Since then, funerals have been held for other glaciers in Switzerland and the United States, with eulogies and dirges performed by flute and string quartets. And the stream of tourists flocking to catch a glimpse of the disappearing frozen giants has also broadened. Known as “last-chance tourism,” this trend occupies the space between loss and celebration, as people navigate growing strains of ecological grief.

A 2026 study out of Rice University in Texas noted that some 14 million people visit the most popular glaciers on the planet every year. The university also keeps a “global glacier casualty list” to “remember their names and tell their stories.” Since 2000, thousands of glaciers of varying size have disappeared.

“Most people on Earth will never be able to visit a glacier, and that fact becomes truer every day as they disappear,” said Rice University anthropologist Cymene Howe, who co-authored the study. “But the desire is there. To be near these giant bodies of ice is a powerful experience because they are unique natural wonders that move, creak, whisper and invite reflection.”

The desire to be near to glaciers as they melt and fade away is a double-edged sword. As Howe notes, the tourism draw may end up harming the glaciers, not just directly from increased traffic, but also indirectly from the emissions caused by the travel required to get to them. Emmanuel Salim, a mountaineer and geography professor at the University of Toulouse in southern France, suggested in a paper that tourists risked “loving glaciers to death.”

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor of Corporate Knights.

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In her keynote speech at the flagship event, Diana Fox Carney called climate change “the biggest challenge of our lifetime” and said the movement’s task is to convince people “that a more climate-friendly future is not only possible, it’s the one everyone wants” – safer, more inclusive and more just. But subsequent speakers charged that Canada is backsliding on climate performance, weakening standards and putting its own zero-emission targets beyond reach.

Fox Carney is a well-known economist, policy expert and adviser on climate issues to global investors – and her husband is Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has faced criticism from environmental groups on his climate agenda thus far. The former central banker has been a powerful proponent of sustainable finance, but his response to growing global protectionism has been, in part, to unleash Canada’s fossil-fuel industries, roll back emissions caps and support new pipelines.

In her opening remarks, Fox Carney did note that economic concerns such as “security and affordability” have been edging out climate concerns. Nonetheless, she added, “we need a shared sense of purpose around these issues.” Climate champions need to act fast, she said, and offer “solutions that are affordable, practical and able to improve people’s lives now.”

“It’s hard to overthrow legacy systems,” Fox Carney observed. Even so, “the question is not ‘Is change coming?’ The question is ‘Will Canada lead this change?’” she concluded, to loud applause.

Canada’s climate crawl

Rick Smith, president of the Canadian Climate Institute, received even more applause for calling out Canadian complacency. Why, he asked, is Canada ignoring the climate threat? Forget the United Nations’ 1.5°C target for global warming, he said: Canada has already warmed by 2.5°C over previous levels, and the wildfire summers of 2023 and 2025 demonstrated the urgent need to prevent even greater destruction.

Smith noted that only one-third of recent media stories about flooding in Canada refer to the longer-term climate trends. He also challenged the country’s overarching focus on the costs of climate action, rather than the true costs of inaction. In the past decade, forest fires have caused $37 billion in insured damage, two and a half times more than in the previous 10-year period. And uninsured losses, Smith said, are usually double those of insured properties.

Canadians are also falling behind on electric vehicles, Smith said. “Globally, 30% of cars being sold today are EVs. But the story of gasoline-car decline is not something we absorb as Canadians.” In the last quarter of 2025, just 11% of the cars sold in Canada were electric.

Between the past and the future

While Canadians line up at the gas pumps, the electric future is already here. According to Smith, 75% of new demand for electricity last year was met by solar sources. Battery storage in 2025 grew faster than ever. Last year, China exported $22 billion in green and solar technologies.

With the United States’ energy transition struggling under Trump, Canadian innovators have a chance to stand out on world markets. But that advantage may not last long. Smith predicted that a Democratic win in the midterm elections in November will rekindle the U.S. sustainability economy: “The North American focus on climate change is about to kick into gear, again.”

But some speakers pointed out that climate inaction is not an incidental failure of Canadians not paying attention, but a deliberate result of lobbying campaigns run by the resource-extraction industries. “Fossil-fuel disinformation is driving a lot of these rollbacks,” said Laura Tozer, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Toronto. While many other countries are racing ahead on climate issues, she said, in Canada and the United States, “fossil-fuel owners are using these times of turmoil to double down.”

Signs of progress

How to get beyond this impasse? One of the most effective messages came from Joannah Lawson, a principal of the Brian + Joannah Lawson Family Foundation, the platinum sponsor of Toronto Climate Week. A former business consultant, Lawson’s opening remarks offered clarity. Beneath an image of the earth hanging alone in space, she said, “The atmosphere is the only thing keeping us alive.” But now, she says, “we’re putting too much carbon into the atmosphere.”

