zimbabwe eventually started getcase.ca, preventing more than 250,000 black takeout containers from ending up in landfill by sanitizing them and selling them back to restaurants. This also amounts to an approximate savings of 34,644 kilowatt-hours of energy, 97.8 barrels of virgin fossil fuels and 180 cubic yards of landfill space. “Ultimately, I hope to inspire others [so] that we can change the status quo.”

Kurtis Layden

28, Ottawa
senior policy advisor, Office of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change

Kurtis Layden was just 15 when he was part of the Canadian delegation to a UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network climate change conference in Denmark. The experience cemented a firm belief in Layden that Canada needed to take a leading role on the international stage when it came to tackling the climate crisis. Since then, he has worked in the offices of three successive environment ministers and has been a key advisor on some of the Liberal government’s main environmental policies, including its ban on some single-use plastics. Once the ban takes effect in 2025, it could eliminate an estimated 1.3 million tonnes of plastic waste over the following decade. “These policies are critical to addressing environmental challenges such as pollution and climate change in Canada at a national scale and to help promote environmental sustainability,” he says.

Pratap Sandhu

27, Vancouver
CEO & director, Pangea Natural Foods

By the age of 21, Pratap Sandhu was already marketing director at his family’s global food company. After he got his MBA from the University of Liverpool, Sandhu decided to branch out on his own, founding Pangea Natural Foods in the spring of 2021. With $1.4 million in seed financing, Sandhu shopped his flagship product, Pangea Plant-Based Patties, to grocers across North America. “I was inspired to create high-quality nutritious products while keeping a clean label,” says Sandhu. Just over one year later, Pangea products are now in more than 300 stores, including select Loblaw and IGA stores. Sandhu’s latest product? Vancouver-made vegan Chikken Nuggets made with three types of pea protein. “We are excited to launch another plant-based product given the immense growth that the sector is experiencing.”

Ethan Talbot Schwartz

27, Toronto/Montreal
consultant, CPCS Transcom

As an associate with JCM Power, Ethan Talbot Schwartz led the development of renewable energy projects in Malawi, the world’s fifth-poorest country. With a background in engineering and diplomacy, honed through a master’s in international relations and a stint at the UN, Schwartz worked for months in the East African nation to advance the development of its first utility-scale wind farm. The project should mitigate more than 175,000 tonnes of CO2 per year while increasing the country’s installed generation capacity by nearly 10%. “A key takeaway from my travels was that I needed to use [the] advantage … of simply being born in a place like Canada as best as I could to make the world a better place.” Schwartz recently started as a consultant with CPCS, where he supports the organization in providing sustainable infrastructure solutions to governments across sub-Saharan Africa. With Pathways to Education, he provides weekly tutoring services to students in math and science while leading lectures on climate change to fill a gap in the current Ontario curriculum. Says Schwartz, “They will be the ones making a difference in tomorrow’s society!”

Samia Sami

24, Regina
engineer-in-training, SaskPower

“In Islam, humans are referred to as ‘khalifa’ (guardians) of the earth,” says Samia Sami. Those teachings have helped shape Sami’s attitude toward her two passions, sustainability and engineering. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, she now designs transmission stations to support the increased use of renewable energy (contributing to Saskatchewan’s goal of generating 50% electricity from renewables by 2030). “I have learned that electrical engineers can make a difference in the ecological footprint of the world.” As well, her work at the University of Saskatchewan reduced the school’s overall greenhouse gas emissions by 20% from 2007 levels, and she has helped 12 Canadian mosques implement sustainability initiatives via the Greening Canadian Mosques program. The Starfish board member is also big on empowering youth. As a chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Power and Energy Society student branch chapter, Sami helps students advance their careers in sustainable energy. “It is also important for youth to realize that diversity plays a vital role in our fight against climate change.”

