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.

The post Welcome to overshoot appeared first on Corporate Knights.

While these measures are important, they address only part of the problem. Canada still faces mounting costs and escalating risks from extreme weather, and these steps alone fall far short of what is needed.

Ottawa’s nature strategy is the latest in a series of federal policies that must be turned into concrete programs and actions to address Canada’s vulnerability to extreme weather. Despite the National Adaptation Strategy laid out in 2023, the Trudeau government implemented too little to help Canada adapt to a changing climate. Adaptation has also received insufficient focus under the Carney government beyond what is included in its nature strategy. It has received even less attention across the provinces.

Adaptation is more than protecting natural assets and encouraging greater investment in sustaining natural capital. These measures have undeniable value, but in the absence of robust federal and provincial action, Canada remains exposed to significant risks and escalating costs. Extreme weather can cause loss of life, emergency relocations, widespread property damage and destruction, and lasting health impacts. These economic, financial and health burdens are rising as extreme weather events become more frequent and severe.

Canada can ill afford these increasing losses. Adaptation needs to be a foundational pillar of Canada’s nation-building and economic resilience strategy. This will require much stronger government capacity and sharper policy focus to design and implement effective adaptation programs and practical applications. Meaningful reforms to public-sector budgeting and accounting practices are also essential.

Climate adaptation’s inadequate role in Canada’s policy reset

To understand climate risk policy, it’s helpful to distinguish between mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means preventing or reducing greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change. Adaptation refers to protecting or lessening the impacts of climate change and extreme weather on people, communities, businesses and infrastructure.

In practice, mitigation continues to get far more attention and resources than adaptation. Under the Carney government, it remains the main climate focus, even though overall mitigation funding and policy support have fallen compared with the Trudeau era. Since spring 2025, Ottawa’s emphasis has been on carbon capture and electrification, and now on sustaining natural capital, as the primary tools to fight climate change.

In contrast, adaptation spending is much lower, accounting for only a small share of climate-related expenditures in 2025 and early 2026. Despite the compelling merits of more funding and extensive information available to support implementation, adaptation efforts by Ottawa and the provinces remain a fraction of what is needed.

Embedding adaptation as a core pillar of nation-building is essential to support long‑term economic resilience in the face of a changing climate and challenging economic times.

– Kathryn Bakos and James K. Stewart

Inadequate adaptation poses critical risks to the Carney government’s wide-ranging strategy shift on the economy and climate. Improved federal policy, investment and spending in crucial areas such as defence, infrastructure and trade are long overdue and have considerable merit. Yet adaptation has not featured in flagship legislation (e.g., Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act), or in key fiscal policies (e.g., the November 2025 budget and the February 2026 Defence Industrial Strategy).

Without more funding and focus on adaptation, Ottawa and the provinces risk making the impacts of extreme weather even worse. Weak adaptation capabilities and implementation also make it harder to coordinate federal and provincial government programs to boost resilience, attract private investment and improve regulations without harming the environment.

Large and increasing economic and financial costs

Extensive international and Canadian research shows that climate change and catastrophic weather reduce output, or gross domestic product, as well as productivity. Extreme weather events create negative supply-and-demand shocks through multiple interconnected channels. These begin with decreasing an economy’s supply capacity with its existing stock of labour, capital and land. Extreme weather (e.g., floods, wildfires, hail, wind) damages utilities and transportation and communications systems, interrupts and reduces business operations, disrupts product distribution channels, and impedes supply chains.

Extreme weather events also diminish the available supply of capital, land and labour, further constraining output. Weather disasters damage or destroy structures and equipment, reducing both the quantity and quality of facilities, and can accelerate asset depreciation. Events such as major floods and wildfires decrease the labour supply by reducing work hours or preventing work altogether through evacuations, community disruption, increased caregiving demands, and prolonged dislocations to transportation and communications.

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The production and supply repercussions from extreme weather shocks range from major temporary disruptions to devastating harms. The floods in Quebec and Nova Scotia, and the wildfires in Lytton and Jasper, show how communities can be thrown into chaos.

Even when work does not completely stop, extreme heat reduces the effectiveness of workers and their hours worked. Heat stress lowers cognitive and physical capacity, decreasing labour productivity materially starting at temperatures above 25°C. Labour productivity falls more sharply if temperatures rise further, especially at 33°C to 35°C and above. Temperature extremes also boost absenteeism.

Climate disasters also exert a serious toll on the demand side of the economy. They reduce business and household incomes from interruptions to normal activity, damage to physical capital, reduction in labour supply and lower output. In turn, they cause decreased spending by firms and consumers, further reducing GDP.

Longer-term economic and health burdens

While the rebuilding phase after weather emergencies can temporarily – and misleadingly – increase GDP, reconstruction and replacement of damaged infrastructure require funding and resources that could otherwise have been used to maintain operations or expand productive capacity.

