Engineers promise more dams and more tunnels to bring water from the Amazon side of the Andes – but the accelerated melting of Peru’s tropical glaciers puts even those megaprojects into question. 

Where modern engineering fails, can traditional know-how succeed? The answer is “Si.” A Peruvian non-profit called Aquafondo is rallying high-Andean communities – where ancient knowledge is still preserved – to use nature-based tactics to “sow” new supplies of water. Local people are restoring thousand-year-old trenches high in the mountains to redirect water flow into ancient, stone-lined canals, revitalized wetlands and, eventually, the underground aquifers that supply Lima. They’re also restoring grasslands and forests that increase the mountains’ ability to absorb moisture, reducing runoff and increasing the water supplies available to local communities. 

How meaningful can old ditches be? Studies by The Nature Conservancy in one community, San Pedro de Casta, found that restoring 20 kilometres of pre-Incan canals (known as “amunas”) boosted dry-season river volumes by 50%. Another study found that the cost of “sowing” the aquifers was just a third the cost of saving an equivalent amount of water behind a modern dam. Aquafondo now estimates that its community-based approach is adding more than 13 million square metres of water a year to Lima’s river basin – all while reinforcing traditional knowledge and creating new jobs in remote communities.  

The COP30 climate conference in Brazil recognized this success in November, where Aquafondo won the global “Local Adaptation Champions” award for nature-based solutions. “We have strengthened our unity, our identity and our capacity to adapt without losing our roots,” Aquafondo executive director Mariella Sánchez said after winning the award. “This is not only a nature-based solution. It is a solution grounded in memory, dignity and the leadership of our communities.” 

Rick Spence is editor-at-large at Corporate Knights.

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A first-of-its-kind report looks at the 20 largest credit card issuers in the United States and evaluates whether they were in line with the International Energy Agency’s net-zero by 2050 pathway between 2021 and 2024. The report, titled Better Options: How Large Companies and Nonprofits Can Select Climate-Aligned Credit Card Partners, was produced by Stop the Money Pipeline, a coalition of environmental groups targeting banks and insurers, and released on February 18.

Of the 20 institutions examined, 12 finance the fossil fuel industry, including expansion projects. The report, which was developed in collaboration with groups like Rainforest Action Network, Reclaim Finance and Stand.earth, also outlined how six of these 12 institutions, such as Barclays, Capital One Financial and TD Bank, increased financing for the fossil fuel industry between 2021 and 2024. Seven of the 12 decreased financing for sustainable energy projects, such as UMB Group and Citibank. All 12 need to increase their spending on sustainable energy at least 13-fold compared to fossil fuel financing to align with net-zero by 2025 targets.

“We wanted to look at credit cards,” says Sarah Lasoff, lead author of the report and special projects manager at Stop the Money Pipeline, because there is a “viable and ambitiously climate-aligned action that companies can take.”

Changing banking institutions can be a huge undertaking for companies, non-profits or governments, Lasoff says. “Whereas a credit card partnership, you can just choose another one of these large credit card partners, because they can issue millions of credit cards, and they’re not funnelling billions into the fossil fuel industry.”

The remaining eight better-option institutions, such as American Express and Synchrony, did not finance the fossil fuel industry. Instead of commercial or investment banking, these institutions specialized in issuing credit cards, as credit unions or as smaller regional banks.

It’s really rare that we have an opportunity to potentially move so much money towards a financial institution that is doing the right thing and away from a financial institution that is doing the wrong thing.

– Sarah Lasoff, Stop the Money Pipeline

According to another report released last spring, The Carbon Bankroll 2.0 by Topo Finance, the financial institute that a company chooses to partner with may be their largest source of indirect emissions. However, tracking emissions from a company’s financial institution is not yet a standardized practice, Lasoff says. It also means that companies should look for financial institutions that align with their own sustainability goals. “If companies started choosing the better options, there would be a market incentive for financial institutions to move away from financing the fossil fuel industry,” Lasoff says. Companies that have net-zero 2050 targets might be unaware that their credit card partner is misaligned with their own corporate climate ambitions.

The Costco case

Costco, for example, is a company that Lasoff says has demonstrated that it cares about things like diversity and inclusion, its workers and the climate. But Costco’s credit card partnership with Citibank, the second-largest funder of the fossil fuel industry worldwide between 2021 and 2024, is misaligned with its climate ambitions. And Costco’s partnership is significant for Citibank: it makes up 15.8% of all its credit cards issued.

Lasoff says that this is an opportunity for Costco to do what it already does but better, and to maximize its positive climate impact. “We don’t believe that Costco wants to contribute to the pollution of communities in the Gulf South and contribute to global warming, which is creating . . . more dangerous climate disasters.”

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Costco’s co-branded credit card partnership with Citibank is set to expire in 2029, and procurement of a new partnership could start as early as 2027. Lasoff says that previously Costco had a partnership with one of the better options, American Express, and she hopes that by sharing the report with Costco, it can make choices aligned with its climate goals. Lasoff says that Costco has received a copy of the report but has not yet responded. Costco also did not immediately respond to a request for a comment.

In addition to Costco, Citigroup has credit card partnerships with Best Buy, ExxonMobil, Home Depot and others. The report also mentions other partnerships with the worse fossil-fuel-funding financial institutions. For instance, JPMorgan Chase has credit cards with Air Canada, British Airways, United Airways, Hyatt Hotels, Marriott Hotels, Amazon and others.

Equipped with information about which financial institutions are the better options, companies can now decide to partner with financial institutions that are not financing climate change.
“It’s really rare that we have an opportunity to potentially move so much money towards a financial institution that is doing the right thing and away from a financial institution that is doing the wrong thing,” Lasoff says.

