Finisterre means “the end of the world,” which feels a bit too on the nose these days. We bought our tickets before Israel and the United States launched their war on Iran, and we certainly never expected to be travelling during a global oil shock. But more frightening than travel interruptions is the strong likelihood of a “Super El Niño summer” that’s now developing in the Pacific Ocean. As Europe bakes under record-breaking temperatures, a key part of our travel prep is mapping contingency plans for extreme heat at each leg of our journey.

In short, global heating is progressing faster than expected, fossil fuel economics are as nakedly violent as ever, and life goes on.

The seduction of doomerism

Doomsayers have always held an important voice in the climate movement, but defeatism and pessimism have gained even more prominence as the oil and gas industry fights gloves-off to retain its influence and revenues. There’s a reason that hope is in demand: things look bleak. Personally, I don’t see doomerism as wrong so much as one-dimensional. It’s true that most people alive today still seriously underestimate the harms that climate change will cause. Yet on the other, much of what’s happening is best expressed by that one key word: change. There’s bad and good and just different, but plenty that’s good.

For example, nature-based solutions are gaining prominence as an effective and cost-efficient countermeasure to carbon pollution and other environmental damages. A system is now being built that will make restoring ecosystems a much more central field of human endeavour. Leveraging nature’s power to heal the earth does mean accounting for it in financial terms – an exercise in commodification that many will balk at. But we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and people need to get paid to do it, so capital has to flow. We can be grateful when it goes to forests and wetlands.

Travelling across a changing landscape

To get to Europe and back, our round-trip carbon dioxide emissions – not including the baby, who’ll ride on our laps – is roughly two tonnes, which is about what we’d pollute on a drive from our home in Montreal to Vancouver and back. For that quantity of emissions, I can buy decent carbon offsets from tree-planting projects for as little as $20. I could even contribute to projects that support sustainable aviation fuels, though it’s hard to see a viable path for air travel to switch to lower-carbon fuels. Carbon reduction programs that involve biofuels have proven particularly problematic, such as in Brazil, where criminal networks of “carbon cowboys” are exploiting the state-run system. When greenwashing overlaps so closely with climate urgency, every path forward lies somewhere between skepticism and pragmatism.

The new edition of the magazine, out this week, is themed on travel and tourism. In it, our writers examine different ways that climate change is altering how we move around and explore. Some are visiting glaciers before they disappear; some are using their holidays to remove trash from the environment. Some are just picking different destinations: cooler climes instead of the traditional equatorial getaways. Humans aren’t the only ones changing our trajectories. Other species are shifting, too, often toward the poles, like trees, bacteria and even great white sharks.

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The most important climate migrations are not for pleasure or discovery. Tens of millions of people are already leaving their homes, and the rate of displacement could rise to hundreds of millions by mid-century. In more targeted – and certainly privileged – fashion, digital nomads are also leaving their mark on territories and exposing some of the contradictions that belie our times.

Finisterre in Spain is not the end of the world, though people in Europe used to think it was. Climate change is not the end of the world, either. Nor is it simply a physical description of how our planetary ecosystem is evolving in response to a massive, human-caused carbon explosion. Climate change is more like a calling to adjust, adapt and grow. Like a long walk across an unfamiliar landscape, we cannot predict exactly how it will unfold. But it will surely teach us resilience. To that end, we may permit ourselves a sense of humour, a good dose of curiosity, and maybe even a taste for adventure on the journey.

Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights. He lives in Montreal.

The post Editor’s note: Walking to the end of the world appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Canada has some of the lowest industrial power prices among high-income economies, and 85% of the grid is non-emitting, with nuclear and hydro playing an important part of the mix. But as artificial intelligence and electrification drive up demand faster than expected, Canada’s edge for attracting big industry is at risk of eroding, the authors write. After a decade of flat growth, Bank of America Institute now forecasts 2.5% compound annual growth until 2035. Investment will flow to regions with the best grids, not just the most resources, but Canadian jurisdictions are systematically underplanning for industrial demand, they argue.

The report, titled Power Play: How to Supercharge Canada’s Clean Electricity Advantage, contends that for Carney’s economic strategy to work, the country must overcome an ethos of risk-avoidance at the planning level. Utilities and regulators are wary of overbuilding infrastructure and passing the bill to ratepayers. But the bigger risk now is underbuilding, the Climate Institute suggests, especially as faster-moving regions take advantage of low-cost renewable technologies to improve their offer for energy-hungry industries.

The new research presents side-by-side comparisons of Canada’s four largest electricity systems with other jurisdictions around the world. Alberta and Texas are treated together as “market-led systems,” while Ontario and the United Kingdom are compared as “coordinated market systems.” Four other jurisdictions – British Columbia, Quebec, Washington and Norway – are grouped as “hydro-led systems,” whose reservoir storage gives them an inherent advantage with clean, dispatchable power. Quebec’s tie-in with California’s well-functioning carbon market is an added bonus for investors.

Implementing growth

Increasing grid flexibility across all regions is one of the foremost recommendations of the report. That means more “firm” power from low-emissions sources like batteries, as well as more interties with neighbouring grids so that available clean energy is more likely to be shared and less likely to be wasted. The report also points to better long-term planning, more predictable procurement for renewables, modernized rate design, and stable climate policy as critical to sharpening Canada’s offer. It argues that funding interregional transmission lines should be a national policy imperative.

Increasing Indigenous ownership is another strategic priority, to uphold self-determination and bring in capital. “Indigenous ownership could further unlock $12 billion in generation and $5 billion in transmission equity,” the report states, citing the First Nations Major Projects Coalition.

The Climate Institute’s central argument about protecting Canada’s clean electricity advantage echoes a report published in February by SHARE, or the Shareholder Association for Research and Education. “Grid constraints, slow infrastructure build-out, and mounting policy and regulatory barriers are colliding with skyrocketing demand from electric vehicle manufacturing, battery materials, critical minerals, AI and data centres, and green industrial production,” the authors write. Increasing the flow of clean electricity “adds material asset value and enables market access” for industries like tech, AI and mining, SHARE’s Power at Risk report states.

Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.

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There really is something quite equanimous in the way Garcetti talks about the deep political rift in the United States over low-carbon energy. Garcetti currently serves as chief ambassador for global climate diplomacy at C40 Cities, an international network of nearly 100 mayors committed to advancing climate action. He served as the group’s chair from 2019 to 2021, during the last part of his nine-year tenure as L.A.’s top official.

Garcetti is on a mission to remind the world that President Donald Trump doesn’t have the last word on the state of climate action in the United States, nor is he the most reliable authority. If you pay attention only to the current administration, you’re missing the bigger story about where climate adaptation and mitigation are headed in the world’s largest economy, Garcetti says.