In response to this crisis, Lawson offered four reasons why she remains hopeful:

1) Climate change is caused by humans, which means humans can also fix it.

2) The transition to clean energy is well underway. (In fact, she said, renewables production has tripled in the last 20 years.)

3) Regenerative agriculture, or holistic farming that focuses on soil health, is a powerful lever to reverse climate change by capturing carbon from the atmosphere.

4) Canada has huge nature resources to preserve – and we’re doing it! Last month, for instance, the Carney government released Canada’s first national strategy for protecting nature, which came with $3.8 billion for conservation and protection.

Transforming climate change from existential crisis to solvable problem could be key to creating consensus and investing in the future. With Canada falling behind, Fox Carney noted, “We must stop arguing amongst ourselves.” The current struggle, she said, “will shape the economic prospects of our country for years to come.”

The post At Toronto Climate Week, experts call out Canada’s climate complacency appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The Pacific Ocean has become a particularly important backdrop. For months now, the United States Coast Guard has been aggressively tracking and intercepting high-speed boats allegedly carrying thousands of pounds of cocaine across choppy international waters. One operation alone nabbed US$133-million worth of illicit drugs in January. Further afield, near the Philippines and Japan, China has deployed various aircraft carrier strike groups, testing the geopolitically sensitive region. Not to be outdone (or outgunned), the United States has significantly increased military exercises in the region, including large-scale drills in the Philippines and Japan that involve thousands of troops from various nations, along with air and maritime exercises.  

But arguably the most disruptive force in the Pacific is just pulling up. Forces of nature are gathering to create what some are predicting will be another “Super El Niño” season. In April, a typhoon flipped a U.S.-flagged cargo ship in the Pacific, near Guam, killing at least one crewmember and another five are still missing.  

El Niño and La Niña are two sides of the same meteorological coin, known as ENSO – or the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The WMO says its impact on rainfall, drought and extreme events give it the ability to “reshape global weather.” 

El Niño comprises warm sea-surface temperatures in the central Pacific that extend all the way to South America. Super El Niño, a more extreme weather pattern, increases the chances of drought and damage to food crops in various parts of the world. For nations most dependent on agriculture, it can have a serious impact on livelihoods. The WMO does not use the “Super” moniker because it is not part of standardized classification. The term emerged in 2003 when Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, used it to describe events where the Niño 3.4 index – a measure of sea-surface temperature anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific – exceeded 3°C. Yale Climate Connections notes that the term has been used more liberally, and informally, by the media and commentators.  

La Niña operates in an opposite way, pushing warm water toward Asia and cooler water toward the Americas. This can still lead to drought in places like the southern United States and heavy rains and flooding in the Pacific Northwest. Winter is warmer than normal in the south during La Niña and cooler than normal in the north.  

According to the WMO, forecasts point to above-normal temperatures across nearly the entire world this summer. There is an 82% chance of El Niño taking shape in May through July, according to a May 14 outlook from the National Weather Service Prediction Center. Scientists have found that the combination of ENSO and a warming climate make for more extreme weather events.  

So far, 2026 paints a grim picture. The World Weather Attribution, a global climate research collaboration, compiled a long list of already worrisome events, including record-low levels of Arctic sea ice, the hottest winters ever for a number of U.S. states, record rain in Spain (just a few years after record dry spells), and temperatures as high as 46°C in India. Combined with El Niño, the planet could be headed toward “an unprecedented year of global fire and record-breaking weather events,” the organization said in a statement.  

Countries are bracing. International organizations such as the WMO have been pushing for vital early-warning systems to help nations and communities plan. The UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) notes that El Niño effects will feel harshest in places with preexisting structural vulnerabilities. The U.S.–Israel war in Iran and its impact on the Strait of Hormuz have triggered “the most severe energy crisis in history,” according to Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency – one that will have wide-reaching effects beyond the shipment of goods.  

“Together, these pressures leave governments and households less able to absorb climate shocks than during previous El Niño cycles,” ESCAP said.  

The post The coming Super El Niño summer appeared first on Corporate Knights.

With sustained winds of nearly 300 kilometres per hour, storm surges of four metres, and half a metre of rain, Hurricane Melissa flattened much of western Jamaica, doing somewhere between US$8 and $15 billion in damage. But even as roofs were still flying off churches and palms were bending like stalks of grass, Edmund Bartlett, Jamaica’s minister of tourism, was already giving interviews to international media, encouraging travellers to visit and to visit soon.