Ashley Perl is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Stockholm. 

The post New climate-finance campaign targets Costco’s partnership with Citibank appeared first on Corporate Knights.

EWF alleged that Tyson’s promise to reach “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and its sale of “climate-smart” beef, could not be credibly substantiated. Before pulling its Brazen Beef line in 2024, Tyson had marketed the product as “the first climate friendly beef with 10% greenhouse gas reduction,” a claim that Matthew Hayek, an environmental scientist at New York University, says he never believed. Echoing what he told Corporate Knights in 2024, Hayek reiterates that “10% just seemed like such a fine-grained amount of emissions reduction that was well within the margin of error.” He is “skeptical that anyone had the information that could ‘prove’ that when that consumer went to the grocery store, they were actually getting 10% fewer emissions than the steak right next to it.”

“The decision to settle was made solely to avoid the expense and distraction of ongoing litigation and does not represent any admission of wrongdoing by Tyson Foods,” a company spokesperson told Reuters.

EWG claims that Tyson spent less than 0.1% of annual revenue on actual emission-reduction efforts, and that was “mostly on research – $50 million out of a total annual revenue of roughly $53 billion.” It adds that Tyson spends about “three times as much on advertising as it does on research.”

All the while, according to EWG, Tyson is producing greenhouse gas emissions that “exceed those of Austria or Greece,” with its beef production responsible for 85% of those emissions.

A particularly polluting food

One third of global greenhouse gases are linked to agriculture, with beef remaining disproportionately responsible. According to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, “the global livestock sector is estimated to be responsible for between 12% and 19% of total human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making it one of the world’s highest emitting sectors.” This has led some major meat-industry players to invest heavily in climate-friendly marketing campaigns and carbon offsets – not in reducing production.

For example, Canada’s Maple Leaf Foods, which produces pork and poultry, has claimed since 2019 to be “the world’s first carbon neutral food company.” It relies in part on offsets, according to its website, “that help us neutralize our remaining, unavoidable emissions.” The company has also pledged to reduce its Scope 1 and 2 emissions “by 30% by 2030 against a 2018 base year” and the “intensity [per tonne of product produced] of our Scope 3 GHG emissions by 30% by 2030 against a 2018 base year.” Scope 3 emissions account for roughly 90% of Maple Leaf’s total reported footprint, with third-party pork and poultry suppliers responsible for the majority, more than 30%, of those emissions.

Fellow meat giant JBS USA had also made similar promises, to “reach net zero by 2040.” But in early November, New York State’s attorney general found the company lacked any credible plan to meet that promise. As a result, JBS agreed to remove or revise its “Net Zero by 2040” statements on U.S. consumer-facing websites so that the target is presented as a “goal,” not a firm pledge or commitment. The company’s website now describes it as an “ambition.” It will also pay US$1.1 million to support climate-smart agriculture programs.

Hayek, who has long been vocal about so-called climate-friendly meat claims, says that while “greenwashing is not going away anytime soon,” he hopes these cases “bring a little bit more attention to the fact that meat is a particularly polluting food.” Hopefully, he adds, this “discourages unfounded climate marketing, and not the important work of climate-target setting and value-chain decarbonization.” What is ultimately required, he says, is to “make animal production less polluting and to shift away from animal production.”

Jessica Scott-Reid is a freelance writer covering animal rights and welfare and plant-based food topics. She is also the culture and disinformation correspondent for Sentient. 

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U.S. climate researcher Victoria Herrmann has a doctorate in geography and a specialization in polar studies, and she’s an official National Geographic “Explorer.” But when she worked on “America’s Eroding Edges,” a 2017 study of shoreline communities facing rising sea levels, she learned to shut up and just listen. Herrmann was the so-called expert on climate change, but the 350 community leaders interviewed for her study knew their communities best – and they pointed her toward local threats and crises she’d never studied in school.

The story Herrmann most likes to tell is of an activist in the U.S. territory of American Samoa, who showed her how climate change and culture are indelibly linked. He described how high seas, stronger winds and hotter temperatures were pushing more salt water onto agricultural land, reducing taro production. The starchy root vegetable is more than a staple food in Polynesia – it’s a cultural icon, a connection to the spirit, and a symbol of prosperity. To farmers in American Samoa, rising tides threaten not just their land and livelihood, but the meaning of their lives.

“Climate change, at its core, is a story about losing the things that make us who we are,” Herrmann told National Geographic, which helped fund the project. “The way we tell this story and find climate change solutions has to include our history and our culture and these intimate parts of us.”

The realization that the climate crisis is both a global phenomenon and a million different local disasters spurred Herrmann and National Geographic to form a new climate-adaptation initiative called Preserving Legacies: A Future for Our Past. Founded in 2022 in Washington, D.C., the project aims to help cultural heritage sites around the world – from the ninth-century Angkor temples of Cambodia to the 17th-century Spanish fortress of Cartagena, Colombia, and the wine cellars of France’s Champagne region – counter the destructive threats of climate change by devising their own place-based mitigation plans. (According to UNESCO, one in six cultural heritage sites is at risk of climate-related destruction.)

Preserving Legacies, which is sponsored by Canadian financial giant Manulife, isn’t in the business of telling its clients what to do. Taking a “train the trainers” approach, the initiative uses global climate models to create personalized threat analyses for each site to identify their likeliest risks from climate change, from flooding to crop failures to wildfires. It then offers these local “heritage custodians” a proven format for engaging local stakeholders – including Indigenous people, elders, artists, women and youth – in carefully assessing the risks and most optimal outcomes. In the end, each group prepares its own customized adaptation plan, building community and resilience throughout the process.