We spoke with Garcetti about the power of cities and states to implement the green transition, how climate communications are evolving, and why Washington can’t stop the low-carbon economy.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

MARK MANN: Are you building a parallel order of climate diplomacy?

ERIC GARCETTI: Look, we know that things like a pandemic and disease and certainly climate, these things don’t care where we draw borders between cities or countries. It demands a diplomacy that also doesn’t ignore borders but works across them, and that’s really what we’re doing.

MM: You’re here at the Montreal Climate Summit with Gina McCarthy, chair of the America Is All In coalition and former climate adviser to President Biden, who argues that Trump’s power to stymie climate action is exaggerated. I’ve noticed it in the media, that sometimes Trump’s attacks are much more amply covered than the rebuttals. What’s going on there?

EG: Well, go to your business model: what generates clicks is conflict. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what generates clicks; what matters is what generates electricity in a sustainable way. Wind might be controversial in one project off the coast, but meanwhile, take Texas. It’s a very conservative political state right now, run by Republicans, and they’re decarbonizing the Permian Basin, the largest oil field in America, primarily with wind and solar. Maybe they don’t brag about it because it doesn’t fit their politics, but they’re not stopping.

MM: Do you take a page and talk less about climate?

EG: Yeah, not because of Trump, but because I think “climate” is an abstract word for many people. Climate literally means weather. It doesn’t have a value to it. Climate isn’t environmentalism or green, and those things, while they were good early on, were too segregated. You felt very special if you were a green activist or if you worked on environmental issues, when it requires a billion people to be incorporating sustainable values.

I like talking about jobs, health and safety. And in the face of extreme weather and climate change, we have communities that don’t feel safe because of floods and fires and everything else. The economy is rapidly changing, and so responding to what’s happening requires us to retrain people and to generate jobs through the work that needs to be done.

MM: What’s the best evidence, in your view, that climate action is still winning in the United States? That the momentum is still there?

EG: Sometimes there are setbacks that reduce the acceleration, but there’s nothing that’s reversing the direction. You read headlines and you think, “Oh, people are going backwards.” No. Coal plants are still being shut down, even if the president is trying to save a handful of them over the wishes of the actual power companies that own them. We are seeing the more conservative states – like, 70% of the new [low-carbon power] installation was done in Texas, Ohio and Florida, all run by Republican governors.

California continues that. Los Angeles, the largest municipal utility, is still on path to be at 97% carbon-free power in four years – it’s so exciting to even say that – and 100% by 2035. Transportation investments are continuing. The number-one car sold in California is still an electric car.

It’s hard to find a measure where we are moving backwards. When you look at capital flows, too, there’s never been more deals at a better price than right now. When I talk to investors, they’re like, “Maybe we don’t talk about it as loudly, but in some ways all that shouting coming out of Washington has helped us find even better deals.” Everybody knows it’s the cheapest way to get power. It’s the best way to move forward with transportation. It’s the healthiest thing to do for communities. We struggle to find evidence against it, [despite] what the White House claims.

MM: Do you think energy is shifting to the local level? Is there any sense that the centre of gravity is moving away from federal politics?

EG: No, I don’t think many people ever cared what Washington was doing, even when they might be pro–climate action. I mean, there have been moments, like when Joe Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act. That was huge. It was the biggest piece of environmental legislation ever passed by any nation. But they also knew that if you could add up all the local and state money spent, it would dwarf [the IRA]. We’re the ones who maintain sewer systems, who do private investment, build houses. We invest and build our transportation networks. In America, most spending on climate-related sectors is done at the sub-national level. I think anybody who has been active has always known that’s where the fight is.

MM: In Canada, cities can be disempowered relative to the provinces. Often there’s a dynamic where politicians at the provincial level gain more power from rural voters than from urban voters. I’m wondering how powerful cities really are?

EG: It’s different from state to state, but in the United States, big cities have tremendous power, whether it’s formal or informal. Even if you’re a drop of blue in a red state, the state leaders know they need to have a Houston work, or Atlanta work or Nashville work. There’s often political conflict, but when it comes to spending money and getting things done, it’s the same voters and the same people who are demanding answers.

I also think that urban–rural divide is disappearing a little bit based on some issues. For instance, data centres are being built in the most rural areas and the most urban areas. And people are like, “Whoa, why are my energy bills going up 20% in a year? What is the impact of having this around me? How are we actually generating that electricity?” Folks who might not have in the past cared about whether it was coal or gas are suddenly questioning, “Do I really want that, just to help an AI system develop?” In urban areas, they’re finding new coalitions between people.

The majority of people really do live now in urban areas in America, overwhelmingly. Depending on how you measure it, up to 80% of Americans live in cities. So that is allowing cities to hit above their weight class, even if they don’t have the formal power. They really have the influence, even sometimes when they’re led by people from a different party.

MM: I don’t know if people are still talking about “abundance” as much, but I’m curious if you think that’s the type of shift that we need?

EG: I’m not a huge fan of the word “abundance,” because what does that mean? It’s another one of these academic-sounding words. But making shit easier to get done: yes.

There are some basics we should never, ever sacrifice. But we’ve put so many boulders in our backpack, it’s so slow to move. For instance, imagine a New York subway system getting built in this day and age. It would take 100 years to build that, and it would cost a trillion dollars.

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I’ve become simultaneously more progressive and libertarian as I age. Libertarian, like, get the hell out of the way. Get the basics covered, but let people do stuff because there’s a crisis. And more progressive: make sure it has a conscience. Don’t just let bad design and capital flow in however it wants. But if you let capital flow in in a predictable way, there are smart ways to be both progressive and caring, but also a little bit more libertarian and less regulatory.

MM: Do U.S. mayors who engage in the C40 or in other types of sub-national climate diplomacy face threat or pushback from the federal government?

EG: Yeah, when they’re not focused on something else, like wars in the Middle East or going after our immigrants. It’s somewhere in that agenda. It’s not frequent, and it’s not a friendly partnership, but [Washington doesn’t have] a lot of tools. They can’t tell Los Angeles “You can’t create renewable energy for your energy mix.” They can’t write our building code. They can’t tell us where to invest our transportation dollars.

There are moments when federal funds would be useful, and can help accelerate the greening of our ports, the building of more public transportation, the environmental-justice issues of restoring communities cut up by bad infrastructure decisions, and that’s frustrating at times.

But no, I think that there are bigger targets that they have their attention on. And we actually welcome collaboration with them. If you can get past some of the fixations they have, whether it’s offshore wind or this, that and the other, there are opportunities for America to be strong and have jobs the same way that Prime Minister Carney is talking about. This is the age of more national sovereignty, reshoring jobs. I’d love for us to be talking about in the United States, as Canada is doing, really being one of the green manufacturing hubs that can export to the world. Don’t cede that to China, as marvellous a job as they’ve done. They shouldn’t be creating every future car. We should have Canadians and Americans that build cars, but it’s probably not going to be an internal combustion engine 20 years from now. So we’re going to lose a decade by winding away all those subsidies. And we’re going to be behind the eight ball for a long time.

Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights. He lives in Montreal. 

The post U.S. climate action isn’t stopping appeared first on Corporate Knights.

That coral bleaching is an old story obscures the fact that it is also a new story. First reported in the early 1980s and then extensively in the 2000s and 2010s as mass bleaching events became more common, the tragedy of tropical reef habitats being drained of their kaleidoscopic beauty has long been a familiar trope in the climate-change narrative. But the situation changed during the last El Niño phase, between 2023 and 2025, when prolonged heat stress afflicted 84% of the world’s coral reef area, of which half didn’t survive, according to estimates by Carlos Duarte, a leading marine scientist.

“We’re in a new reality whereby we can now say that we’ve passed the first major climate tipping point, which is the coral reefs,” said Steve Smith, a research fellow at the Global Systems Institute, in an interview with CBS News. Smith is one of the co-authors of an October 2025 report by the University of Exeter that found that warm-water corals – where 830,000 species live, and upon which 33% of marine life depends – are the first planetary-scale system to enter irreversible decline. The latest mass bleaching event came soon after the previous one, from 2014 to 2017. “They don’t have time to recover,” says Marinez Scherer, who served as special envoy for the ocean at the COP30 climate conference in Brazil, in an interview. “The water is staying far too warm for them to survive.”

Scientists are horrified. “We’re talking about an extraordinary, catastrophic collapse,” Oliver Steeds, director of the species cataloguing initiative Ocean Census, said at a summit in Montreal in March. He called the coral dieback “an apocalyptic situation that is happening in our oceans.”

The start of the heat wave that killed off so many warm-water coral reefs coincided with another grim milestone: 2023 was the year the planet first sailed past the critical threshold of 1.5°C of global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that crossing this marker probably means losing between 70% and 90% of tropical shallow water coral reefs, which are the vast majority of the world’s reef ecosystems. Go up to 2°C of warming and we’re facing 99% die-off. The world is currently on track for about 2.6°C by the end of the century, and fossil fuel emissions have not stopped rising.

While warming is generally measured as an average across decades, many scientists consider “overshoot” to no longer be a risk but rather a fact. We may still be at the gate, but we now live in the land beyond 1.5°C, where coral disappearance is but one of multiple cascading transformations – melting polar ice sheets, disruption to North Atlantic Ocean circulation, the dieback of the Amazon – that can no longer be considered merely theoretical.

“We know that scientists have told us that [overshoot] territory exposes us to potential non-linear trajectories of climate change,” said Ricken Patel, founder of the global online campaigning network Avaaz, speaking on the Outrage + Optimism podcast. Patel’s focus has shifted from pressuring governments to keep warming below 1.5°C to preparing for more catastrophic tipping points, because, he said, we are unlikely to avoid them: “I haven’t met anyone who said that we’re on track. Not a single person.”

The truth is that 1.5°C is not the magic number when corals start to wobble into irreversible decline. That was likely 1.2°C of warming, which we started to traverse about a decade ago.

But 1.5°C has been freighted with significance since it became the main reference point in international climate policy following the Paris Agreement, the climate accord agreed to by 195 countries in 2015. (The United States has since dropped out – twice.) At the time, the signatories set a goal to limit warming to well below 2°C but committed only to “pursuing efforts” to stay below 1.5°C. Even so, 1.5°C became one of the central pillars of global climate governance, particularly as the science coalesced around that marker as the real upper boundary for what’s relatively manageable.

“It’s a limit. It’s a ceiling. It’s a maximum temperature level,” Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who led the UN climate talks at COP21, has said. “It’s not a target.”

Whatever it is, it’s not happening, and the climate movement is still working out how to adjust to that fact. Some are calling for a reckoning, as climate action weathers a prolonged period of political hostility and public disaffection, with climate coverage down 35% across major U.S. networks in 2025. But even missed, 1.5°C won’t be killed, because it still retains its scientific significance and legal status. In short, we’ll have to get back to it in the future. But can the movement keep rallying around its most glaring failure?

A movement in crisis

The story of human-caused climate change follows three interconnecting pathways: what the science says, how it’s received, and what we’re doing about it. But it’s the science that runs down the middle, laying the track for the others to follow.

When the greenhouse effect was discovered in the mid-1800s, it did not take long for scientists to recognize that fossil fuel pollution would build up in the atmosphere and heat the earth. Through research and observation spanning disciplines and decades, the theory was validated and its impacts described and anticipated. But as the picture crystalized and the imperative to stop burning fossil fuels became apparent, the response split into two distinct dynamics.

On one track, applied scientists recognized the reality of the impending climate crisis and began to innovate. They invented solutions, started companies – many failed, some succeeded – and ultimately spawned whole new industries that are now pillars of the economic landscape. Wider society, too, reflexively accepted the science, but this response was hijacked by oil and gas companies, who spent billions on misinformation, greenwashing, legal attacks and lobbying. And so the climate crisis became, on one side, a technical challenge and an economic opportunity, and on the other, an actual “climate fight” between environmental campaigners and the incumbent industry, with scientists decidedly in one corner and policymakers trying to play both sides.

Stopping climate change has always been popular, but consensus around appropriate and effective climate action has been dazzlingly hard to produce. That impasse has never felt more stark. Humanity’s civilizational story of encountering existential peril and making a hard switch to a new energy system feels, on a bad day, like one of failure and defeat. Just ask David Suzuki. The famed environmentalist said in an interview with iPolitics last summer that it’s “too late” and that “we have lost the fight against climate change.”

Consider the evidence. There’s the spectacle of President Donald Trump swinging his golden wrecking ball through U.S. climate policy, obliterating environmental protections and stamping out climate science – and apparently without much opposition. There’s an ascendant cultural movement that derides and attacks climate ambitions, and anti-green political parties poised to seize power in Europe, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. There’s the sad scene of countries and corporations quietly shedding the goals they proclaimed only four or five years ago. And then there’s the annual Conference of the Parties to the Paris Agreement, shuffling from petrostate to petrostate, yielding less and less.

Arlo Brady, CEO of Freuds Group, a London-based PR agency with a history of supporting climate and sustainability campaigns, said in October that the movement “has lost the battle for hearts and minds.” Accepting that fact “paves the way for the adoption of a new approach, but only if we treat this as a learning moment,” Brady told a crowd at a taped recording for the Overshoot podcast, a documentary series by Laurie Laybourn about the implications of transgressing 1.5°C.

Brady decries the lack of “populist narratives for climate action” and warns that the environmental movement’s staple response of “outrage and turning up the volume” won’t work anymore. He argues that “the jargon and the ideology and the groupthink has gotten in the way” and that the sustainability movement should rally around the idea “that people might be able to live better lives.”