Andy Lam

29, Toronto
manager of climate programs, MaRS Discovery District

When Andy Lam is working late and his friends pressure him to get off early, he has an answer at the ready: “Climate change isn’t going to solve itself.” During his last five years at MaRS Discovery District, Lam has been busy helping Canada’s cleantech entrepreneurs grow their businesses and scale their solutions. “Seeing these innovators take risks and put their careers on the line to make the world a better place also inspired me to join the fight,” he says. That fight? Managing Mission from MaRS: Climate Impact Challenge, which helps 10 Canadian climate tech companies with high potential overcome barriers to adoption. Lam has advice for budding sustainability leaders: “Be solution-oriented rather than problem-oriented. We all know that climate change is a big issue, that pollution is a big issue, but we need to start focusing on how we’ll resolve them and begin actioning.”

Leah Perry

29, Burlington, ON
senior manager, cleantech, venture services, MaRS Discovery District

With less than 20% of Canadian cleantech companies having a female founder, Leah Perry wants to create not only a more sustainable world but one that is also led by a diverse mix of leaders. “It has been amazing to work alongside these amazing women founders to help accelerate their technology to the market,” says Perry, who leads the Women in Cleantech Accelerator at MaRS Discovery District. Raised by two environmentalists, she’s dedicated to ensuring women have equal opportunity to succeed in our net-zero future. The Schulich School of Business grad has been actively involved in the cleantech capital ecosystem since 2015, beginning as a founding member of the cleantech team at Export Development Canada and now as manager of cleantech venture services at MaRS. “There are more jobs in sustainability and impact than there ever have been,” says Perry. “A better world doesn’t just have to be a side hustle. Find a job that embodies your beliefs and you can spend every day chasing your mission.”

Marco Folino

27, Vancouver
manager of sustainable investing, BentallGreenOak

When Marco Folino started working as a management consultant, he found that there were rarely enough sustainability experts to help companies considering integrating ESG into their strategic goals. That’s when he decided to pursue a career in sustainability. Folino now manages sustainability programs for property management firm BentallGreenOak, which has US$80 billion in assets under management. Through this work, Folino has helped deliver custom ESG action plans for more than 120 million square feet of real estate properties across North America. He’s also provided climate adaptation plans for more than 90 million square feet of properties. Last year, Folino’s firm made a commitment to make its operations and assets under management net-zero by 2050 or earlier – a challenge he’s embracing with open arms. “Real accomplishments come when you have a relentless drive to succeed despite many failed attempts. This often means turning over every stone until you find the one that has what you’re looking for,” he says. 

Kait Tyschenko

27, Toronto/London
founder, Queer Infrastructure Network

Kait Tyschenko began their career in the environmental non-profit realm and was soon drawn to the construction sector’s low-carbon potential. Working at two of Canada’s largest construction companies, Pomerleau and EllisDon, Tyschenko focused on scaling up sustainability- and equity-driven innovations. These included community engagement programs, an Indigenous-relations roadmap, a sustainable-construction training program, and R&D exploring the powers of life-cycle assessment to reduce the embodied carbon of building projects. “I work tirelessly to ensure that the sustainability and impact projects that I lead have an equity-informed and -integrated lens,” they say. Tyschenko is the founder of the Queer Infrastructure Network, a group working to improve LGBTQ2S+ inclusion, visibility and safety in the Canadian infrastructure sector. “We cannot do the work we need to do without being kind and understanding with one another,” says Tyschenko, who is queer and trans-nonbinary. 

Alex Cool-Fergus

29, Gatineau, QC
outreach & engagement advisor, Federation of Canadian Municipalities

Alex Cool-Fergus calls herself “a municipal nerd innovating to build a more sustainable world.” Having witnessed her neighbours and parents win a campaign to protect local greenspace when she was a child, she got interested in both movement-building and sustainability. “Municipalities are the most ambitious level of government for climate mitigation and adaptation yet have the fewest resources to achieve their goals,” says Cool-Fergus, who has spent most of her career working with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ climate programs, including the Global Covenant of Mayors and the Green Municipal Fund. From cofounding a bike co-op at the University of Sherbrooke to helping 10 municipal candidates in Gatineau get elected with ambitious climate platforms, Cool-Fergus has stayed focused on creating a resilient and inclusive world. “As a young woman of colour, I quickly understood that it is essential to apply an equity and reconciliation lens to all sustainability policies.” The avid cyclist also sits on the board of the CREDDO, the largest environmental non-profit in the Outaouais region.