With Preserving Legacies active now in 35 countries, Herrmann hopes to extend the program to hundreds of cultural sites on every continent: “That is my big goal – that it reaches everyone.”

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. He is based in Toronto.

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For environmentalists, it means acknowledging that end-of-pipe solutions like carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) do have a role after all. And for the fossil fuel industry, it means accepting that they need to decarbonize not just their own processes, but also the products they sell – and without expecting the Canadian taxpayer to foot the bill. In the short term, this might make those products less profitable – although it might also give them a more secure, if less exciting, long-term future.

Dismissing the notion of “decarbonized oil” as a myth is equivalent to saying that stopping climate change is a myth: but it has to mean genuinely decarbonized oil. Safe and permanent disposal of all – yes, all – the carbon dioxide they generate is the only way to stop fossil fuels from causing further global warming before the world stops using fossil fuels. And if anyone believes the world will stop using fossil fuels altogether in time to prevent dangerous climate change, we suggest that they look at recent events in Venezuela and think again.

A matter of timing

Make no mistake, we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels as far and as fast as possible. But every year that goes by makes it clearer that won’t be far or fast enough. Carbon dioxide accumulates in the climate system like lead in the bloodstream. We can slow warming by emitting less, but it won’t stop until we stop emissions entirely, or balance any residual emissions with active carbon dioxide removal.

It’s conceivable, albeit unlikely, that renewable or nuclear energy are about to become so cheap that everyone, everywhere, will lose all interest in using fossil fuels, even in “hard to abate” sectors like aviation, within the next few decades. It is also conceivable, albeit even more unlikely, that everyone, everywhere, will agree on carbon prices so high that they amount to a de facto worldwide ban on continued fossil fuel extraction and use. But it would be folly to bet the future on either of these things happening.

Everyone talking about “decarbonized oil” needs to level with Canadians about what it means. Capturing the carbon dioxide generated in the production and refining of fossil fuels is the obvious place to start – but it is only a start.

In the absence of that worldwide ban, or fossil-free energy that is cheaper than natural gas in Qatar, the only other way to stop fossil fuels from causing further global warming is to capture every tonne of carbon dioxide they generate and pump it back underground. This means capturing as much as possible at source, with CCS, and taking the rest back out of the atmosphere, through active carbon dioxide removal (CDR). The industry is already doing both: the challenges are not technical, but economic. CDR is still very expensive, and lots of CCS projects run over budget – often because operators have no incentive to control costs as someone else is footing the bill.

There are other, potentially equally permanent, disposal options, like reacting carbon dioxide with rocks or storing it in the oceans, but geological disposal is the only one proven on a multi-million-tonnes-per-year scale. And even that needs scaling up by at least a factor of 100 to have any hope of balancing all remaining fossil fuel use even in the most optimistic scenarios for renewable-energy deployment.

A pragmatic solution

Environmentalists should be actively promoting CCS, not trying to block it.

This balance, between ongoing production of carbon dioxide from geological sources with disposal of carbon dioxide into geological sinks, is what we called “geological net-zero” in a paper published last year involving all the authors of the six papers that established, back in 2009, what it would take to stop carbon dioxide from causing global warming.

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The carbon dioxide we are emitting today was locked away in fossil fuel reserves formed from ancient forests, marine organisms and plant material that accumulated over tens to hundreds of millions of years. In just a few decades, we are reversing that geological process, returning carbon to the atmosphere at a pace without precedent in the recent history of the Earth system. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are heading toward levels last seen in the Jurassic period. And while it is sometimes said that “the dinosaurs lived with that much carbon dioxide,” it is worth remembering that they are no longer around.

The geological record reminds us that high-carbon worlds are not hypothetical, but neither are they environments in which human civilization has ever existed. The question is not whether the planet endures – it will – but whether the climatic conditions that allowed our societies, economies and food systems to develop can be maintained as we unleash, in decades, what nature took millions of years to put safely away.

Every hundred billion tonnes of carbon dioxide we release from the “geosphere,” or solid Earth, ratchets up global temperatures by one-twentieth of a degree – and we are currently releasing 400 billion tonnes per decade, so our carbon dioxide emissions alone are causing roughly a degree of warming every 50 years. That’s well-understood climate physics.

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We can delay that warming for a decade or two by planting trees or cutting methane emissions, but once carbon is released from the geosphere, it’s out, propping up global temperatures until we, or our long-suffering descendants, can pump it back out of the atmosphere and into the geosphere again. And if there was a chance that we would stop using fossil fuels in time to meet our climate goals back in 2015, that chance is long gone. We are going to generate too much carbon dioxide, so we must work out how to get rid of it, permanently and at scale, through a combination of CCS and CDR. Anyone who still thinks otherwise is in a level of denial akin to those who dismiss global warming as a hoax.

Make polluters pay

All that said, everyone talking about “decarbonized oil” needs to level with Canadians about what it means. Capturing the carbon dioxide generated in the production and refining of fossil fuels is the obvious place to start – but it is only a start. We will also need to dispose of the carbon dioxide generated when fossil fuels are used. If that use is for road transport or aviation, that means recapturing it back out of the atmosphere. Technologies exist to do this, but they need to be scaled up.

Disposing of carbon dioxide responsibly is more expensive than just dumping it into the atmosphere: which is why the Pathways CCS project in Alberta is costing $16 billion dollars. But part of the reason CCS is so expensive is the way it is funded: through taxpayer subsidies. If the government asks an industry how much they need to get rid of carbon dioxide, what company would say they can do it cheaply?