In that vein, BloombergNEF’s Michael Liebreich launched a manifesto for a “Pragmatic Climate Reset” in the fall, accusing climate campaigners of being tribalistic, elitist and unrealistic about the costs and challenges of a rapid transition. The movement’s main mistake, he says, was pinning policy to 1.5°C and net‑zero‑by‑2050 as non‑negotiable absolutes, despite the unlikelihood of achieving them. “It’s time to put the decade of 1.5°C behind us,” he wrote, and aim instead for “the hard 2°C target that lies at the heart of the Paris Agreement.”

But 1.5°C isn’t something we can quit like a bad habit. “The primary temperature goal is 1.5°C and not 2°C degrees,” climate lawyer Harj Narulla says in an interview. “In an overshoot scenario, that legal standard does not change. All that changes is that the factual emissions reduction pathway shifts and becomes more difficult, [because] we need to have more removals.”

Narulla was among the litigators who brought evidence and legal arguments before the International Court of Justice for its advisory opinion on states’ climate obligations, delivered last summer. That opinion, he says, effectively locked 1.5°C in as the legal standard for warming. Even in an overshoot world, the bar does not move; it simply means that states must bend temperatures back down through much faster cuts and large‑scale carbon removal. Equipped with the ICJ’s opinion, litigation is pouring more heat on fossil fuel production and methane emissions, he argues, because courts are starting to treat them as incompatible with getting back to 1.5°C.

Beyond fossil-fuel economics

Political scientist Jessica Green is ahead of the curve. She’s been pushing for a reckoning over the fundamental flaws in global climate governance for years, and she, too, argues for a pragmatic turn. But in her definition, pragmatism doesn’t mean softening ambition, but rather to use existing institutions to pull the props out from under the oil and gas industry. Her book Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them (Princeton, 2025) makes the case that climate governance has leaned too heavily on voluntary targets and carbon pricing and not nearly enough on industrial policy and confronting corporate power. She calls for “ditching the fiction that markets alone will deliver decarbonization” and instead using the state to plan and build the clean‑energy economy.

There’s an irony to the accusations and hand-wringing in the climate movement growing noisiest at precisely the moment when the energy transition has reached transformative momentum and scale. Global investment in renewables now roughly doubles spending on oil and gas, and electrified technologies are growing much faster than their fossil fuel alternatives in areas like transportation and heating. The oil price shock precipitated by the Iran war will create a lot of pain – and underscore the incentives for switching to renewables and electrification.

“We’re now at a point where clean technologies are cheaper and better for most uses,” says Chris Severson‑Baker, executive director of the Pembina Institute think tank in Canada, “but they still struggle to proliferate in regulatory environments built for fossil fuels.” He argues that climate advocates should focus less on “demonizing fossil fuels” and more on helping policymakers align climate goals with a positive vision of the future economy, showing how cleaner systems mean jobs, security and lower long‑term costs.

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But in the rush to find solutions and successes, climate campaigners are sorely at risk of failing to get credit where credit is due. None of the economic momentum we see now would exist without the many decades of effort by citizens, litigators and campaigners to force governments and markets to take climate seriously in the first place. They shouldn’t be discounted, either, as they are continually gaining economic allies among insurers, investment managers and wealth funds.

For Carlos Duarte, who leads the G20’s Coral Research & Development Accelerator Platform, the biggest challenge is defeatism. We already have a toolbox of imperfect but workable interventions that could keep reefs alive if we deploy them at scale. He estimates that about US$68 billion – roughly the cost of a major harbour or airport – would be enough to safeguard reefs for future generations, creating millions of jobs in the process, so long as we also keep phasing down fossil fuels. Most of that money would go to restoration rather than rescue, which he says “shows that conserving is a lot more cost‑efficient than having to repair when the damage is done.”

In the wider climate crisis, cost efficiency may be swiftly retreating, but ambition need not be. This is a story with many chapters left to be written.

Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights. He’s based in Montreal.

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The founders of Red Leaf Pulp say they’ve figured out how to make high-quality pulp from agricultural by-products rather than wood from trees, and they’re ready to start producing at scale. The company’s first-of-a-kind pulp mill, slated to begin construction in Regina, Saskatchewan, in the first quarter of 2026, will manufacture what it calls “climate-positive, non-wood pulp” using a process that consumes 95% less water and 70% less energy than traditional mills – all while running on electricity generated by burning biomass from its own waste stream.

“We think there’s nothing in Canada that’s as sustainable as this project, in terms of what we bring in upstream and downstream benefits,” says William Walls, vice president of strategy and development, in a phone interview. He claims that the carbon footprint of Red Leaf’s wheat straw pulp is a third that of regular wood pulp.

Red Leaf has earned the confidence of investors, raising $42 million in five years, most of it from the container company Dart, as well as about $8 million in government funding and a $1-million angel investment. Walls calls it “probably one of the best-funded cleantechs in Canada.” The company used the funding to build a demonstration plant in Alberta, where it has been testing its process and selling its products for different applications. Once operational in 2028, the facility is expected to convert 400,000 tonnes of straw into 200,000 tonnes of market pulp annually.

There’s a lot for investors to like. For example, Red Leaf doesn’t need to develop any equipment to run its patented process for “making the straw act like a wood chip,” Walls says. They use conventional equipment for wood pulp mills made by Valmet, one of the biggest pulp and paper equipment manufacturers on the planet.

Red Leaf sources directly from farmers and accepts all varieties of leftover wheat straw, as well as oats, barley and flax, much of which would often otherwise be burned or left to lie on the field. This creates a new revenue stream for farmers and positions them in a circular economy, while ensuring a reliable supply of pulp for Red Leaf’s new mill.

An opening in the pulp market

The introduction of wheat straw pulp comes amid an ongoing decline in the supply of “economically viable timber,” which has been devastating for Canada’s forestry industry and prompted one B.C. lumber mill to close in November. The main culprits are wildfires, which consumed 17 million hectares in 2022, and invasive insect infestations, which killed 13 million hectares worth of trees the same year. Those disruptions, plus a reduction in the allowable cuts, caused the whole forestry sector to contract by 22% in 2023 and have shrunk the available wood fibre for products like pulp and pellets by more than 40% in British Columbia since 2018. To make matters worse, the United States raised its duties on softwood lumber to 20.6% last July.

The constrained fibre supply in Canada’s forestry sector creates an opening for Red Leaf, but the company sees its role as complementary rather than competitive, spokesperson Elle Kreitz says in an email: “Red Leaf introduces new, non-wood fibre into an already integrated system, helping to relieve supply demand pressures without competing for forest resources.”