Helen Watts

28, Toronto
senior director of global partnerships, Student Energy

Right out of her undergraduate degree, Helen Watts became the head of fundraising for what would become the world’s largest organization working with young people on the energy transition. Over the next five years she drove the expansion of Student Energy’s global partnerships, growing the youth-led organization’s budget by 680% to help turn it into a multimillion-dollar organization and managing a team that supports a network of 44 funding and strategic partners. “I don’t come from a typical energy or climate background,” says the history major, who is frank about experiencing imposter syndrome when she started in this field. “I’m really passionate now about bridging the gap for young people who don’t feel they have the knowledge or experience to participate in climate and clean energy.” In 2018, Watts co-founded an accelerator for young people in low-income, high-climate-risk countries working on climate start-ups. Now, she’s focused on raising accessible funding for youth-led clean energy projects through the Student Energy Solutions Movement in partnership with the UN. “We need everyone at the table and in this fight with unique solutions to get where we need to be on the energy transition,” she says.

Mark Soberman

29, Vienna, Austria
director of research & development, Evanesce

Mark Soberman says he’s always been sensitive to the impact of human activity on the natural world. So it’s fitting that he is now working on the cutting-edge of sustainable packaging at Evanesce Packaging Solutions, a compostable packaging company based in Vancouver. (He’s currently conducting R&D at a partner lab in Vienna.) In the hope of helping to rid the world of single-use plastics, he is leading the development of Evanesce’s proprietary plant-based packaging material that biodegrades in up to 90 days. And if all goes to plan, he sees the company’s products – which are made of starch, cellulose fibre and agricultural byproducts – diverting thousands of tonnes of waste from landfill to industrial composting, where it can be used to grow plants and take more CO2 out of the air. “I firmly believe in waste reduction and working on leaving the world a better place than I found it,” he says.

Nabeela Merchant

29, Hamilton, ON
founder, Canadian Women in Venture Capital; senior associate, TELUS Pollinator Fund for Good

Nabeela Merchant knows well that every individual action – no matter how small – contributes to collective action. “Big things can grow out of small, consistent steps. That’s the power of compounded action,” she says. What started as a casual dinner she organized in 2018 has grown into Canadian Women in Venture Capital – a national group that looks to empower and connect women in the industry. Through this work, Merchant has contributed to helping more than 350 women get the support they need to succeed in an industry that has been dominated by men. While she was the initial igniter of the community, she is quick to give credit to the larger collective of women who have made it thrive. She began her career in investing five years ago and, as an early-stage investor at the $100-million TELUS Pollinator Fund, has focused on investments that look to tackle the climate crisis, inequality and barriers to healthcare.

Theresa Westhaver

29, Treaty 6 and 8 in the traditional territory of the Secwépemc Nehiyaw, Stoney, Métis, Dene-zaa, and Aseniwuche Winewak (now known as Jasper National Park)
Indigenous liaison, Jasper National Park, & co-founder, Howl Experience

Theresa Westhaver’s parents taught her that we’re all visitors to the animals’ homeland. Her father was a park warden and her mother a park interpreter. She has followed in their footsteps, as she now works as an Indigenous liaison for Parks Canada and teaches other young people about conservation through an educational non-profit called Howl Experience. “Without personal connection to place, people will not be inspired to protect and care for it. This guides the work that I do,” she says. As if that wasn’t enough to keep the single mom busy, she also runs a small business, called Mountain Stek’lep (formerly Left Coast Collective), which sells upcycled beadwork. She hopes that the impact of her work “ripples down to the next seven generations. If at least one youth is empowered to learn opportunities and leadership roles that they may not have otherwise seen themselves in, I would see that as being meaningful change.”