The almost manic push to have all the island’s hotels operational by mid-December, when the peak season begins, threw into sharp relief a contradiction that underlies the Caribbean as a whole: it depends on an industry that, in some respects, is also responsible for its undoing.

The Caribbean is the most tourism-dependent region in the world. It is also one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Warming oceans, rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather events represent existential threats to the region: not only to residents but also to the tourism industry on which they depend. Sustainability, in this context, is not a nice add-on, but a necessity. If tourism is to remain a mainstay of Caribbean economies, it has to be resilient to the impacts of climate change, protective of increasingly fragile ecosystems and beneficial to local economies as a whole.

It’s asking a lot of an industry that, as Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid argued in her 1988 book A Small Place, exhibits a similarly extractive quality to the slave-based plantation economies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Kincaid draws a direct line from Caribbean sugar to sand: resources that have been exploited by foreign powers with little to no regard for the well-being of locals.

“Tourism is both a lifeline and a liability,” says Therez Walker, who grew up in Antigua and is now a lecturer on sustainable tourism at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. “It’s a very uncomfortable reality that a lot of people don’t want to face.”

Half a century ago, when the imperial powers that colonized the Caribbean dropped preferential trade arrangements for their agricultural exports – primarily bananas, sugar and rum – these tropical islands, with World Bank support, set their sights on the postwar middle class’s growing appetite for beach vacations. Tourism ministries were established and tax incentives were offered to foreign developers. In 1970, some four million international guests visited the Caribbean. Since then, the figure has increased almost 10-fold.

Tourism now accounts for an average of 11% of the gross domestic product of the 33 political entities – sovereign states, dependencies and overseas territories – that make up the Caribbean. But in some countries, the sector constitutes a virtual monoculture. In Antigua, for instance, tourism generates 88% of the country’s GDP and provides 91% of all jobs, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

Such dependency on a single industry creates vulnerability, particularly when only a fraction of its economic benefits flow back to the country. The vast majority of revenue generated by Caribbean tourism lands with the foreign operators who control it: airlines, cruise companies and hotel chains. The United Nations World Tourism Organization puts the level of economic “leakage” from Caribbean tourism at about 80%. At the same time, local governments have to contend with 100% of the waste that the industry generates.

Climate change is only amplifying this vulnerability. Over the last five decades, rising sea temperatures have cost the Caribbean almost half of its hard coral cover: a blow to the marine life that coral sustains as well as the huge revenues generated by snorkelling and diving. At current rates, sea level rise is expected to reduce the Caribbean’s sandy beaches by half and to force the closure of a third of existing hotels by the end of this century. Likewise, extreme heat and storm events like Hurricane Melissa are becoming more intense and frequent.

When Walker, who has been based in the Netherlands since 2022, returns home to Antigua, she feels both frustration and sadness. The beach she went to as a child is barely recognizable. The water is higher, the shore depleted. Gone are the mangrove swamps and the thriving fish populations they once hosted. In her community, water is in chronically short supply: many households have running water only twice a week. When she drives past water trucks parked outside the island’s all-inclusive resorts, she is resentful – not of the guests inside, but of decision-makers who have failed to protect domestic and environmental interests.

The needs of tourists and residents are often not aligned. Drought for locals translates into a sun-filled vacation for visitors. The mangroves that serve as natural barriers against erosion and storms are the enemy of the pristine sand beach. The protected coastline that hosts animal, plant and marine life is an obstacle to shoreline resorts.

“Our policymakers go to UN climate conventions and talk about our vulnerability,” Walker says. “And then they come home and approve another huge development on an ecologically sensitive coastline.”

According to Beienetch “Bennie” Watson, who teaches tourism policy and planning at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, the problem with Caribbean tourism is its foundation in a “colonial logic” that is top-down and externally driven. “Those seated around the table haven’t reflected the voice of ‘the people,’” she says. “The people’s vision of tourism hasn’t been heard.”

But in recent years, Watson has seen a shift, prompted in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, when Caribbean hotels stood empty and tourism revenue dropped by half. Some islands took the opportunity to promote homestays and longer-term accommodation options. Others directed visitors to more tailored experiences in eco-, adventure, and rural tourism. Watson is encouraged by a younger generation of traveller that, often prompted by social media, wants to explore outside resort walls.

A 2025 World Bank report on the future of Caribbean tourism emphasized the importance of moving beyond “sea, sun and sand,” pointing out how the short-term economic benefits of volume tourism – all-inclusive resorts and cruise tourism – have overshadowed their high environmental, energy, water-consumption and emissions costs.