The company believes its wheat pulp should telegraph its authentic sustainability, so they’re not going to dye it bright white, which has long been an industry norm. Red Leaf advertises its pulp as possessing a “natural golden tone” – one that doesn’t require a harmful bleaching process to achieve.

A starring role for lignin

Red Leaf also plans to sell the lignin – a component of plant cell walls that gives them their structure – separately as a stand-alone product. Straw has less lignin, so it’s easier to separate out, Walls says. Lignin comes out of the pulp process as a sludgy brown by-product that’s already a popular binder in animal feed and is considered eco-friendly because it diverts waste that would otherwise contaminate waterways.

But Walls sees much more potential for the sticky residue. Non-toxic but also not directly digestible, there is evidence that lignin has some health benefits as a food additive, and it can also be used in other industries as a natural bonding agent for materials manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. There are also emerging applications in batteries and bioplastics.

“It’s like a unicorn. We’re selling it for more than twice as much money as the pulp,” Walls says. “But someday down the road it may be that this thing is called Red Leaf Lignin and the pulp is the by-product.”

Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights.

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One year earlier almost to the day, then-UN Special Envoy on Climate Action Mark Carney gave the keynote address at the Sustainable Finance Forum in Ottawa, in a speech titled “Transformational Leadership.” At the time, Carney’s reputation as a climate leader was gold-plated. Regarded as one of the architects of modern sustainable finance, his Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero had corralled hundreds of major banks, insurers and asset managers to pledge funds for the energy transition. To add to his veneer, he was already being chased by reporters about his prospects for Canada’s top office.

A lot has happened in a year. Carney and his central bank bona fides soon became the hottest commodity on the Canadian political map, for an electorate that was suddenly feeling under siege by a Donald Trump White House. He won the Liberal leadership, then eked out a come-from-behind win in the federal election, upending what had looked to be the dawn of a new Conservative era in Canada.

Now, these two moments – the finance summit and the pipeline deal – mark a full turning for Carney, from climate hero to, in the eyes of some, climate villain. Even so, Carney stated his convictions clearly back at the Ottawa event in 2024. Asked if the federal government should invest in decarbonization in high-emitting industries, Carney said, “I’m suggesting we should run towards that, because that, in the end, is going to have the highest impact on the climate.”

As promised, Carney has now stamped his approval, and his reputation, on so-called decarbonized oil and the infrastructure to move it. It’s a high-stakes gamble, at a different inflection point in the climate battle than the showdowns over the Keystone XL and Trans Mountain pipeline projects. The politics are shifting, as evidenced by the shuttering of Carney’s net-zero banking alliance in October.

The myth of low-carbon oil

So-called decarbonized oil hinges on the deployment of expensive technology to snatch carbon from smokestacks and pump it underground, known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS. While there are many CCS projects already operating around the world, albeit mostly for methane gas processing rather than oil, the technology has not been proven at scale as a reliable climate solution. Critics point out that it is costly, inefficient and unlikely to ever exist independently of government subsidies.

Whether CCS turns out to make sense economically, the marketing belies the fact that oil cannot be decarbonized. It is made of carbon, and you still need to burn it to use it, which is when most of the pollution is released. The word “decarbonization” exists to set the widest possible frame around what reducing carbon dioxide emissions can mean. In this case, it means roughly 10% to 20% of the full life-cycle emissions of a barrel, and those reductions come at such a high price that any market for it is conjectural at best.

The Pathways Plus system agreed to in the new MOU, billed as “the world’s largest carbon capture, utilization, and storage project,” will cost approximately $16.5 billion to deploy in the oil sands, and that’s just for the underlying infrastructure to move the CO2 around and store it. The participating companies still need to buy their own carbon-capture units and install them at their extraction and upgrading plants.

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Few in the world of net-zero finance are buying it. Carney is “legitimizing doublespeak,” says Kyra Bell-Pasht, director of research and policy at Investors for Paris Compliance. “By using greenwashing terms like ‘decarbonized oil’ on his pulpit, he is setting a standard of misinformation at the highest level,” she writes in an email.

Carney has already paid a high political cost for backing the oil and gas industry’s plan to increase production in the era of climate consequences. Just hours after the deal was signed, former environment minister Steven Guilbeault quit his new cabinet post as minister of Canadian culture, saying that he could not have looked himself in the mirror if he’d gone along with the prime minister. Two core members of the Net-Zero Advisory Body, which gives guidance to the government on reducing emissions, also stepped down over the pipeline deal: Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub, and Simon Donner, the group’s co-chair. The Assembly of First Nations chiefs passed a unanimous emergency resolution echoing coastal leaders who say the project “will never happen,” while B.C. Premier David Eby was more tepid but still dismissed the deal as a “distraction.”

Premier Smith, too, paid a price for collaborating with Ottawa, which Alberta premiers can little afford to be seen doing. She was loudly booed at her party’s annual general meeting just a few days after signing the MOU.

More than half of Canadians still support the proposed pipeline, but any push by Carney would surely be a long, bruising effort, and the prize at the end looks very much in doubt. At the Sustainable Finance Forum in 2024, he told the crowd, “We may be the first generation that understands the risks associated with climate change. We’ll also be the last generation that can do anything about it.” Building an oil pipeline is not something most people in that room would have picked for a next step.

Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights. He is based in Montreal. 

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Scale is a challenge when it comes to disclosure. There are around 6,000 cooperatives in Canada, about half of which are non-profits, and many are quite small. They don’t necessarily have the resources to bring a standardized process around sustainability into their operations, Duguid says.

Recognizing the lack of data and the intrinsic barriers, Duguid and fellow researcher Daphne Rixon asked themselves, “Could we help co-ops to do this better?” Together, they set out to build a dashboard to capture the performance of Canadian cooperatives with respect to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the cooperative principles.

The aim is to create an easy-to-use sustainability tool that enables co-ops to better understand their own sustainability performance and impact and share the results publicly, without adding a lot of work. The platform, called ACT (Accounting for Co-operative Transformation), is backed by the Centre of Excellence in Accounting and Reporting for Co‑operatives at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and will launch next year.

Work by the Corporate Knights research group confirmed the limited visibility on sustainable impact at Canadian cooperatives. Out of more than 140 co-ops or credit unions in Canada with annual revenues exceeding $5 million in 2023 or 2024, researchers found that only 11 reported their sustainable investments and revenue. Ranked by sustainable impact, five of the top 10 were credit unions, which have more advanced sustainability reporting because they operate in the financial sector.

Sustainable impact at smaller co-ops can’t be measured by the same standard as it is at large credit unions, Duguid suggests. “It wouldn’t be fair to the co-op sector to think that a small bike co-op, for example, should be investing sustainably,” she says. “Their raison d’être is to provide sustainable transportation, and that should speak more than their investments.”