Shivani Chotalia

29, Toronto/Edmonton
director of development & partnerships, NRStor

Growing up in Edmonton, sandwiched between the oil industry and the beauty of the Rocky Mountains, Shivani Chotalia felt a growing sense of responsibility for building the world she wanted to see. “It became clear to me that the way we manage our economy needs to be aligned with stewarding the natural ecosystems that support us all.” As a director at one of Canada’s leading energy-storage project developers, NRStor, she’s particularly proud of contributing to its “partnerships first” approach with First Nations communities. NRStor and Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation are launching one of the largest energy-storage facilities in North America. “We can use our projects as an avenue to enable greater Indigenous ownership and economic benefits resulting from our transition to clean energy.” The engineer and financial professional, with a background in international development, also mentors Indigenous youth with Outside Looking In and in 2020 became the youngest board member of Environmental Defence.

Theresa Dearden

28, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea/Salt Spring Island, B.C.
technical lead, Natural Resource Management Hub, UNDP Papua New Guinea

It’s hard enough for most people to fully grasp the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of Papua New Guinea, a nation where more than 800 languages are spoken. Theresa Dearden helps communities in the country transcend cultural barriers to improve sustainable development. The first-generation Canadian (with parents from Thailand and the U.K.) designs user-friendly, open-source digital tools, including a phone app called Lukim Gather, that allow communities to monitor and report social or environmental issues (such as deforestation or pollution) to policy-makers. “We need good data in order to be able to avoid devastating climate change [and] biodiversity loss,” she says. She hopes to spread the idea that you don’t need to be a tech guru or biologist to collect data that can change the world. “Preservation of these ecosystems is vital for mitigating climate change at a global level.”

Jonathan Edwards

29, Aurora, ON
principal research scientist, CERT Systems

Jonathan Edwards was drawn to sustainability work after learning about climate change in high school. He realized how crucial cleantech was to the future of the world and decided to devote his career to it. His work at start-up CERT Systems focuses on converting carbon dioxide into fuels and chemical feedstocks using only water and electricity. Edwards says that while the climate crisis can be daunting, the world needs to see a huge scale-up of cleantech to meet its 2050 emissions targets. “When you feel that you or your technology [are] very small compared to this global challenge, recognize that you are not alone and that you have a tremendous opportunity before you. Plan for growth, but don’t be afraid to take that first step,” he says. Over the next five years, Edwards and his team will further develop their technology for commercialization.

Anoosha Lalani

27, Toronto/Pakistan
manager of ESG reporting & assurance, KPMG

Born in Pakistan, then raised in Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia before arriving in Canada for university, Anoosha Lalani has seen firsthand what happens when people cling to the idea that climate change affects only those far away. “I’m passionate about climate change because I believe equity does not exist without sustainability.” As ESG manager at KPMG, Lalani supports multibillion-dollar companies to develop operating models that actively work toward building a greener future. “What I like most about my job is that I can support organizations trying to make the shift from viewing ESG as simply a marketing exercise to embedding it within their strategy and ensuring effective disclosure.” As a passionate public speaker, novelist, Ocean Wise alumni ambassador and World Economic Forum Global Shaper, Lalani encourages youth to keep telling their climate stories and using their skills to move the needle. “Every inch counts!”

Pierre-Laurent Macridis

28, Montreal
Associate Principal, Asset Management, Fondaction

Pierre-Laurent Macridis tries to develop solutions that will tackle a problem in the most efficient way. And he hopes that the impact-investing management firm he helped launch this summer will play an important role in closing the US$2.5-trillion funding gap needed to achieve the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. His work has helped catalyze more than $500 million in impact investing, primarily targeted toward climate change. He’s also managed funds and financed businesses that will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 1.3 million tonnes. But most importantly, Macridis has mentored more than 20 young people pursuing careers in sustainability-related fields. To inspire his mentees, Macridis reminds them that Rome was not built in a day, nor alone: “Don’t be afraid to dream big and find your peers with whom you can shoot for the moon, because even if you miss it, you’ll land amongst the stars.”