There is another way of funding CCS, which is to package the cost of carbon dioxide disposal in with the cost of fossil fuels themselves. We don’t have to dispose of 100% of that carbon dioxide right away, but we must make a start: in our geological net-zero paper, we suggested 10% in the early 2030s, rising to 100% by or soon after mid-century. A mandate to capture and store 10% of the carbon dioxide generated by its production and use would add just a few dollars to the cost of producing a barrel of oil – less than typical taxes and royalties. If companies are mandated to capture and store carbon dioxide as a licensing condition for continuing to sell fossil fuels, they have much more incentive to do it cost-effectively than if they are simply subsidized to install CCS. And as CCS becomes more widely adopted, its price tag plummets.

The world needs fossil fuels that don’t cause global warming. So, whoever works out how to supply the cheapest and most reliable fossil fuels that don’t cause global warming is going to clean up, literally, on a planetary scale.

Canada’s risky gamble on carbon capture and storage

That supplier could be Canada, blessed with an almost unique combination of three vital ingredients: abundant fossil fuels, even more abundant capacity for geological carbon dioxide disposal, and, crucially, a world-beating reputation for climate and geological sciences and responsible resource governance.

The Canadian label

Mark Carney emphasizes that Canada’s oil should be “low risk, low cost and low carbon.” There will come a time when the only low-risk oil is not just low-carbon, but net-zero carbon. One day, no one will want to risk using fossil fuels at all unless either they or their fuel supplier has taken care of all the carbon dioxide those fuels generate, for fear of being held liable for the impact of dumping it into the atmosphere. We cannot predict when that time will come, but as climate impacts accumulate along with public outrage, it may come sooner than even we would have predicted 20 years ago.

If, in the second half of this century, Europe or China or an environmentally conscious U.S. airline wants to buy a barrel of fully decarbonized oil – that is, oil bundled with a commitment to take back and dispose of all the carbon dioxide generated by its production and use, either directly through a pipeline or back out of the atmosphere – who will they want to buy it from? Not from Russia, surely, absent some truly dramatic changes in Russia’s reputation for waste management. Probably not from Venezuela either. Possibly not even from Texas, if the U.S. administration continues to gut the Environmental Protection Agency’s capacity to monitor leaks from potential carbon dioxide storage sites.

They will want to buy it from a country with a proven track record, respect for property rights and the rule of law; a country that, back in the 2020s, made history by being the first to make geological carbon dioxide disposal a licensing condition of extracting fossil fuels and has been progressively scaling up her carbon dioxide disposal industry ever since; a country whose customers can be 100% confident that decarbonized oil really does what it says on the label. The Canadian label.

Myles R. Allen teaches at the University of Oxford in the Department of Physics. Andrew J. Weaver teaches at the University of Victoria in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

The post There’s a simple way to fix the economics of carbon capture appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The EPA’s page explaining the causes of climate change now focuses on how “natural processes,” like variations in Earth’s orbit and in solar activity, influence the climate.

“Human causes are not even on the list, which is simply misinformation. It’s false,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. “And moreover, it’s clearly deliberate, because a week ago, that page correctly reflected the scientific understanding of climate change.”

At least 80 pages related to climate change vanished from the EPA’s site in early December. It’s one of the most far-reaching removals of climate change information from government websites since President Donald Trump took office in January. “Up till now, we really had not seen hardly any changes on EPA pages,” says Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.

While important resources have already disappeared from other government sites – including the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated climate reports translated for public consumption – many of the previous changes were language swaps, replacing “climate change” with more innocuous phrases like “future conditions” or “extreme weather.” The EPA’s most recent overhaul represents a more radical rejection of mainstream science.

“Yes, there’s been climate information coming down, but so far it hasn’t actually necessarily been the nuts-and-bolts climate science information,” Swain says. “This is pretty fundamental physical science.” The resources on the EPA’s site were used by teachers, businesses, and local and tribal governments, as well as the public, since they translated the jargon-filled language of scientific reports into something more useful and accessible.

For example, the agency deleted a resource explaining the signals of a warming world – everything from rising temperatures and melting ice sheets to the damage toll on wildlife and human health – with more than 100 charts and maps. Also gone is a website quantifying the physical and economic risks. The effect is to isolate climate change from the issues that affect people’s lives, Gehrke says: “It’s specifically targeting the information about why we should care.”

In response to questions about why the EPA’s climate change resources were removed, the agency said it was upholding “gold-standard science.”

“Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. “As such, this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.”

Swain says the changes could be a way for the EPA to bring its public-facing information in line with the proposal to reverse the agency’s own “endangerment finding,” the scientific basis that allows the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. The agency is expected to finalize the repeal soon, in what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has promised to be “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

Mark Carney trades climate allies for controversial oil-patch solutions

The post The Trump administration has purged climate change data from the EPA website appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But that doesn’t mean the project is dead.

Climate action groups, governments, development agencies and even some banks and investors are holding out hope that the trail-blazing fund – known as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) and spearheaded by COP30 host Brazil – can become a reality, providing billions of dollars annually to halt tropical deforestation.

“This is a landmark moment for nature and climate finance,” Kirsten Schuijt, director general of the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement. Ani Dasgupta, CEO of the World Resources Institute, said the fund “has real potential to be a breakthrough for the world’s forests.”

Yet only a handful of COP countries pledged to invest in the fund, totalling $6.6 billion in initial capital, well short of the $25-billion target for government contributions set by Brazil. Brazil is aiming to raise a further $100 billion in private money from asset managers, investment funds, private investors, philanthropic organizations and corporations, for a total fund size of $125 billion. (All funds in U.S. dollars.)