Sustainability Solutions Group (SSG) is a prime example of the tension between the commitment to sustainability and the absence of data-driven recognition for this work. Founded in 2001 in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia, the worker cooperative generates greenhouse gas inventories and climate action plans for cities, provinces and states across Canada, the United States and Chile. But with only 50 employees/members, most of whom work from home, the company doesn’t have the capacity to publish a sustainability report.

Despite the lack of clarity surrounding sustainable impact, no one doubts the deep links between the cooperative sector and sustainability. “Most co-ops were invested in sustainability long before it became fashionable,” says Daniel Brunette, senior director of cooperation and engagement at Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada. Recognizing the critical role that co-ops play toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN declared 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives.

Cooperatives are a huge part of the economy. So where’s the training?

Yuill Herbert, founder of SSG, says that the co-op’s shared-ownership model is intrinsically democratic and therefore more likely to pursue sustainable goals. “The co-op is the enterprise manifestation of sustainability,” he says.

Despite the existing core alignment with sustainability, the co-op sector still needs to get on board with reporting, Duguid says. “Co-ops should have been first off the mark with all the reporting about corporate social responsibility and ESG,” Duguid says. “Co-ops do really well in terms of social, economic and community [impact], but environmental can be hard for them to tackle.”

“They were doing that originally, and not just in a greenwashing way, but in a real way,” she says. “But they haven’t done a good job of talking about it.”

Naomi Buck is a writer based in Toronto. Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.

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The International Cooperative Alliance estimates that 280 million people – or about 10% of the world’s working population – are employed by co-ops. Collectively, the world’s three million cooperatives claim 12% of humanity as members. In 2023, the largest 300 cooperatives and mutuals together generated US$2.8 trillion in revenue, according to the World Cooperative Monitor.

But education for cooperative governance is not commensurate with the influence of co-ops. A study published in March highlighted the relative absence of cooperative education at business schools, not to mention in management and economics textbooks. The authors found that “the single most important non-mainstream business model, the co-op enterprise, is currently absent in most business schools most of the time.”

“You can do your MBA and never hear about co-ops,” says Daniel Brunette, a senior director at Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada. The national association has done exercises around getting more co-op education in Canada, but setting up new academic programs at universities is a long, arduous undertaking. The only full graduate degrees offered in Canada are the master’s and graduate diplomas of management for co-operatives and credit unions at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia. Other schools allow students to specialize in cooperatives.

Even in Quebec, which has the most developed cooperative culture in Canada and whose 3,000 co-ops represent some 14% of the province’s economy, many business schools barely mention them, says Rafael Ziegler, a specialist in sustainability management and the director of the Institut international des coopératives Alphonse-et-Dorimène-Desjardins (IICADD) at HEC (Hautes études commerciales) Montréal.

The institute is home to the Portail Co-op, an online library devoted to cooperatives and mutuals, which was developed in part to help address the paucity of cooperative education.

A one-of-a-kind archive

Alphonse Desjardins, the godfather of the credit union movement in Canada, understood the importance of this kind of information-sharing. It was only through contacts in Europe that he came to understand the people’s savings and credit systems that were sweeping the continent in the late 19th century. And after establishing North America’s first credit union in Lévis, Quebec, in 1909, he spent much of the rest of his life explaining – in lectures, articles and letters – how the model could be adapted to different contexts to protect the interests of Quebec’s working and rural classes.

It is fitting that Portail Co-op was made possible by a donation from the Desjardins Group, which is now North America’s largest financial cooperative. Ziegler believes that, with its dedicated librarian and technician, the repository is the only one of its kind in the world.

At HEC Montréal, where Ziegler teaches, the cooperative form is integrated into courses across the program, particularly as it relates to sustainability and the circular economy, subjects that attract significant interest. He sees this as an auspicious confluence, as the values of today’s students are increasingly aligned with those of cooperatives.

The return of the collective economy

Part of the idea behind the Portail is to create an institutional memory for the cooperative movement; its technician spends much of her time digitalizing archival material, from photographs to newsletters to financial reports.

The library’s other function is to offer co-op members and researchers access to the widest possible array of relevant documents. The Portail covers 150 years of cooperative history, in 36 languages and from 84 countries.

Working together with Cooperatives and Mutuals Canada and the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation, the library curates thematic collections about issues and trends like climate change and digital services. “Obviously, we work as cooperatively as possible to distribute the library’s content,” Ziegler says.

Business schools should pay more attention to co-ops, Brunette says, because they breed resilience by their very nature. “The beauty and challenge of collective entrepreneurship is that you have to get people around the same table,” he says. “And that’s how you’ll weather the storms.”

Cooperatives are also much more territorially anchored, Ziegler points out, so they are unlikely to move elsewhere for a competitive advantage. In an era of escalating trade threats and multiplying crises, domestic rootedness is its own kind of asset.

Naomi Buck is a writer based in Toronto. Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.

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Though not quite a silver bullet in the fight against methane emissions, MethaneSAT was something more like an effective and well-placed spy. But just over a year into its five-year mission, the satellite stopped working.

On June 20, the boxy, solar-powered device passed over the North Pole and made a link with the High Arctic ground station in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The communication was normal and there were no signs of trouble. But less than an hour later, after travelling half the circumference of the world at 27,000 kilometres per hour, it had gone silent as it hurtled over the South Pole.

EDF has not made contact with the methane-tracking satellite since it mysteriously stopped communicating that day. Subsequent photos taken from space show that the satellite is intact and its trajectory has not changed. EDF has commissioned an anomaly review board to figure out what happened, but the results have not been published.

A new height of ambition

For many, MethaneSAT was a preeminent symbol of human ingenuity in the face of the overwhelming challenge of shifting our entire energy system away from fossil fuels. The project has been lionized in the media and awarded generous philanthropic funding to cover the US$88-million cost to build and launch it into space, including from the Bezos Earth Fund.

Methane, which is responsible for about 30% of global warming, traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. But it also has a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere, so lowering its emissions is considered a low-hanging fruit for effective climate action – especially because natural gas consists almost entirely of methane, so the industry is theoretically incentivized to avoid bleeding it off into the atmosphere from leaky operations.

“Despite the scale of the problem, solving it is largely cost-effective,” Dominic Watson, a senior manager on the energy transition team at EDF, has said. Plugging leaks also isn’t overly complicated: “It’s plumbing, it’s not rocket science.”

MethaneSAT’s wasn’t the only satellite tracking methane emissions from space, but it was the only one built specifically for this task, and it could measure methane “over large areas but with enough precision to identify specific facilities and oil wells,” The New York Times has reported. The satellite’s high-precision spectrometer could detect tiny differences in the concentration of methane molecules – as little as two to three parts per billion – from 580 kilometres in the sky.