Extreme weather also has long-term effects that can persistently reduce productivity. The difficulty of rebuilding can create delays that reduce output for years. Smaller firms are particularly vulnerable. U.S. data show that 40% of small businesses affected by extreme weather do not reopen, and another 25% close within a year of the catastrophe.

Further, extreme weather events place enormous strain on Canada’s healthcare system. As health deteriorates, more people visit hospitals and costs go up. Society’s most vulnerable individuals are disproportionately affected: the elderly, people with pre-existing conditions, pregnant women and those experiencing homelessness. Climate-related disasters are also linked to worsening mental health from the loss of homes, prolonged relocations and financial stresses from costs not covered by insurance.

Escalating fiscal and financial burdens

Governments face rising costs of emergency assistance and infrastructure repairs from extreme weather events, as well as the growing need to invest in resilient infrastructure. However, public-sector budgets distort the substantial net financial and economic benefits of adaptation spending and investment. While budgets capture immediate costs, they fail to reflect much larger future savings. They also overlook key benefits such as more reliable services, fewer delays and reduced productivity losses.

Businesses and households are also facing growing financial pressures from extreme weather. Rising insurance premiums are a huge factor, but they are just the start. Companies must cover costs for immediate repairs, long-term recovery, and investing in more resilient offices, factories, warehouses, and equipment. Households can struggle with limited mortgage options in high-risk areas and out-of-pocket expenses for repairs and rebuilding. These pressures are compounded by time away from home or work, income disruptions and reduced personal productivity.

Extreme weather and insurance losses on the rise

Since 1983, Canada has experienced more than 300 catastrophic weather events – defined as events causing more than $30 million in insured losses ($25 million prior to 2022). In the 1980s, Canada averaged about two catastrophic events per year; today, that figure has climbed to roughly 15 annually.

Adjusted for inflation, annual losses from extreme weather typically ranged from $400 million to $700 million between 1983 and 2008. Over the past 17 years, insured losses from climate-related disasters jumped to average nearly $3 billion annually, with every year but one surpassing $1 billion.

Although total insured losses in 2025 were $2.4 billion, the broader trend of escalating insured losses from extreme weather events is evident – and is accelerating year over year, as shown in the graph below.

Across Canada, the true financial burden of extreme weather extends far beyond insured losses. Uninsured losses, those not covered by insurance, are estimated at roughly three times the amount insurers pay out, reflecting the costs borne by households, businesses and communities.

A select review of major Canadian floods, wildfires and extreme heat events over the past 13 years shows their increasing frequency, severity and rising economic, financial and health costs. Catastrophic weather events have destroyed homes and infrastructure, displaced residents, disrupted transportation and energy networks, and generated billions in economic losses, demonstrating how climate disasters threaten lives, livelihoods and productivity.

Climate adaptation: A core policy need

Despite the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – the primary driver of climate change and extreme weather – fossil fuels are expected to remain a central part of the global economy for the foreseeable future, according to analyses by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the United Nations Environment Programme. Meanwhile, global climate-related losses are rising as shown by catastrophe loss trends over recent decades and are expected to escalate further alongside ongoing fossil fuel use.

Given this reality, climate adaptation is essential to actively manage these risks. According to the Canadian Climate Institute, every dollar invested in adaptation in Canada can generate up to $15 in value – approximately $5 in direct avoided losses (repair and replacement costs) and up to $10 in broader economic benefits, including reduced supply chain disruption and sustained labour productivity.

A 2026 study on proactively upgrading public infrastructure assets to adapt to extreme rainfall and rising heat estimated that Canada could save $10 billion annually in net costs compared to not making these adaptation investments. The savings exceed $5 billion per year relative to a reactive approach, where upgrades are made only at the time of asset replacement.

What Canada should be doing differently

1. Embed adaptation in nation-building and transformational projects
Major projects and infrastructure development are cornerstones of Ottawa’s nation-building strategy. But success critically depends on building right the first time – designing Canadian infrastructure and economic assets to withstand the escalating risks of extreme weather.

Adaptation policies and programs are foundational to Canada’s economic success, resilience and nation-building. Embedding climate resilience into transportation, energy, hospitals, water systems and emergency operations supports public safety and security, growth and incomes. Aligning adaptation investments with Canada’s defence commitments is vital, including upgrading and protecting critical military infrastructure to safeguard it against extreme weather disruptions.

2. Significantly increase government capacity in adaptation
Effective climate adaptation depends on strong, coordinated institutional capacity across both the public and private sectors. The public sector, in particular, needs enhanced capabilities to assess climate risk and design policy that guides investment capital wisely. Greater government expertise is essential to better inform stakeholders and integrate resilience into decision-making across ministries. It is also critical to prevent fragmented and reactive adaptation efforts.

Establishing a National Adaptation Office (NAO), led by a national adaptation director, would enhance leadership and improve coordination and accountability across all levels of government. Incorporating aspects of the Major Projects Office and Defence Investment Agency, an NAO would attract expertise from the non-profit and private sectors. The director of such an office would serve as a clear focal point with authority to provide guidance, deliver analysis and advance national adaptation priorities.