Three months after Melissa, Jamaican Tourism Minister Bartlett went on an international marketing blitz to boost investor and traveller confidence in his island. At a luncheon in New York City, he announced that 70% of Jamaica’s hotels were up and running: a remarkable accomplishment.

But Watson, who lives in Kingston, has witnessed recovery on another level. Members of her church go out every Thursday to help communities that are rebuilding. She says the hurricane has proven something important to Jamaicans: that the island is close-knit, solidarity is strong, and residents’ needs matter.

Therez Walker agrees that change has to come from below. “We need to demand more of tourism,” she says. “This is an ‘us’ problem.”

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

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Amid the cow-shaped ice sculptures at the 20th annual Embryos on Snow event in Colorado, buyers in cowboy hats bid on the genetics shaping the future of the United States’ cattle industry, from frozen embryos to semen. Auctioneers tout breeding programs, semen-collection-company sponsors and even “pregnancies for you to purchase” from a steadily growing sector of the livestock industry: assisted reproductive technologies.

At the National Western Stock Show, this premier event sold cattle embryos for an average of US$2,760, up to $26,000, this year. Bull semen sold for an average of nearly $10,000 a unit, with the highest lot going for $200,000.

What happens at Embryos on Snow and other genetics sales is a stark contrast to how meat and dairy are marketed today. Portrayals of food and farming in the United States often emphasize the “naturalness” of meat and dairy, yet in reality, much of the industry is shaped by intensive confinement, genetic manipulation and assisted reproductive technologies.

Proponents say that assisted reproductive technologies in animal agriculture, including in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination and embryo transfer, can improve efficiency, increase sustainability, benefit animal welfare and boost the odds that high-value genetic traits are inherited, such as increased calf and milk production. However, some bioethicists and animal advocates worry that these benefits tell only part of the story.

“It is quite difficult to really distinguish between the nice words and the ideals and aspirations” of assisted reproductive technologies, Koen Kramer, bioethicist and assistant professor in animal ethics at Utrecht University, tells Sentient, “from what’s actually happening.”

The cattle reproductive tech market

Despite the familiar image of cows on grassy, open fields, living and perhaps breeding in natural ways, the reality is different. High-tech assisted reproductive technologies are a growing agricultural sector for farmers seeking higher milk production and more and higher-value offspring. These methods of selective breeding typically include in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination and embryo transfer. In vitro fertilization is when the embryos are developed outside of an egg “donor” cow’s body before inserting one or more of the embryos into a surrogate female’s uterus. Embryo transfer is performed when a “donor” cow’s embryos are fertilized by artificial insemination, flushed out of her, and then inserted into a surrogate cow to carry to term. This way, a high-value cow can produce more calves. Flushed embryos sold for as high as $50,000 at Embryos on Snow.

Global bovine genetics was a booming US$3.9 billion market in 2025 and is projected to reach $6.7 billion by 2033. North America held the largest share of the market in 2025 at about 40%, with the United States leading the region.

More than 60% of dairy cows in the United States in 2025 were bred using artificial insemination.

Proponents of these technologies say they help farmers rapidly multiply an animal’s best traits, producing more high-value offspring from top animals. “You can amplify those elite genetics,” Alison Van Eenennaam, animal biotechnology and genomics specialist at the University of California Davis, tells Sentient. “If you look at the improvement in genetics over time, that has these knock-on effects,” she adds, citing efficiency, or needing “less animals to produce the same amount of product.”

Research on California dairy farms does show that producing a glass of milk in 2014 results in about half the emissions that it did in 1964.

Andrew Hunt, founder of The Bullvine, highlights several advantages of cattle embryo transfer. These include improved breeding success under difficult conditions, such as heat, and giving producers global access to “top-notch genetics” without moving live animals or risking disease spread to another herd.

Peer-reviewed research has also shown that embryo transfer can improve pregnancy success rates in heat-stressed cattle. Whether or not embryo transfer gives cattle breeders “top-notch genetics,” however, is up for debate. A 2023 review in the journal Animal shares the successes of embryo transfer in improving genetics, but suggests that in vitro-produced embryo transfer technology has obstacles to address before it will be efficient enough to meet the needs of the industry.

What about animal welfare?

The livestock industry primarily promotes the production benefits of assisted reproductive technologies, but some critics are concerned about how they affect animal welfare, biologically and behaviourally.

Kramer and bioethicist F. L. B. Meijboom argue in their 2021 Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics research paper that these tools may enable more intensive production systems that “speed up selective breeding for economically viable traits that affect welfare negatively.”