But providing a critical new vantage on worldwide methane emissions wasn’t the only thing that made MethaneSAT special. It also demonstrated that complex and expensive ventures to combat climate change could be realized outside the framework of government or private industry. The satellite represented, both figuratively and literally, a new height of ambition for environmental non-profits.

Coming in the midst of a dramatic reversal on climate policy by the U.S. administration, MethaneSAT’s untimely ending was a most unwelcome development for the climate movement. The announcement that the satellite had gone dark was met with an online outpouring of sadness and disappointment.

But in New Zealand, which contributed NZ$32 million to the overall project, the response among some scientists has been different. They aren’t sad. They’re mad about it.

A troubled relationship

“We were played like a fiddle by these guys,” says Richard Easther, an astrophysicist who was consulted by the New Zealand government about the project, speaking via video call from his office at the University of Auckland, where he teaches in the physics department.

Easther views his government’s sizable investment in MethaneSAT as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to have a huge technical leap in a globally significant area.” New Zealand joined the project in an effort to boost its aerospace sector. Instead, the country “settled for what was always going to be a participation trophy at best,” he argues.

The satellite stopped working just days before students and faculty at the Te Pūnaha Ātea Space Institute at the University of Auckland were scheduled to assume control of the mission, following several months of delays. The failure to transition control to the university at the original deadline in March prompted mounting public frustration and calls for transparency.

Easther is leading the criticism and has called for a no-blame review to understand “how New Zealand blew past so many red flags about MethaneSAT’s operation.” He alleges that the mission operators “kept pumping out upbeat comms even after it became apparent that the spacecraft had major problems.”

Methane trackers pick up the slack as U.S. regulatory pressure evaporates

Easther’s ire is directed mainly at his own government, for spending so much money on a space project without soliciting bids for other projects. “It’s not the result of a competitive call for proposals or a pre-existing need,” he says.

New Zealand does contribute to the world’s methane problem, but its emissions come from livestock – those famous cow and sheep burps – not oil and gas. “If we wanted to understand agricultural methane . . . there’s dozens of other things we could have done and they may have been more effective,” Easther claims.

‘Typical teething issues’

The story behind New Zealand’s involvement with MethaneSAT begins with Peter Beck, who holds the title of “the world’s newest space billionaire.” He is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, the upstart competitor to SpaceX whose shares have gone interstellar in the past year.

Rocket Lab puts satellites into space and has made New Zealand the third-most-frequent country to launch rockets to orbit after the United States and China – a feat that Beck achieved without the benefit of a university degree. New Zealanders are proud of him the way Americans used to be proud of Elon Musk. So when Beck said he wanted to get involved with MethaneSAT, people paid attention.

Rocket Lab’s stunning success in launching satellites was a prime factor that brought the Environmental Defense Fund into partnership with the New Zealand government in 2018. In the end, MethaneSAT grew too big for Rocket Lab, which specializes in smaller launches, and SpaceX won the contract. “If we’d known right from the beginning that Rocket Lab wouldn’t launch it, I am sure the conversation would not have happened,” Easther says.

MethaneSAT’s utility for tracking agricultural methane emissions was also misrepresented, according to reporting by Eloise Gibson, a climate change correspondent for New Zealand’s public broadcaster RNZ. When EDF approached the New Zealand Space Agency at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment about the idea for the partnership, staff saw it as an opportunity to position New Zealand as a serious player in both space science and climate change, she reported.

Gibson obtained communications by space agency staff at the time. They wrote that “the satellite will be able to detect emissions from agriculture” and “importantly . . . should be able to provide data that would enable more precise measurement of methane emissions in New Zealand and help inform policy related to agricultural emissions.”

They were wrong. New Zealand scientists told the space agency the mission was “hopelessly oversold” for livestock gas tracking and “would not add much to New Zealand’s understanding of its greenhouse gas profile from farming,” Gibson reported. The agency ultimately realized the error, but the rationale persisted in underpinning the nation’s involvement in the project.

Jon Coifman, a spokesperson for MethaneSAT, wrote in an email that the purpose of New Zealand’s research investment was to “gain deeper insight and understanding into the usefulness of high precision methane measurements in understanding agricultural methane emissions” – that is, to study the satellite’s applicability for this task.

Once the satellite was in space, it suffered ongoing technical issues that delayed its scheduled handover to the control station at the University of Auckland. One of its three thrusters repeatedly malfunctioned, and increased solar activity caused it to go into “safe mode” multiple times. Rather than being handed off to New Zealand scientists, control was transferred back to its manufacturer, Blue Canyon Technologies in Colorado.

Craig Rodger, a professor of physics at New Zealand’s University of Otago, has questioned whether solar activity should have been so disruptive: “There have been moments when it’s been interesting in the last year and a bit, but there have not been extreme conditions in the space environment,” he wrote in published comments. “We’re talking about normal, slightly active conditions . . . Typically, people build their equipment to handle that.”

Coifman describes these difficulties as “typical teething issues.” Solar activity has not been attributed as a reason for MethaneSAT’s cessation on June 20.

A report by the New Zealand space agency published on November 7 found that the satellite’s technical failure “occurred in components outside of New Zealand’s control and within the bounds of accepted risk in space missions.” MethaneSAT’s sensor “performed exceptionally well and delivered meaningful science data which New Zealand researchers are using,” the report states.

A different model for satellite development

Easther and others have questioned whether MethaneSAT made the best decisions in the satellite’s development. In a post on LinkedIn, Leigh Foster, former director of space systems at Rocket Lab, accused the project of having failed “to select the right spacecraft manufacturer, and a failure to focus on the right level of technical rigor pre-launch and during [optical alignment, integration and testing].”

Responding to these criticisms, Coifman wrote that the project sought to prove that a non-profit could build and launch a “game-changing instrument using as much off-the-shelf tech as possible,” rather than relying on slow-moving government-run space missions or commercial providers that keep the data private. “MethaneSAT is about transparency,” he wrote. “The data is meant to be open source . . . because we believe that’s the fastest way to turn data into action to protect the climate. The urgency of that purpose means we couldn’t afford the time or money involved in those other approaches.”

Methane emissions are vastly underreported, but they could be slashed quickly

If it had been a conventional NASA-type mission, MethaneSAT would have had “back-ups for the back-ups,” Coifman wrote. But adding those layers of redundancy “would have made it much slower and much more expensive – and totally beyond our reach.”

Even so, MethaneSAT was fully tested before launch according to best practices and protocols, Coifman says.

“The teams at MethaneSAT and Environmental Defense Fund worked with some of the most seasoned professionals in the commercial and government aerospace sectors. We had no reason to doubt their judgement,” Andrew Johnson, deputy head of the New Zealand Space Agency, wrote in a statement to Corporate Knights.

Not a failure

In a blog post earlier this month, Easther excoriated EDF for failing to disclose any results from its investigation into what went wrong with the satellite, writing, “Whatever was learnt has not been shared, a situation that comes as no surprise to those of us who watched this saga play out.”