3. Improve fiscal support for adaptation
Investing in resilient infrastructure, strengthening energy grids, and protecting workers can lower future costs from emergencies, repairs and health impacts. Communities and households can be made more resilient through limiting development in high-risk areas, climate-smart construction, and retrofitting existing stock to maintain housing stability.

Fiscal policy can also strengthen public–private collaboration. Ottawa’s nature strategy goal of attracting private and non-profit investment in nature is commendable. Much more can be done to align government budgets with private investment, and encouraging risk-sharing is key. Incentivizing adaptation in business planning will help embed resilience throughout the economy.

4. Adopt natural asset valuation and better accounting
Natural ecosystems – including wetlands, forests and grasslands – provide essential adaptation services such as mitigating floods, moderating heat and aiding water management. The National Infrastructure Council’s 2025 report emphasized their robust economic, fiscal and health benefits. Their role is critical in delivering more resilient infrastructure through nature-based solutions as highlighted in Ottawa’s nature strategy.

For example, upstream wetlands reduce flood damage in urban areas by up to 38%, while expanded tree canopies in cities can reduce heat by as much as 5°C. Swamps and marshes in one watershed alone in Ontario provide stormwater management services that would cost more than $1.7 billion to replace with built infrastructure.

Yet federal, provincial, territorial and most municipal accounts overlook natural assets, facilitating their degradation and overuse. This increases climate risk and boosts disaster and replacement costs for households, businesses and governments. Public-sector financial reporting needs to align with new international standards for climate risk and natural asset accounting.

Canada must act

Looking ahead, greater investment in climate adaptation and long‑overdue government strategy for climate-risk management are vital requirements for Canada’s economic success.

Canada must go much further than its new nature strategy to avoid the tragedy of the horizon, as then Bank of England Governor Mark Carney warned in 2015. Climate risks unfold over much longer timeframes than those typically considered by financial markets, policymakers and businesses. By the time the full impacts of these risks are visible, it may already be too late to avoid severe consequences.

Embedding adaptation as a core pillar of nation-building is essential to support long‑term economic resilience in the face of a changing climate and challenging economic times.

Kathryn Bakos is a biologist, the managing director of finance and resilience at the University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, and chair of the Ontario Biodiversity Council.

James K. Stewart is an economist, a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute, and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.

The post It’s time to address Canada’s major shortfalls in climate adaptation appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The anti‑government protests sweeping across Iran, from major cities to rural towns, are fuelled by anger over economic collapse and political repression. But beneath the headlines of currency devaluations and street clashes lies a deeper, more permanent driver of dissent: ecological calamity.

Decades of ignoring scientists, persecuting activists and greenlighting corrupt development schemes have triggered a water crisis so severe that President Masoud Pezeshkian warned in November that Tehran’s residents may eventually have to evacuate the capital city, which is sinking as dried-up aquifers give way.

The devastation extends far beyond Tehran. Lake Urmia, once one of the world’s largest salt lakes, has shrivelled to less than 10% of its volume, while the iconic Zayandeh River has sat dry for years. Wildfires have ravaged the parched Hyrcanian forests, a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the oil-rich Khuzestan province, home to Iran’s Arab minority, state-led water diversion has devastated the local economy and inflamed ethnic grievances.

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In a public letter entitled “Three Tough Truths about Climate,” Gates said that carbon-emission projections are heading down and that climate change will not turn Earth into a fiery hellscape. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates wrote. 

“To be clear: climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved,” he wrote. But “the biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been,” he added. “Improving lives” is more important than “emissions and temperature change.”

Gates’s assessment turned heads, coming from a man who wrote a book called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. His true passion is human health. His Gates Foundation has invested US$50 billion to improve global living standards and combat diseases. But when the Trump government is pushing “American energy dominance” through fossil fuels, Gates’s manifesto seemed dangerously counter-productive.

Climate deniers couldn’t wait to mangle Gates’s message. “Huge victory,” Florida lawyer Rogan O’Handley crowed to two million followers on X: “Bill Gates & the climate-change alarmists are finally admitting humans will be just fine.” A Fox News panel responded to Gates’s letter by concluding that “we need abundant fossil fuels, and cheap – that’s how we lift people out of poverty.” 

Climate supporters fought back, noting that health and climate are inextricably linked. We can’t address health without targeting climate. Gates’s memo “redefined the concept of bad timing,” noted U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann, whose co-authored study A Planet on the Brink came out the same day as Gates’s letter. Mann’s warning that we are hurtling toward climate chaos got scant attention. 

But there could be another force at work: a cycle of confirmation bias. In 2024, Scottish data scientist Hannah Ritchie published a book called Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. On page 1 Ritchie writes, “It has become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change.” Her alternative message is that fixing the climate will be hard, but it’s doable. Gates called the book “eye-opening and essential.” In November, he named Ritchie’s latest book, Clearing the Air, one of his top five books of the year. 