Jasveen Brar

27, Calgary
executive director, Youth Climate Lab

Jasveen Brar was on a university research trip in Antarctica years ago when she saw something that changed her life: a plastic water bottle left between two penguin rookeries in the otherwise pristine landscape. “To see something of our man-made creation at the ends of [the] earth was shocking. I knew that we needed to do more [and] I needed to do more to leave our planet in a better place,” she says. After she returned from her trip, she changed her degree to pursue sustainability. Last year, the former Ocean Wise manager became the executive director of Youth Climate Lab, a non-profit that has raised more than US$450,000 to support youth-led climate action. The lab gives youth the skills, financial access and policy knowledge to become climate leaders. As she becomes an “older youth,” Brar hopes she’ll be able to “leave this space in a better place for future youth and to pave a better, more just and resilient future together.”

Erin Andrews

27, Toronto
executive director, Impact Zero

Erin Andrews’s best advice for tomorrow’s youth sustainability leaders is to find a community of people who inspire you. She founded Impact Zero to do just that. The Toronto-based organization brings businesses, consumers and entrepreneurs together with the goal of creating a circular economy. But Andrews says that no single organization on its own will make the circular economy a reality. “The only option is empowerment, real collaboration and resource-sharing,” she says. Andrews built the organization from scratch, working tirelessly to bring more attention to the idea of a circular economy in Toronto. She says that the circular economy can provide huge emission-reduction opportunities and that we just need to empower people to bring these solutions to life. Since 2020, Impact Zero has informed thousands of people about circularity and connected them with circular businesses through a directory it created. The group has also helped launch seven circular start-ups.

Eric Lam

26, Gatineau, QC
economic advisor on energy transition and finance, Environment and Climate Change Canada

Between 2019 and 2021, private banks and financial institutions invested US$1.5 trillion in coal. Eric Lam is trying to put a stop to that. He’s the private finance lead for Team Canada in the Powering Past Coal Alliance, a joint initiative between Canada and the U.K. that works to phase out global coal power generation. “There’s a lot of talk about greenwashing with all of these financial institutions pledging to meet net-zero by 2050 … I am working to get financial institutions to actually take action on their net-zero commitments.” He also advises public banks on greening their investments. He admits that working in sustainability can be demoralizing, especially when banks keep telling him “no.” Says Lam, “It’s important to remember that by working in this field, you are part of a movement that is doing as much as we can within the means that we have.”

Sabreen Salman

29, Toronto
director of ESG reporting & measurement, Export Development Canada

Sabreen Salman had always enjoyed math and was working toward a degree in business at Schulich, specializing in financial accounting, when she was introduced to the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Since then, she’s risen in the ranks as a sustainability professional and ESG manager in the financial industry. She’s now director of ESG reporting and disclosures at Export Development Canada (EDC). ”ESG disclosures and reporting have come a long way from voluntary ‘CSR reporting’ to now being a business imperative expected by investors, shareholders and stakeholders.” Her work at EDC and in industry groups has helped create essential ESG standards. Over the next five years, Salman hopes to see ESG embedded in all areas of business, and she wants to play a part in helping companies reach that goal. “I want to play my role in this transition to help educate and empower teams sitting outside of ESG to really understand their ESG impacts and embed it in their work,” she says.

Devesh Bharadwaj

28, Victoria
CEO, Pani Energy

Water is more than just what comes out of a tap or what is needed to flush the toilet. It’s what we use to grow the food we eat, manufacture the products we use and produce the energy we consume. Growing up in India, Devesh Bharadwaj saw the critical role that water, and a lack of access to it, plays in the health and development of communities. “Every drop of that water and wastewater needs to be treated and fit for purpose, and that treatment takes its own toll on the environment.” After completing a mechanical engineering degree in Canada, he started building an industry-transforming software-as-service company called Pani Energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated by water and wastewater treatment processes. “We’re aiming to cut down on 500 megatons of emissions per year from the sector by 2032.” So far, the company has raised more than $8 million working with worldwide partners from across the industry to get as many treatment plants as possible on board in this mission. The mantra that drives him: “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” Adds Bharadwaj, “Find a problem that is meaningful, that excites you and is worth solving.”