He’s not alone in seeking clarity. “Even though it appears that New Zealand was not likely involved in the chain of events leading to the underperformance of MethaneSat, we as investors in the project are entitled to an explanation,” Nicholas Rattenbury, another physicist at the University of Auckland, has written in a collection of expert reactions on MethaneSAT’s breakdown for New Zealand’s Science Media Centre.

For its part, EDF rejects the idea that its MethaneSAT project was a failure. “We didn’t accomplish all the things we wanted to, but we’re proud of what we did accomplish,” says Steven Hamburg, EDF’s chief scientist and the project lead for MethaneSAT. The project exceeded expectations in terms of data quality, he says. “We really did push ahead a long way from where others were.”

The high-precision data that MethaneSAT collected in its one year of operation showed what many suspected: that emissions from oil and gas operations are higher than previously estimated or that the industry reports.

The data is also starting to serve its purpose in steering the fossil fuel industry toward methane emission reductions, at least by validating successful regulations. In September, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham revealed that her state’s methane intensity – a measure of escaped gas – is only 1.2% compared to Texas’s 3.1%, despite much steeper increases in production, and that the captured methane was worth US$125 million in additional natural gas production and $27 million in tax and royalty revenue. The difference is attributed to New Mexico’s stronger methane rules enacted in 2021.

Jon Goldstein, associate vice president for energy transition at EDF, said in a statement that the data obtained by the satellite proves “that cutting methane pollution and waste delivers economic benefits while protecting air quality and our climate.”

Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.

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At the same time, the climate emergency is entering a new and even more dangerous phase as global heating accelerates, sparking mass migration, devastating floods and wildfires, and large-scale die-offs in the ocean.

Meanwhile, money is streaming into renewables and clean technology at a record pace. Last year, global investment in the energy transition passed $2 trillion for the first time, and green funds are soaring. Climate lawsuits are increasing in number and racking up wins, climate risk reporting is becoming more entrenched around the world, and electric vehicle adoption is racing forward in many countries.

How is the next generation of climate leaders responding to these developments?

We sent a survey to young sustainability leaders whose work and dedication has earned them a spot on our annual 30 Under 30 ranking. This list of emerging changemakers is now in its 11th edition, so while not all those surveyed are under 30, they are all millennials or Gen Z. Broadly, we think of them as influential pathfinders in the youth movement for a cleaner economy and a healthier planet.

We make hope through our actions. Hope is a verb, not a noun, and we create it with every step we take towards a better future.

– Dana Decent, director of climate and health at the Definity Foundation

We wanted to know how they are thinking about the future of climate action in Canada. Sixteen people responded to the survey. Here’s what they said.

What levers are most effective for change?

Nine of the 16 felt that policy and politics are the most effective lever for change, followed by science and innovation (3), markets (2) and arts and culture (1). None picked litigation.

“We know that policy/politics is the only arena for real change at scale; it is the way to shift markets and enact broad-scale, multi-sectoral change,” writes Gareth Gransaull, a non-profit leader in Toronto and one of last year’s 30 Under 30 honourees. “There is no single institution besides the nation-state with the power to manage large-scale societal transitions.”

“We can’t give up on the political arena just because it has become more challenging,” Gransaull argues. “We just need to get serious about how to mobilize real grassroots movements to shift the Overton window, influence partisan politics and recapture real democratic control of the government.”

“We need multiple levers acting together, and to think one is more important than others is incorrect,” writes Dana Decent, director of climate and health at the Definity Foundation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who made the list in 2016. “Alternative levers that are important to reduce emissions and adapt, such as building power in social movements, shifting values and mindsets, or building alternative economies that focus on people and planet.”

Canada’s climate leadership

These sustainability torchbearers say that Canada is seriously dropping the ball on climate. When asked how they would rate Canada’s climate leadership out of 10, more than half picked 5 or 6. The average rating was 4.6.

“Canada has made important commitments and investments toward net-zero, but the pace of action doesn’t yet match the urgency of the crisis,” writes Smiely Khurana, founder of The Sustainable Act and Climate Wellness Network, who was one of 2024’s 30 Under 30 picks. “There’s strong innovation and leadership at local and grassroots levels, but federal and provincial policies still too often prioritize short-term economic interests over long-term planetary health.”

“The current path of abandoning reduction targets in favour of intensity targets and pursuing an energy-superpower approach in international trade can hardly be described as climate leadership,” writes David Klar, a 2018 honouree. “It ignores major developments south of the border, namely the creation of the National Energy Dominance Council . . . By the time Canada’s proposed fossil fuel infrastructure build-out is complete, the U.S. nuclear power sector will likely have significant cost, national security and climate advantages.”

What’s not working?

Sustainability advocates everywhere are reevaluating their strategies. We asked respondents what aspect of the climate movement isn’t working or needs to change.

Tyler De Sousa, a 2023 honouree and the co-founder of Circulr, writes that we need to get past “focusing on climate purity, or the idea that we cannot work with those who don’t fully embrace our beliefs about climate or sustainability.”

Julien O. Beaulieu, a doctoral researcher in the United Kingdom who made the list in 2023 and who served as a judge in this year’s ranking, writes, “We need to stop speaking to the people who are already convinced and focus on the reasons that make opponents and skeptics doubt.”

What’s giving you hope?

We asked respondents what gives them the most hope for the future of the climate movement in Canada.

De Sousa is energized by the increasing interest in electric vehicles and the circular economy. Beaulieu finds hope in the “relentless mobilization from individuals in all spheres who keep doing the hard work.” For Hawa Mariam Keita, a 2021 honouree, hope lies in international cooperation and policies implementation. One anonymous respondent pointed to the election of a growing number of climate-aligned MPs in the latest Parliament.

“Canadians care about the environment and we’ve made monumental progress,” writes Kurtis Layden, a 2022 honouree who is now the director of policy for the minister of fisheries.

“The growing focus on climate wellness, community connection and collaboration across disciplines gives me hope,” Khurana writes. “Seeing more young people, artists and BIPOC leaders bringing creativity, empathy and storytelling into the climate space shows that this movement is evolving into something more holistic, human and resilient.”

“The next generation of Canadian climate founders are incredibly technical, impact-driven and globally ambitious,” writes Leah Perry, a senior associate for the Innovation Fund at Wittington Ventures in Toronto, who made the 30 Under 30 list in 2022. “They’re building companies that prove climate solutions can scale and can compete internationally.”

“I find hope in uncertainty. Outcomes don’t look good, and I fear climate impacts will worsen before we change for the better. But we don’t know for sure what will happen and there is hope in that space,” Decent writes. “We also make hope through our actions. Hope is a verb, not a noun, and we create it with every step we take towards a better future.”

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