Veteran U.K. climate activist Jonathon Porritt questions the work of both Gates and Ritchie. In a 2024 article, he ripped into Not the End of the World for Ritchie’s selective use of statistics and her “banal evocation of ‘hope’ as our best tool in the fight against climate change.” Her naïveté, he said, “is quite staggering.”

Still, Gates was hardly the first voice to dial down the climate emergency in 2025. In April, former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair fronted a  report called The Climate Paradox in which he wrote that “any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.” And in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney – the UN’s former special envoy for climate action and finance – is touting Canada’s energy resources to the world – including oil and gas, and maybe a new oil pipeline. These debates will likely heat up in 2026. 

We want to know what you think about these developments. Please feel out this short survey to share your perspective.

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But eventually the giants, like General Motors, failed to fully keep their word. Just like today, promises made have not been kept. Notably, Stellantis still has not fulfilled its commitment to communities, workers and government to retool its Brampton plant.

Now, faced with threats from our neighbour to the south, we are, again, in a moment where our advanced manufacturing automobile industry is hemorrhaging jobs and at significant risk, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s controversial ads notwithstanding. Just like in 2008, Ottawa and the provinces need strong pressure to protect the jobs of today and develop the jobs of the future.

Multiplying threats

Mayors and councillors across Canada are also ringing the alarm bells for another reason. Not only are good jobs at risk: the very towns and cities in which we work and live are, too.

This summer our country was quite literally on fire from coast to coast to coast. More than 200 communities were affected by wildfires, not to mention flooding, air quality alerts, drought and extreme heat. The premiers of Manitoba and Saskatchewan both declared states of emergency.

Science shows that changes to our climate are driving this new reality we now face every spring and summer, that these changes are primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and that the world must cut fossil fuel use nearly in half by 2030 to prevent catastrophe. This is possible only if Canada does its part.

That’s why – on the eve of the federal budget, when Carney is expected to release his so-called climate competitiveness strategy – we are calling for the government to invest in true nation-building, job-creating projects, not more pipelines and fossil fuel subsidies.

Building a competitive economy

As local leaders representing more than 10 million Canadians, we are calling for projects that would link communities across Canada with clean electrical power and modern high-speed rail; build affordable, energy-efficient homes, including heat pumps; and support communities to withstand and recover from climate disasters.

These are the building blocks of a competitive and resilient economy. They are the building blocks of safe and prosperous communities.

Why wouldn’t Carney, a climate expert, be prepared to take bold action to ensure that Canada is “climate competitive”? The answer, in part, lies with who the government is listening to. Oil and gas lobbyists have been received at more than 600 meetings since January, including 50 meetings with Energy Minister Tim Hodgson alone since the April election – an average of two a week.

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That the government is meeting so often with proponents of old technologies, which are proven to cause irreversible harm, is all the more startling given the reality our communities are facing. The impacts of climate destabilization are widespread and devastating, from Jasper’s clean-up costs and massive home-insurance increases in Yellowknife to estimates of insured damages from the Flin Flon and La Ronde wildfire complexes reaching $300 million and counting. Without urgent action, Canada is on track for $100 billion per year in climate damages by 2050.

A double standard

Further, communities such as Jasper, Alberta, have been asked to repay part of the response costs to the disastrous wildfire that burned a third of the town – a clawback that will be devastating to its recovery.

Compare this to the fossil fuel majors that made $35 billion in profits in 2022 alone while significantly contributing to inflation across the country. Why should the government continue to subsidize foreign companies to profit while residents in Jasper are asked to repay disaster support?

In fairness, the federal government is expected to take serious and applaudable steps in the budget to address methane emissions. Such measures could even see Canada as a world leader in reducing methane emissions.

However, these steps will not be enough to secure Canada’s economic future or meet emission-reduction targets needed to keep our communities safe from summer after summer of life-threatening wildfires, oppressive smoke, damaging floods and evacuations.

No wonder a recent Leger poll shows that a majority of Canadians are worried about the changes in our climate, especially in Quebec, where Carney also drew much of the support that secured his victory this spring.

Mayors and councillors are worried, too. And they understand the pressures this government faces, especially in light of U.S. protectionism and industrial competition. As Carney recently reminded us, the geopolitical landscape has been forever transformed.

That’s why at this moment of existential economic crisis, Canada must invest in projects that create the jobs of the future and truly build this nation, not help burn it down.

David Miller is the co-chair of Elbows Up for Climate, a coalition of more than 250 mayors and councillors working to ensure that Canada prioritizes climate action and economic sovereignty; a former mayor of Toronto; former chair of the Ontario Auto Mayors; and the current managing director of the C40 Centre.

The post To save our economy, Canada must choose projects that are truly nation-building – not nation-burning appeared first on Corporate Knights.