Jamie Mark

28, Toronto
chief operating officer, Exactus Energy

Jamie Mark was one of the first employees hired by Exactus Energy after its
founding in 2016. Exactus was a small start-up back then, providing engineering
and design services for solar providers. “We started with a handful of employees in
a garage and our team size is now approaching 200.” At the beginning, the
engineering grad designed solar panel layouts herself. Now, as chief operating officer,
she leads six different teams across four countries, having helped build the firm
from the ground up into a leader in solar engineering and design in North America.
“Complacency is dangerous,” says Mark, who has had to constantly adapt and be
open to change in an industry known as the “solarcoaster.” “The status quo and our
comfortable routines are not going to cut it anymore. We need to question how both
our own day-to-day actions and how existing policy and systems are impacting our
planet and start making changes to combat these impacts.”

Sanch Gupta & Milton Calderon Donefer

Both 25, Toronto
co-founders, MealCare

When Sanch Gupta and Milton Calderon Donefer were students at McGill University, they often sat in a school cafeteria until closing, when they saw staff throw out trays of fresh meals. Around the same time, they talked to many unhoused people in downtown Montreal who needed food. They founded MealCare to tackle both issues. “Every day, MealCare makes a tangible impact both in reducing the environmental impact of food waste, as well as helping people in our communities not go hungry,” says Calderon Donefer. With chapters in eight cities, MealCare has already saved shelters more than $300,000 and delivered more than 70,000 meals to the hungry. “Growing up in Canada, it was shocking to me that one in seven people suffer from food insecurity, and I wanted to use my privileged position to help underserved members of my community,” says Gupta. “We believe food is essential and should be available to every human being, especially when we as a nation have an abundance of it.”

Shaelyn Wabegijig

25, Rama First Nation/Lekwungen Territory, Victoria
master’s student in Indigenous governance at the University of Victoria

Since Shaelyn Wabegijig was five years old, she wanted to change the world. “I have always questioned the way the world is,” she says. When she attended university, she connected with the local Anishinaabeg community and learned about teachings such as Ginawaydaganuk (all is related) and Mino Bimaadiziwin (to live the good life) that confirmed her feelings of responsibility to live in a way that respected the planet. The 25-year-old master’s student is now one of seven youths suing the Ontario government for lowering its emission-reductions targets in 2018. “I hope our court case sets a precedent, putting into law that governments have the obligation to protect citizens from climate change and that all people and future generations have the right to a safe and habitable environment.” Before she left to pursue her master’s, Wabegijig was a program and outreach coordinator at Kawartha World Issues Centre, where she worked to assert Indigenous-led conservation in Ontario and empower youth and Indigenous Peoples to steward their lands for future generations.

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“A lack of meaningful progress hasn’t created a great deal of trust amongst our valued stakeholders,” says Reid, referring to the protesters who have unfurled banners both outside and inside today’s meeting that read “Broken promises mean forests burn.”  

Reid is one of thousands of business leaders, policy-makers and civil-society advocates who have gathered in New York (after a two-year pandemic hiatus) for more than 500 roundtables, panels and side events scattered across the city. It’s all part of the drum-beating prelude to the 27th UN climate summit taking place in Egypt this November. A laundry list of corporate pledges and climate solutions are on discussion boards here, and one message comes up again and again: there is no meeting Paris Agreement climate targets without halting forest loss. 

After a decade of failing to deliver on deforestation-free pledges, 21 consumer goods corporations, including Mars, Unilever and Nestlé, launched the Forest Positive Coalition (FPC) last year, hinged on a “new theory of change.” Back in 2010, more than 400 companies promised that all their soy, palm oil, beef, and pulp and paper would be “zero net deforestation” by 2020. Still more companies joined the New York Declaration on Forests in 2014. The deadline came and went and little progress had been made. 

“Reflecting on the past 10 years, we learned that solely focusing on individual supply chains and relying on certification will not drive the full-sector transformation needed to end deforestation,” FPC’s 2021 report noted. Transitioning to be “forest positive businesses” (with market value of more than US$2 trillion) would involve a more collaborative approach to their shared supply chains moving forward.  