The initial contributors included Norway, Brazil, Indonesia, Germany, France, Colombia and Portugal. These countries pledged to invest in the all-important first tier of TFFF’s capital, money that would be used to provide first-loss guarantees to cushion private investors against losses.

Despite the small initial contribution, 53 countries endorsed the concept, suggesting there could be more public money to come. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Asian Infrastructure and Development Bank – two of the world’s largest development banks – are also considering investment in the fund, according to the Devex media platform on international development.

And Daniel Hanna, head of sustainable and transition finance for Barclays, said the British-based bank is looking to support the fund through bond underwriting services. Underwriting is a critical part of the process to sell bonds to institutional investors. “I remain very optimistic around the TFFF moving forward,” Hanna said.

Forests are ‘worth more standing than felled’

The fund was one of the signature projects announced by Brazil at this year’s COP, which was held in the Amazon rainforest city of Belém. The concept was held out as a way for private finance to ramp up support for forest and climate protection while addressing inequalities between the Global North and South.

Tropical forests are suffering severe deforestation from commercial agriculture (particularly from beef, soy and palm oil), logging, mining and infrastructure development, moving the forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources. The fund would be an endowment to provide permanent funding to tropical nations to keep their existing forests intact. “It is an unprecedented initiative,” said Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in launching the fund at COP. “Forests are worth far more standing than felled.”

The fund plans to invest in government and corporate bonds (excluding bonds in fossil fuels and environmentally destructive sectors) primarily in developing countries.

The fund is also based on a “blended finance” model. The sponsor money from governments would provide a reserve against losses by private investors, mitigating the risk of placing capital in higher-interest investments. This would enable the fund to attract capital from a broad range of market players such as pension funds, asset managers and investment funds.

Brazil’s balancing act at COP30

The total target return is 7.6%. Investors would receive the lion’s share of this income (targeting a 4.9% return), and the remaining 2.7% would be used to pay developing countries a fee for maintaining tracts of tropical forest within their boundaries. Penalties would be incurred for deforestation. Indigenous communities on those lands would receive at least 20% of the funds to manage the forests.

At the target level of capitalization of $125 billion, the fund would generate $3 to $4 billion annually to be disbursed to about 75 tropical countries and their Indigenous communities. The World Bank estimates this would work out to about $4 per hectare of protected forest land.

TFFF is “quite unique and quite pioneering” in the world of blended finance, says Nick Zelenczuk, a researcher with the Toronto-based Convergence blended finance think tank. Blended finance models typically use public capital to cushion losses by private investors in higher-risk impact ventures. But rather than generating a direct return from the project, TFFF shares the proceeds of the bond fund between the forest and the investors. “Using the return from the fund to drive the incentive scheme is novel in the [blended finance] market,” Zelenczuk says.

Forest payments versus carbon markets

One of the reasons there is high interest in making TFFF work is that it is considered a more promising climate finance model than carbon markets, the option that has commanded much attention at recent COP meetings.

The idea of carbon markets is that corporations or financial institutions buy “carbon offsets” that are linked to specific volumes of carbon avoided, reduced or removed through activities such as reforestation or renewable energy. The system of accounting for these carbon volumes is not well established. The value of carbon credits is based on estimates of future carbon reductions, estimates that may be wrong to begin with or fail to meet projections. A study last year of more than 2,000 carbon-credit projects found that only 16% of the projects achieved the carbon savings claimed. As a result, corporations and investors are losing interest in carbon markets, and money for projects is drying up.

The TFFF represents an alternative focused on forest lands – not estimated carbon – which can be transparently and accurately tracked over time. If the lands become deforested, the annual payments will stop or be reduced.

“Offsets have too often been used as a license to pollute,” Australian billionaire businessman Andrew Forrest said in a statement announcing a $10-million investment in TFFF. “They categorically do not work the vast majority of times they have been independently measured. This is the opposite. The TFFF makes forest protection a strong economic choice in favour of our environment – rewarding countries that actually keep their forests intact.”

But will there be enough money?

With such a disappointing start, however, will the fund be large enough to create lasting impact? After the British government signalled early on at COP that it would not be supporting the TFFF, the project lost some momentum.

At the current level of capitalization, tropical forest nations will receive only 16 cents per hectare per year, a far cry from the $4 projected by the World Bank. But the Brazilian government believes the fund is well positioned to attract more funds. Finance Minister Fernando Haddad called the initial investment “auspicious,” anticipating that “after this first investment . . . we will have a very good start.”

Launch of the TFFF fund has come at a timely moment. The U.S. government under Donald Trump has slashed development assistance and decimated its international development agency, USAID. Other countries like the United Kingdom are also cutting assistance to poor countries. At the same time, market-based approaches like carbon credits have fallen out of favour.

A third way is needed. TFFF represents a new approach, one that uses the financial power of the markets to create a very non-market outcome, the survival of the world’s tropical forests.

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now the Responsible Investment Association).

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The Brazilian president’s forceful remarks at the outset of negotiations in the Amazonian city of Belém were meant to set the stage for a new chapter in international climate diplomacy. On the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, the time had come, according to Lula, to stop arguing about what the historic agreement requires and instead focus on implementation – actually taking the steps required to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect countries against the coming economic and public health consequences wrought by climate change.

In the same speech, Lula called for a “road map” for the world’s phaseout of fossil fuels. This was intended to make good on an international agreement made two years ago at COP28, when UN member countries reached consensus on the need to “transition away” from coal, oil and gas. The so-called UAE consensus, named for the host country of that year’s conference, marked the first time a blanket transition away from fossil fuels was ever officially mentioned in the Paris Agreement framework.