From increased respiratory illnesses to morbidity, from adverse effects during pregnancy to the mental toll exacted in the aftermath of wildfire destruction, the blazes that have become an increasingly visceral sign of a warming planet are exacting a painful blow. “There is no safe level of exposure to wildfire smoke: the more exposure we get, the worse a range of health outcomes,” Marshall Burke, an associate professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, said earlier this year, in the midst of one of the worst wildfire seasons Los Angeles has seen.

Wildland wildfires are gobbling up about 26% less landmass than they did two decades ago, according to research led by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health and published by Science magazine. But the number of people exposed to fires has shot up some 40%, in part because people are living closer to areas now prone to igniting.

Wildfire smoke contributes to the deaths of about 40,000 people a year in the United States alone, a study published this year in Nature found, and that number is forecasted to rise to 70,000 people by 2050. A similar study published by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research in 2024 found that wildfire smoke contributes to about 16,000 deaths in the United States, and that number could climb to close to 30,000 deaths by the middle of the century.

“There is consistent and significant evidence of an association between wildfire smoke exposure and an increased risk of emergency room visits, hospital admissions, physician visits, or medication dispensations for respiratory conditions.

– Health Canada

“This really points to the urgency of the problem,” Minghao Qiu, the lead author of the report, told NPR. “Based on our results, this should be one of the policy priorities, or the climate policy priority, of the U.S., to figure out how to reduce this number.”

Another study predicted that wildfire smoke will kill 1.4 million people every year by the end of the century. And while headlines are often focused on North American or European blazes, it’s in Africa where the greatest risk is playing out. The UN University study found that 85% of global exposure to fire was in Africa.

Half a pack a day

Wildfires are a major source of pollution. In fact, they are 10 times as toxic as air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, a recent Stanford University study found. Smoke from wildfires can affect air quality in the immediate vicinity and stretch out over great distances. As flames gobbled up forests in Northern Ontario and Alberta this past June, Toronto briefly recorded the worst air quality reading in the world, while parts of the United States were covered by a smoky haze. In Detroit, for example, air quality readings during the wildfire summer were akin to smoking a quarter or half a pack of cigarettes a day, according to one pulmonologist.

“There is consistent and significant evidence of an association between wildfire smoke exposure and an increased risk of emergency room visits, hospital admissions, physician visits, or medication dispensations for respiratory conditions,” according to a study of available research conducted by Health Canada in 2024. There is “significant” evidence, for example, linking asthma to wildfire smoke exposure. Women, children and seniors faced increased risk of respiratory morbidity, the study noted.

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A more nascent area of research is the impact that wildfires have on reproductive development. Researchers note that while there is limited comparative information, the most consistent evidence is for low birth weight and preterm birth as a result of wildfire smoke. The timing of exposure to wildfires also matters – with evidence pointing to the second and third trimesters as being the most delicate, and the severity of wildfires and proximity also influencing adverse birth effects. It’s not just about exposure to wildfire smoke; the mere occurrence of wildfires may also have an impact. “This is an important consideration, as increased maternal stress leading to the adverse birth outcomes could result from both wildfire smoke exposure and occurrence,” a 2024 Health Canada report warned.

Likewise, both exposure and occurrence may be taking a toll on mental health. A number of studies have found increased rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression in both children and adults, which is in line with the climate grief that many people express in an age of seemingly constant environmental crises. The impacts of a wildfire may stretch on for months, or even years. However, it’s not clear that wildfire smoke specifically is linked to adverse mental health effects, “given the difficulties in differentiating the impacts attributable to smoke from those due to trauma associated with the wildfire occurrence (for example, potential loss of property or livelihood, physical threat, evacuation).”

For Qiu, the Stanford researcher, the importance of adaptation is ever more glaring in our learning-to-live-with-wildfire future: “We need to explore what types of adaptation strategies are most useful.” He points to improving access to air purification at home and creating networks of clean-air centres to help people avoid exposure during smoke days.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires–based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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For the past few summers, however, hostile forces have launched a relentless assault on Canada – setting forests ablaze and forcing hundreds of thousands of Canadians from their homes. Across the country, millions choked on acrid smoke. In just three years, this enemy has burned an area nearly half the size of Alberta, leaving behind charred landscapes and shattered communities.

That enemy is wildfires. Once part of nature’s regeneration cycle, they are now four times more destructive than they used to be, driven by hotter, drier conditions. Megafires of this scale are the new normal. While wildfires are inevitable, the scale of the damage is not. Our inaction has made the crisis far worse than it needs to be.

If these attacks had been made by a foreign adversary, we would be operating at “DEFCON 1,” deploying every resource at our disposal. Yet even though nearly 8% of Canada’s forests have burned in just three years, progress has been slowed by fragmented jurisdictions, small step increases in funding and piecemeal measures – challenges that governments and agencies have long struggled to overcome.