Still, two years in and the progress being announced at Colgate’s headquarters – like a lot of what’s being discussed at Climate Week – is glaringly incremental. Disclosure rates are increasing, but “it’s not all going as fast as we would like,” concedes Kevin Rabinovitch, Mars’s global VP of sustainability and the architect of the FPC’s theory of change.  

There’s been a fivefold increase in the number of corporations in the agriculture, forest and land sector that have committed to net-zero, but of the 148 that have, only nine have made strong progress on slowing deforestation to date, according to a UN-commissioned study released in July. As the CEOs of Unilever and Nestlé, both FPC members, wrote in an op-ed this summer, “This lack of progress risks derailing the net zero commitments of over 94% of major food and land use companies.” The two companies now say they’ll make their key supply chains deforestation-free by 2025 by embracing nature-positive supply chains and have called for the acceleration of forest finance ahead of the COP27 summit in November.  

A lack of meaningful progress hasn’t created a great deal of trust amongst our valued stakeholders.

–Grant Reid CEO of Mars Inc.

Glenn Hurowitz, the CEO of forestry advocacy group Mighty Earth, is holding out hope. “From what I’ve seen, the single greatest action at protecting forests is private sector action.” He points to a 90% decrease in palm industry deforestation after years of public pressure on brands pushed them to take deforestation seriously. “It’s a gigatonne-scale climate victory.” (Not that the palm industry is clear of scandal: Nestlé just dropped a major Indonesian palm oil supplier accused of land-rights and environmental abuses in late September.) 

“The frustrating thing for us, why we think we still saw 25 million acres of deforestation last year,” says Hurowitz, “[is that] in the cocoa and meat industry that approach has not been used.” He calls the lost opportunity tragic and unnecessary. “There are 1.6 billion acres of previously deforested land where they could channel agricultural development across South America alone.” 

In the lead-up to November’s climate summit, calls for an emergency global movement to reverse forest loss are mounting. COP26 president Alok Sharma has been gathering support for the launch of the Forests and Climate Leaders’ Partnership at COP27, to “scale up action to protect, conserve and restore the world’s forests while delivering sustainable development and promoting an inclusive rural transformation.” 

Across town from Colgate headquarters, a panel organized by the newly formed Seed to Forest Alliance that is stacked with tree planters and seed savers is working on just that. Rather than talking about slowing deforestation, they’re discussing best practices to accelerate reforestation and an inclusive forest-based economy, starting with ensuring that there are enough native seeds on hand to plant a trillion trees. “We’re trying to transition our economy from extraction and exploitation to restoration and regeneration,” says Shyla Raghav, co-founder of a new venture incubated by media giant Time, called CO2.com, focused on accelerating climate investment.  

“Not only is it about [healing] our relationship to the land [and] nature, it’s also a really incredible climate solution,” says Raghav. “There’s really no path to net-zero without rapidly scaling up nature’s contribution, both through conservation and restoration.”

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Even before the pandemic, 805 million takeout containers were dished out in Canada in 2019, as were 5.8 billion straws and 15.5 billion plastic grocery bags. Now Canada’s federal government is giving businesses until the end of 2023 to stop selling six hard-to-recycle single-use plastic items, including polystyrene and black plastic takeout containers, cutlery, grocery bags and straws. It’s an important first step that should eliminate more than 1.3 million tonnes of plastic waste, but environmental advocates point out a troubling fact: the ban is aimed at just roughly 5% of Canada’s swelling plastic stream. What about the rest of it? 

As the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) noted in its latest global plastic report, released in June, “Plastic waste is projected to almost triple by 2060, with half of all plastic waste still being landfilled and less than a fifth recycled.”

“Less than a fifth” may be a generous estimate. In late April, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a first-of-its-kind investigation into the recycling claims made by Big Oil. “For more than half a century,” Bonta said in a statement, “the plastics industry has engaged in an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.”