But the Brazilian delegation, which was responsible for overseeing COP30 negotiations and ultimately brokering a new deal, was confronted by a different truth than the president envisioned. The viability of the planet may come down to a few degrees Celsius of warming, but in Belém’s fluorescently lit negotiating rooms, everything ultimately came down to dollars and cents.

In the end, it may well have been a more honest COP than those that preceded it – just not in the way President Lula intended.

The most substantial new agreement negotiated at the conference reflected this realism. The delegations agreed that, by 2035, the world would triple international funding provided to help developing nations adapt to the consequences of a warmer world.

To many, however, the list of missed opportunities spoke louder than the victory on climate adaptation. Brazil’s proposed road map did not make the official ledger. Indeed, there were no new agreements to wind down fossil fuel use or curb deforestation. The latter omission appeared to be either an intentional accident or a diplomatic blunder: the COP presidency had put the new, controversial language on fossil fuels in the same sentence as the comparatively benign clause on halting deforestation, dooming it by association.

The Paris Agreement’s temperature targets, which aim to keep global warming “well below” 2°C and ideally below 1.5°C over preindustrial levels, remain as abstract as ever after COP30. A detailed plan to help nations meet emission-reduction goals that would comply with the Paris Agreement was axed from the final decision.

Just before the conference began, the UN put out its annual “emissions gap” report, which found that the world is on track for warming of between 2.3 and 2.8°C this century. The agreement made in Belém seems unlikely to change that math. Ten years after the Paris Agreement, its champions still have not found a way to get the world to live up to the landmark deal’s most famous goals.

This year’s summit took place at the edge of the Amazon, a symbolic decision meant to uplift the rainforest and the Indigenous Peoples who live in it. Though the conference was rocked by protests and demands for greater Indigenous participation and protections, a collegial air took root among the official negotiators for the first half of the two-week conference. With U.S. President Donald Trump thumbing his nose at the proceedings by refusing to send an official delegation, other world leaders were keen to prove that international progress on climate change could continue in the absence of U.S. cooperation.

Prior to Lula’s statements at the beginning of the negotiations, the expectation was that the discussions would largely focus on finding a path toward reducing deforestation, mobilizing US$1.3 trillion in climate financing that nations had agreed to during last year’s COP29, ensuring that worldwide decarbonization occurs in an equitable manner, and strengthening countries’ “nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs – national plans produced every five years that detail exactly how countries aim to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

As the conference stretched into its second and final week, momentum for Brazil’s fossil fuel transition road map seemed to grow, especially among Latin American countries, the United Kingdom and the European Union. André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, vice minister for climate, energy and environment at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the official leader of COP30, rapidly got more than 90 nations to support putting a shift away from fossil fuels at the heart of the deal coming together in Belém. (The final agreements at each COP are adopted by consensus among negotiating parties, which include career diplomats, former ambassadors, environment ministers, and large teams of supporting staff for each country; the United Kingdom, for example, had about 70 people officially involved in their negotiations.)

On Tuesday of last week, when the first draft of the deal was released, the language was a more forceful commitment to a global energy transition than most attendees were expecting. The agreement – several pages of proposed commitments that do Lago termed the “Global Mutirão,” using a word belonging to the Tupian languages of South America that signifies collective work – included a line indicating that the agreement “decides to establish” a “Belém Roadmap to 1.5,” a reference to the most ambitious temperature target adopted at Paris in 2015. The word “decides” turned heads, as it suggested legally binding authority.

Brazil’s balancing act at COP30

“It would have been crazy,” said Felix Finkbeiner, founder of a conservation organization called Plant for the Planet who has been attending COPs since 2010. “Transitioning away from fossil fuels was set as a vague goal at COP28, but this would have been an actual process that initiated a massive step forward.”

Just days later, however, do Lago’s dream of making the first Amazonian COP a historic success was on the verge of falling apart. A new draft, published on the last official day of the conference, included no mention of a fossil fuel road map at all, triggering a flurry of new negotiations that stretched late into the night on Friday. Two cruise ships housing some 4,000 COP attendees, including many delegates, needed to depart on Saturday morning no matter what. A deal had to be struck.

As the conference stretched past its official ending time, the parties negotiating behind closed doors became increasingly frustrated with the lack of movement on the fossil fuel road map. The obstacles to success, said Peter Wittoeck, one of the negotiators for Belgium, were the same oil-rich countries that had been blocking more ambitious action on climate change at COPs for decades.

“The major pushback is coming from the Like-Minded Developing Countries and the Arab Group,” Wittoeck said, referring, in the former case, to a coalition of large emerging economies that includes China, India and South Africa, as well as a group of 20 Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Those nations, he said, “represent fossil fuel interests, obviously, and the fear of being limited in their economic development.”

The countries that had coalesced around the road map in the preceding days were enraged. “We are being silenced here,” said Irene Vélez Torres, director of the Colombian National Environmental Agency and one of the negotiators working on behalf of Colombia.

“I am saying it with a heavy heart, but what is now on the table is clearly no deal,” said European Union Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. But some developing nations, including those on the front lines of destructive climate impacts, said that agreeing to a road map away from fossil fuels would unfairly limit their economic growth. “Countries that have used all sources of energy in the last 200 years and have achieved the pinnacle of industrial growth and yet not stopped using all those sources of energy are telling us ‘stop growing,’” Aisha Humaira, the head of the delegation for Pakistan, told The Guardian.

At the height of the drama on Friday night, members of the European Union suggested they might have to walk out of negotiations over the road map. “It’s not possible to have less ambition than we had 10 years ago,” said Petr Hladík, environment minister for Czechia, outside the negotiating rooms. U.K. Energy Minister Edward Miliband called the process “painful, difficult, and frustrating.”