Investing billions now could prevent tens of billions in losses later, while sparing Canadians the worst human and health impacts.

– Toby Heaps, publisher and CEO, Corporate Knights

Meanwhile, Canadians endure record displacement: 352,000 people forced from their homes across 2023, 2024 and 2025. In 2023 alone, 98% of Canadians experienced at least one day of smoke-filled air. South of the border, more than 100 million Americans were placed under air-quality alerts in 2023, and more than 80 million in 2025 – alerts driven primarily by smoke from Canadian fires.

This is not just a domestic emergency; it is a continental one, arriving at a sensitive moment in Canada–U.S. relations. Republican lawmakers and Trump allies are already voicing anger over the smoke from Canadian wildfires that has blanketed U.S. cities, and they are unlikely to stay quiet while tens of millions of Americans suffer through air-quality alerts traced directly to Canada’s inaction.

Core defence capabilities

Make no mistake: this is a security threat of the highest order. It is national defence. NATO’s agreed definition of defence expenditure – published by its defence expenditure division – is the standard by which all allies report. Under the new framework, members must reach 5% of gross domestic product by 2035, with 3.5% allocated to core defence requirements such as personnel, operations, equipment, research and development, and infrastructure, and up to 1.5% devoted to defence- and security-related investments in resilience and civil preparedness. Not surprisingly, these big new buckets of money are already inspiring many claims – including plenty of creative accounting.

But wildfire-readiness assets – if owned and operated by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) – can be credibly structured as core defence capabilities. Satellites and drones directly serve military needs in surveillance, reconnaissance and Arctic sovereignty operations. Water bombers, while deployed in summer fire seasons, can be structured as CAF assets for year-round training, logistics and Arctic readiness. Surge personnel trained under CAF operational control strengthen national readiness by providing deployable capacity.

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In practice, these assets could remain military-owned and under CAF command but be made available to provinces through formal support arrangements during fire season. Because wildfire deployments are limited to a short season, these assets remain available to serve military needs – from surveillance and sovereignty to training and logistics – for most of the year, making them credible candidates for classification as core defence expenditure under NATO’s rules.

Canada’s fire-management agencies work tirelessly under immense pressure, but the scale and intensity of today’s fires routinely push even their best efforts to the breaking point. They need stronger national backing to match the new reality.

Invest in prevention

This is not a call to reinvent the wheel. Ottawa has already funded programs like FireSmart, the Wildfire Resilient Futures Initiative and the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada. Prevention – through fuel management, prescribed burns and Indigenous-led stewardship – remains essential. But prevention cannot substitute for suppression. The brutal reality is that Canada simply lacks the surge capacity needed when fire seasons escalate to “all hands on deck,” as they now do almost every year.

This summer, the national preparedness level was stuck at Level 5 – the highest – for virtually the entire season, with only a few days of relief. That meant every available resource was already committed. When new fires erupted, there was nothing left to send. That gap between what we have and what we need is the true measure of our vulnerability.

Canada’s wildfire crisis is measured not only in scorched forests and evacuations: annual suppression costs now exceed $1 billion, and over the past five years wildfires have caused more than an estimated $30 billion in economic damages, from destroyed homes and shuttered businesses to health impacts from smoke. A small fraction of fires – about 3% – cause nearly all of the destruction. Research shows that with better surveillance, faster response and targeted prevention, damages could be reduced by as much as 78%. Closing that gap requires federal leadership and serious investment.

That is why a diverse group of credible national organizations – including the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, the Council for Clean Capitalism, Ducks Unlimited Canada, the Mining Association of Canada, Nature Canada, World Wildlife Fund Canada and Protect Our Winters Canada – is calling for a federal investment of $4.1 billion over five years to build a dedicated aerial firefighting fleet, expand satellite and drone surveillance, and train thousands of additional firefighters to provide the surge capacity Canada now lacks. Put simply: investing billions now could prevent tens of billions in losses later while sparing Canadians the worst human and health impacts.

Canada is on fire. We need a firefighting surge capacity – funded, trained and ready to deploy – because our current system is being stretched beyond capacity. The question is no longer whether we can afford it. The question is whether we can afford not to.

Let’s not wait until we can no longer see the forest because the trees are all gone.

Toby Heaps is co-founder and publisher of Corporate Knights.

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As wildfires get worse, government spending is rising sharply. Research firms that report on the global wildfire defence market are projecting annual growth rates that range from 8.4% to 12.6%, much of it driven by public funding. For example, the United States’ budget for wildland fire management was $1.9 billion in 2025, a 10% increase from the previous year. For 2026, the U.S. Department of the Interior has asked for $6.55 billion – a 245% increase – citing the increasing frequency of wildfires and devastating disasters like January’s fires in Los Angeles, where losses are estimated as high as $131 billion.

In fact, climate-related disasters have become a major economic driver. Andrew John Stevenson, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, has recently produced research showing that 36% of all the growth in U.S. gross domestic product is from spending on disaster preparedness and recovery.