The reality, 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 tough time figuring out what to do with its plastic.

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.

–California Attorney General Rob Bonta

Fortunately, there’s also been a surge in grassroots reuse-and-refill businesses around the globe. While the refillable mugs and reusable bags of the zero-waste movement were vilified in the early days of the pandemic, they’re back on the upswing. Independent start-ups like Suppli in Toronto and DeliverZero in New York have been tackling the takeout waste crisis by offering reusable container services to local restaurants. 

Now some major fast-food chains are promising to get in on the action. 

In a partnership with TerraCycle’s circular packaging service, Loop, refillable takeout containers may be coming to a Burger King near you. At least if you live in the United Kingdom or New Jersey, where BK outlets will be trialling deposit return systems for refillable burger “clamshell” packaging, soda cups and more. In Canada, BK’s parent company, Restaurant Brands International (RBI), partnered with Loop and Tupperware Brands to pilot reusable food packaging containers for the Tim Hortons chain late last year.

RBI isn’t the only corporation scrambling to meet public commitments to shift to fully recyclable, reusable or compostable packaging by 2025. Similar pledges have been made by more than 1,000 organizations. In May, Body Shop announced that it’s reviving plans to roll out refill stations across the U.S., and Dove is now offering deodorant in slick refillable containers. Earlier this year, Coca-Cola promised to make a quarter of its beverage containers “refillable/returnable glass or plastic bottles” by 2030. 

Whether corporate efforts to introduce refillable containers go beyond novelty or pilot projects remains to be seen. On World Refill Day, June 16, more than 400 organizations released an open letter to the CEOs of five of the biggest consumer goods companies (Coca-Cola, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever and Procter and Gamble), urging them to support “transparent, ambitious and accountable reuse and refill systems.” 

In Canada, dozens of environmental groups and zero-waste businesses are calling for increased government support for reuse-and-refill initiatives. Sarah King, Greenpeace Canada’s head of oceans and plastics campaign, says that the federal government has been “stalling on fully embracing refill and reuse funding.” 

King says, “Canada will only meet its zero plastic waste by 2030 goal if it acts now to cut production of all non-essential plastics and creates a strategy to scale reuse and refill infrastructure nation-wide to accelerate a transition to truly zero waste, low carbon systems.”

The OECD agrees that bans on a “tiny share” of plastic waste will get us only so far. Its earlier February report on plastic concluded that “bans and taxes on single-use plastics exist in more than 120 countries but are not doing enough to reduce overall pollution.” The OECD is calling for “greater use of instruments such as Extended Producer Responsibility schemes for packaging and durables, landfill taxes, deposit-refund and Pay-as-You-Throw systems.”

Bans and taxes on single-use plastics exist in more than 120 countries but are not doing enough to reduce overall pollution.

–OECD

While announcing Canada’s new plastic ban June 20, Environment and Climate Change Canada didn’t mention any of the above, but the ministry did note that “moving toward a more circular economy for plastics could reduce carbon emissions by 1.8 megatonnes annually, generate billions of dollars in revenue, and create approximately 42,000 jobs by 2030.” 

In a sea of despair over rising plastic pollution, some hopeful signs are floating to the top. As of July 1, India is banning a long list of single-use plastics, including plastic wrap, cutlery and plastic sticks. Austria is mandating that 25% of beverage bottles be refillable by 2025, while Chile is mandating a 30% quota. 

Back in California, ExxonMobil put out a statement denying the attorney general’s charges that it’s been misleading the public on the recyclability of plastics: “We are focused on solutions and meritless allegations like these distract from the important collaborative work that is underway to enhance waste management and improve circularity.”

Of course, Exxon has also denied that it’s known about climate change for 40 years while spending millions on funding climate-change-denying think tanks. 

Judith Enck, president of the environmental group Beyond Plastics and a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, told Inside Climate News that California’s investigation is “very significant.”

“[It has] the potential to finally hold plastic producers accountable for the immense environmental damage caused by plastics.”

A version of this article appears in the summer issue of Corporate Knights magazine. 

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