The European Union and the United Kingdom talked a big game, and Latin American countries like Colombia put up a fierce fight, but when the conference ended, new language on fossil fuels was nowhere to be found in the final document. The UN climate talks operate on consensus, and with the United States absent from negotiations, proponents of stronger language against fossil fuels faced a stronger, more organized bloc of countries, including two of the world’s largest economies in China and India, who also represent more than a third of the world’s population.

So what did survive the heated negotiations? To everyone’s surprise, the biggest agenda item to come out of COP30 was a plan for rich countries to help poorer nations strengthen themselves against the consequences of hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other climate impacts – an idea that has long lingered around the edges of COP negotiations. But even that win didn’t come easy.

For years, one of the foundational planks of international climate negotiations has been the notion that the rich countries most responsible for causing climate change have a responsibility to help poorer developing countries prepare for problems that they have done comparatively little to cause. This preparation might include infrastructure projects like seawalls, levees, flood control measures, water preservation systems and home-hardening initiatives. The so-called Least Developed Countries, a negotiating bloc of nations including Bangladesh, Chad, Haiti and Tuvalu, call this “survival funding.”

But this financing, known as adaptation funding, has always taken a back seat to financing for mitigation, which is typically the work of building out renewable sources of energy. That’s generally because those who fund mitigation have a clearer path to earning a return on their investments than those who fund adaptation. In other words, it’s less obvious how to make money off of sea walls and flood control systems than it is from green energy.

Still, adaptation aid for developing nations is one of the pillars of the original Paris Agreement – not just a charitable notion. The European Union, Japan and other donor countries have a legal responsibility under the agreement to send money through this pipeline.

But how much money, how quickly it’s delivered and what kinds of projects it should fund has always been a matter of debate. This year, it stormed into the spotlight, and it’s not hard to see why. The consequences of climate change have begun to spill into plain view, and countries are starting to feel serious economic pressure as a result. Gallagher Re, a global reinsurance broker, estimates that the direct cost of natural perils around the world in 2024 totalled a staggering US$417 billion. Public and private insurance companies covered more than $150 billion of that, meaning the rest of the balance was covered by governments, policyholders, taxpayers and everyday people.

The Least Developed Countries and the Africa Group, a bloc of African nations, don’t always have the same set of priorities, despite having some of the same member countries. But a member of Kenya’s negotiating team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the ongoing nature of negotiations, told Grist that the two groups combined forces to push for more adaptation financing. That strategy apparently paid off. As the conference entered its frenzied final week, this mega-coalition of countries pushed the European Union, the United Kingdom and other developed countries to up their adaptation financing commitments.

European negotiators told Grist that the focus on adaptation put them in a tough spot. In the absence of a U.S. presence at COP, Europe has sought to position itself as the de facto global leader on climate action by trying to force the fossil fuel road map language into the final text. But its negotiators quickly found that the developing countries they were trying to align themselves with were laser-focused on adaptation financing.

“The situation now seems that we are not able to gather critical mass around the balance between high mitigation and being reasonable toward developing countries on adaptation,” Wittoeck said in the midst of negotiations.

But increased international aid is a tougher sell than it was even just a few years ago. Over the past several years, European leaders have been trying in vain to tamp down the slow creep of far-right parties in the union’s member states while simultaneously trying to salvage the European Green Deal, a plan to reach carbon neutrality by mid-century. Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine has further complicated matters. The European Union and the United Kingdom recently repurposed climate resilience aid for military spending.

“The world has changed,” said Joe Thwaites, a senior advocate for international climate finance at the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are feeling the political strain back home and are very sensitive to headlines about how much money is being spent internationally.”

The final deal on adaptation, reached in the early hours of Saturday morning, stated that developed nations must at least triple their adaptation financing by 2035. The language is either historically ambitious or epically subpar, depending on who you ask. A previous deal reached at COP26 in Glasgow dictated that adaptation finance would double by 2025 to US$40 billion per year, a number countries have not been able to reach. That deal expires this year, and members of the Africa Group and others hoped to include language in the text specifying that the tripling of adaptation funding should be based on that $40 billion number, meaning a new goal of $120 billion per year. Plus, they wanted the tripling to occur by 2030, not 2035.

The final version of the deal does not specify what the baseline number is, which means different countries might use different figures for their calculations. “I find it a bit vague,” the Kenya negotiator told Grist, adding that “the current needs are so huge that even the $120 billion is a drop in the ocean.” (The UN estimates that countries need as much as US$400 billion per year to properly respond to climate change.)

The COP of the truth cannot support an outcome that ignores science.

– Daniela Duran Gonzalez, Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development

Still, the boost in adaptation funding was a welcome development for many countries at the conference. “This was our priority and we made it a red line,” said Evans Njewa, chair of the Least Developed Countries group.

With the fossil fuel road map off the table and a deal on adaptation financing inked, the exhausted COP boss do Lago affirmed the COP30 consensus agreement on Saturday afternoon to loud applause. But the final conference plenary was engulfed in drama again just moments later, when Colombia’s Daniela Durán González, head of international affairs for the Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, registered an objection. In his haste to end the conference, do Lago had inadvertently passed over a point of order raised by Colombia during the gavelling of the main agreement text. Gonzalez, and representatives of many other nations, wanted the final agreement to include language around fossil fuels.

“The COP of the truth cannot support an outcome that ignores science,” González said.