On October 22, a consortium of national organizations in Canada published an open letter to the federal government asking for a five-year investment of $4.1 billion in wildfire defence. Signatories include Nature Canada, Ducks Unlimited Canada, the Mining Association of Canada, Protect Our Winters Canada and World Wildlife Fund Canada.

Across the world, unprecedented conflagrations have spurred federal investments to new heights.

South Korea

This past spring, one of the worst wildfires in South Korea’s history killed 30 people, injured dozens of others and displaced 40,000 people. The fires consumed a 1,300-year-old Buddhist temple. Five thousand personnel and more than 80 helicopters were mobilized to fight the fires. South Korea’s acting president called them the worst in the country’s history.

Coupled with U.S. auto tariffs, the wildfires prompted South Korea’s government to quickly assemble a US$8.6-billion supplementary budget, of which nearly a billion was earmarked for wildfire recovery. The funding nearly doubles the disaster-response wallet and includes major investments for firefighting equipment like helicopters and AI-enabled surveillance cameras.

“We took into account the fact that the scale of wildfire recovery continued to increase and domestic and international uncertainty has greatly expanded since the announcement of the U.S. reciprocal tariffs,” Vice Finance Minister Kim Yoon-sang said at the time.

Australia

The horrendous bushfire crisis of 2019/2020 in Australia affected 80% of the population and caused AUD$2.4 billion of insured loss. More than 17 million hectares were burned and a billion animals are estimated to have perished, along with 33 people.

The fires prompted the Australian government to establish a dedicated National Bushfire Recovery Agency, with an initial $2 billion focused on community resilience and economic resurgence.

In 2023, Australia was struck again by another round of devastating bushfires, which burned substantially more area than the “Black Summer” fires a few years previous, primarily in the Northern Territory and Queensland.

Australia’s 2025 federal budget now provisions $1.2 billion for disaster recovery payments. For its part, the northern state of Queensland allocated $4.357 billion over four years for a fire disaster and recovery package emphasizing front-line services. (New South Wales outlined a similar amount over the same period for disaster recovery, albeit primarily addressed instead to major flooding.)

Brazil

In the spring of 2025, Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands were visited by what NASA’s Earth Observatory called “unusually early and intense” fires, which consumed more than 1.3 million hectares.

That fall, the government allocated the equivalent of US$95 million for firefighting efforts. The 2024 fires were so bad, the government declared a nationwide environmental emergency ahead of the 2025 fire season and hired an additional 250 federal firefighters.

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The added capacity seems to have helped. So far this year, the country reports that it has experienced the lowest number of wildfire outbreaks in the past 12 years. Brazil’s forest secretary at its Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change attributes the decrease to improved weather conditions and “efforts mobilizing local stakeholders, municipal and state governments, with investments in fire departments and an increase in federal-level initiatives.”

This September, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a US$1-billion investment in the multilateral forest conservation fund called the Tropical Forests Forever Facility. Lula has promised that the Brazil-led fund will become operational at this year’s COP30 in the Amazonian city of Belém. The ambition is to raise $125 billion.

But preserving the Amazonian rainforest is only getting harder. Mongabay reports that “rising temperatures and erratic rainfall rendered parts of the western Amazon up to 30 times more fire-prone than pre-industrial levels.”

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

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That’s almost a fifth of the province’s total budget for this year.

Ruby River Capital LLC, the U.S.-based owner of GNL Québec Inc., filed a claim against Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) after its Énergie Saguenay project failed to pass a federal environmental impact assessment.

The proposed LNG terminal had already been rejected by the Québec government over concerns that it would increase greenhouse gas emissions and negatively impact First Nations and marine mammals.

Canada faces a no-win situation — a catch-22. If the government does not rapidly phase out fossil fuels, it will fail to meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement to address the climate crisis. But when it takes steps to do so, foreign investors invoke international trade and investment agreements like NAFTA and threaten to drain public coffers.

Unlike environmental treaties, trade and investment agreements have teeth. They are enforceable through a system known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) that allows foreign investors to bypass local courts and bring claims for monetary compensation to a panel of three arbitrators. More than 1,200 ISDS cases have been launched against governments around the world in the last 25 years.

Between 1996 and 2018, Canada was sued more than 40 times by American investors through the investment chapter in NAFTA. To date, Canada has lost or settled (with compensation) 10 claims. Canadian governments have paid out more than $263 million in damages and settlements.

When NAFTA was replaced in 2018 with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), it did not include an ISDS mechanism between Canada and the U.S. Chrystia Freeland, the then-deputy prime minister of Canada, noted at the time that the removal of ISDS “strengthened our government’s right to regulate in the public interest, to protect public health and the environment.”

Ruby River was only able to launch its case because USMCA allowed firms that had made investments before NAFTA’s termination – on July 1, 2020, – to continue to bring ISDS claims for three years — until June 30, 2023.

Importantly, Ruby River spent only about CDN$165 million on the Énergie Saguenay project proposal. However, the firm is permitted within the ISDS system to seek “lost future profits” based on speculation about the performance of notoriously volatile oil and gas markets.

Other jurisdictions need to follow Québec’s lead. The global carbon budget has no room for new coal, oil or gas developments.

 

Québec is a member of the global Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance and is the first jurisdiction in the world to ban all oil and gas production. The province is being sued over this ban by several fossil fuel firms — seeking more compensation than was offered — in Québec’s Superior Court.

Had these companies been foreign, and thereby qualified for the protection of an investment treaty, they likely would have chosen ISDS instead. This is because ISDS generally provides broader scope for claims — and larger awards — than domestic courts.

Other jurisdictions need to follow Québec’s lead. The global carbon budget has no room for new coal, oil or gas developments. Construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure also needs to be limited, as it would lock in continued extraction long into the future.

Despite clear messages to this effect from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency, investors continue to propose new fossil fuel projects. They do so in full knowledge that governments need to act to curb emissions in line with their international commitments and that future climate policies may negatively impact their investments.

Allowing these companies to demand billions in compensation creates moral hazard and could dampen necessary policy action.

Governments are increasingly aware of this risk and many are taking action. The European Union is seeking to withdraw from the Energy Charter Treaty, the largest investment treaty in the world, because it “is not aligned with the Paris Agreement, the EU Climate Law or the objectives of the European Green Deal.”

The Biden administration is committed to not signing up to new agreements with ISDS and a number of Democrats are calling for the removal of the mechanism from existing deals. Other countries such as Australia and New Zealand have worked to exclude ISDS from some of their trade agreements.

It is communities impacted by climate change that should be compensated by fossil fuel firms, not the other way around.

 

Canada will soon escape from the legacy of NAFTA. However, the government remains exposed to the threat of ISDS through other trade agreements such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), as well as dozens of bilateral investment treaties.

When the U.K. officially joins the CPTPP, the risk of ISDS claims from fossil fuel firms will increase dramatically.

The idea that public finance, desperately needed for the energy transition and climate adaptation, will be redirected to compensate fossil fuel firms currently making record profits is offensive.

In light of the increasing body of evidence that documents how the industry has actively obstructed climate action and helped to spread disinformation about climate science, it is communities impacted by climate change that should be compensated by fossil fuel firms, not the other way around.

The Canadian government should adopt a consistent approach to ISDS. The exclusion of ISDS from USMCA should be emulated in any future agreements, and Canada should work with treaty partners to remove access to the system in all current ones.

Kyla Tienhaara is the Canada Research Chair in Economy and Environment at Queen’s University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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So climate activists were surprised and disappointed when three large reinsurance companies backed out of the United Nations’ Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) within just three weeks of each other this spring.

Munich Re, Zurich Insurance Group and Hannover Re each announced they were quitting NZIA. In late March, Munich Re said that it was leaving the alliance because of antitrust concerns but that it was still committed to decarbonization. Zurich followed days later. Hannover Re didn’t give any reasons for its decision but said it is also still committed to its climate targets.

Climate campaigners fear that the antitrust risks cited by Munich Re may hamper insurers’ ability to tackle net-zero goals collectively. But they also believe that the concerns are likely without legal merit and that pressure from American anti-ESG politicians is to blame.

“Munich Re, Zurich and Hannover Re derive about one third of their revenues from the US market and are vulnerable to its political follies,” wrote Peter Bosshard, of the Insure Our Future campaign, in Environmental Finance. “Net Zero alliance members that are less exposed should call out the current anti-ESG campaign as the cynical ploy of the fossil fuel lobby which it is, rather than continuing to coddle their coal, oil and gas clients.”

Bosshard points out that competition regulators in the U.K. released guidance to ensure competition law won’t limit companies’ ability to pursue collective climate action. He urged regulators in the U.S., EU and elsewhere to issue similar clarifications.

“The weaponized antitrust campaign is a headache for some climate leaders and an easy excuse for continued inaction for climate laggards,” he adds. “Some financial institutions have argued that they can’t take individual action due to competitive pressures and now argue that they can’t take collective action due to antitrust concerns. They are making a strong case for stronger regulation.”

These moves followed a threat by big banks back in the fall to leave the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a group convened by former Bank of England (and Canada) governor Mark Carney. Facing this mutiny, GFANZ went on to announce it would not require its members to set rigorous science-based emission-reduction targets in line with the UN Race to Zero campaign.

When it comes to the insurance industry, climate campaigners can take some comfort in the fact that these companies have not deserted their net-zero commitments. Munich Re still expects to cut emissions related to its investment portfolio by 29% by the end of 2025 and achieve net-zero by 2050.

Munich Re was set to stop insuring new oil and gas projects in April. That’s something that might have seemed an unlikely outcome just a few years ago.

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