Do Lago had to pause the plenary to confer with Colombia and other nations. After 30 minutes of haggling, the parties came back to the table to finish the conference with an agreement to continue conversations in the future. Do Lago also promised to launch two road maps of his own, one aimed at phasing out fossil fuels and the other in service of ending deforestation. Those efforts will take place outside the binding authority of the Paris Agreement, however, and are essentially opt-in endeavours.

Nevertheless, do Lago’s promise to continue fighting for a fossil fuel phaseout, paired with an announcement that Colombia and The Netherlands will host a first-ever international conference on a fossil fuel phaseout in 2026, proves that the mitigation conversation soldiers on.

“Today was a good day for multilateralism; it was a mixed day for the climate,” Jennifer Morgan, a former climate envoy for Germany, told Grist.

“Clearly the decisions here don’t put us on track for 1.5, but they accelerate implementation,” she added. “Gosh, we have so much more work to do.”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This article originally appeared in Grist at grist.org/international/cop30-brazil-paris-agreement. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

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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.

The post Requiem for a methane hunter appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As temperatures climbed and our forests and communities burned over the last year, several Canadian companies abandoned their sustainability commitments. These companies joined the global ranks of Amazon, Walmart, FedEx, Delta, PepsiCo and numerous banks and fossil fuel companies in weakening their climate promises.

While one might think fear of the U.S. regime had brought this on, the Royal Bank of Canada, Maple Leaf Foods, the Canada Pension Plan and many others instead pointed to a homegrown enemy: Canada’s relatively new anti-greenwashing law, Bill C-59. This outcry became particularly virulent when a new private right of action came into effect in June 2024, a year after the law itself, allowing private plaintiffs to sue for deceptive marketing before the Competition Tribunal.

Greenwashing is communication that misleads people into overly positive beliefs about an organization’s environmental activities. Basically, companies aren’t walking the talk. Canadian lawmakers saw this as impeding fair competition and harming Canadian consumers, so Bill C-59 required evidence to back up environmental claims. Simple.

Or not. Several large Canadian businesses have been arguing loudly against the bill since it was passed. Rather than simply offering evidence to back up their environmental claims, many stated that the law was too complex and risky and that they were instead doing sustainability in secret by “greenhushing.”

As one of the leading global scholars studying greenwashing and greenhushing, let me offer some clarity. In short, I don’t think that word means what they think it means. Greenhushing refers to companies taking genuine actions to reduce their environmental impacts but choosing to downplay or stay silent about their actions publicly. Firms that are truly greenhushing are walking but not talking.

You may see where I’m going here, but let me expand.

Greenhushing means a firm is walking the walk

A firm that is greenhushing is taking genuine action to decrease its environmental impact. Those doing so seriously are likely using at least one of the standards, measures and metrics devised by scientists and international bodies to aid firms in these reductions. This is well-established territory. We know how to measure most environmental impacts, and we know how to measure reductions in those impacts.

In a recently published paper, the first of its kind, colleagues and I interviewed more than 50 firms in the wine industry that truly are greenhushing. It turned out that even though they weren’t public about it, all but two were certified to at least one known standard (Organic, Biodynamic, LEED, Fair Trade, etc.). These certifications cost time and money. Yet firms told us they were certifying to learn from experts, have a plan and metrics to follow, compare themselves to competitors, and keep themselves honest. Greenhushing is not “choose your own adventure,” and it certainly does not mean you use either no metrics or your own more favourable metrics.

If any of us wants to buy a car with better gas mileage, for example, we are very unlikely to simply take the word of the salesperson. We want a number verified by someone credible who is not selling us the car, and we want that to be a number we can compare across cars and companies. Whether they put that number in the ad for the car is a different matter, but we still want some good solid evidence.

Greenhushing means a firm is not talking the talk

Talking very publicly about how you are not going to talk about maybe doing something secretly sustainable is still talking. Of course, many of the greenhushing firms I studied do tell select audiences what they are doing. But when I hear these vague yet very public claims of secret “greenhushed” sustainability, I am deeply suspicious. When we now hear how actively they were talking to politicians in backrooms about their supposed greenhushing? Well, let’s just say my greenwash-meter is on overdrive.

If we are concerned about honest and innovative green Canadian firms greenhushing, as we should be, the best way we can support them is by stopping greenwashing.

– Wren Montgomery, cofounder, Greenwash Action Lab.

If not greenhushing, what are these firms doing?

If firms are loudly telling us they are still doing green things, yet providing no evidence, this is not greenhushing. It is just our same old friend greenwashing in a different guise. Vague and unsupported environmental claims are greenwashing.

With research showing that upwards of 50% of green claims are greenwashing, many of the firms who were being silent had taken Bill C-59 seriously and had stopped making unverifiable claims. But, if they weren’t doing anything credible to begin with, they weren’t greenhushing. They had merely stopped greenwashing.

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All that being said, some firms do legitimately greenhush, like the ones I research. But my research found something fascinating: the primary reason honest green businesses weren’t willing to talk about sustainability was not stringent legislation or fear of backlash. Instead, they thought there was too much greenwashing in the market and they would be lumped in with all the other greenwashers if they did more talking.

To summarize the research, if we are concerned about honest and innovative green Canadian firms greenhushing, as we should be, the best way we can support them is by stopping greenwashing. Luckily, that’s what Bill C-59 and the Competition Bureau had set out to do.

If we want to permit climate disinformation to continue to disrupt markets, inhibit sustainable innovation and drive out genuine green companies? Unfortunately, that’s what Carney’s budget has set out to do.

Wren Montgomery is an associate professor at Ivey Business School at Western University and cofounder of the Greenwash Action Lab.

The post Are corporate claims of ‘greenhushing’ just more greenwashing? appeared first on Corporate Knights.