There are also bioethical concerns about magnifying biological and genetic issues through assisted reproductive technologies, such as an increased risk of abnormal development of the fetus and difficult births. A 2023 literature review in Animal suggests that in vitro reproduction may be linked to large offspring syndrome, a condition involving abnormal overgrowth, organ enlargement, congenital defects, as well as increased risk of difficult birth and low survival.

Meijboom and Kramer suggest in their research paper that these technologies could potentially reduce suffering by breeding animals more resistant to disease and stress, and could conceivably eliminate the need for painful practices such as disbudding (burning off calves’ horn buds) or de-beaking (common in egg and poultry production) “by breeding hornless cows and chickens with blunt beaks.” In the Netherlands, for example, there is movement toward phasing out disbudding and dehorning as part of broader animal welfare reforms. A key ambition in this, Kramer, who is Netherlands-based, tells Sentient, is breeding cattle to be hornless or polled. The hornlessness trait is a target in some breeding programs using artificial insemination, and Van Eenennaam led a research collaboration with Tad Sonstegard, chief scientific officer at Acceligen, to develop hornless cattle via genome-editing technology.

But Meijboom and Kramer also raise ethical concerns about how assisted reproductive technologies – and animal breeding in general – affect animal welfare and innate behaviour. They argue that there is also a risk of undermining welfare by altering animals’ true nature. In other words, even if these technologies can reduce physical suffering, changing animals’ capacities and behaviours may compromise their ability to live natural – or, to be more precise, species-typical – lives. For example, though horns can hinder livestock production, particularly in intensive confinement systems, research shows that horns play a role in cow social behaviour. “Polled animals may have greater difficulties in establishing stable social dominance relationships and may engage in more physical agonistic interactions.”

“It is about productivity,” author and activist Carol J. Adams writes via email. “The hormonal manipulation of the cow is a necessity, so they get to fuck with her, with another bodily intrusion.” She adds that “the cow is not seen as having bodily integrity. That would require the farmers to stop and ask ‘What right do we have to be plunging our arms into her orifice? What right do we have to force any cow to become pregnant?’’’ Adams has long studied and written about the sexual politics of meat and dairy and argues that reproductive technologies used in these industries are “scientific manipulation of reproduction in the service of profit.”

Van Eenennaam sees it differently. Breeding animals in a way that makes them more profitable also lends itself to breeding animals who are healthier and live longer, she argues. For example, she points to the U.S. dairy industry’s “Net Merit” indices, which rank animals and their traits, such as milk production, fertility, udder composition and disease resistance, generating a dollar value based on the combination of traits. Though it is designed around economics, it also incorporates wellness traits linked to animal welfare, including mastitis resistance, calving ease and mobility.

This commodification of traits, though, can also be seen as objectifying and instrumentalizing animals, Kramer argues. As female animals in particular are used as tools in this way, he adds, they become even more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. During the 2025 Embryos on Snow event, viewable on YouTube, embryos are promoted based on the parents, described by the auctioneers as “milestone producers,” “one of the hottest bulls” and “proven matings.” And when a female embryo is up for sale: “Come get her, boys,” the auctioneer shouts.

At another genetics sale in Oklahoma earlier this year, the auctioneer refers to a cow, stating, “Great udder quality. Proven factory.”

“What we’re talking about is using, more discretely, the very best animals to have more offspring, and not having the bad animals have any offspring,” Van Eenennaam argues. “You could say it’s eugenics, and I would argue, well, that’s kind of what animal breeding is.”

At the Oklahoma sale, the auctioneer tells attendees, “We’ve got a few live lots, a great set of eggs, and some semen as well.” First up, a red angus bull, whom the farmer “built” from the ground up. “He comes from an incredible cow family,” the auctioneer announces, describing the mother as an “excellent donor there in their program. Great udder; just a beautiful spine; got a lot of look; very maternal.” His name is Cosmic Cowboy. Then the bidding begins.

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. 

The post Inside the booming business of cattle embryos appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As CEO of the Climate Solutions Prize, I meet founders, researchers and entrepreneurs from across Canada who are forging technologies that are not only cleaner, but better: superior products, superior economics and superior ways of solving entrenched problems.

They are not waiting for permission. They are already building the solutions the world demands. The next era of climate action will not be led by slogans. It will be led by builders.

Canada needs more of them. But we also have more of them than most people realize, and too often we fail to help them get from breakthrough to scale.

Opalia in Montreal has developed a way to produce real milk from mammary cells, without the cow and without the methane. In Kingston, Ontario, RXN Hub is building Canada’s connective infrastructure for green chemistry commercialization, providing the modular lab space, piloting bays and technical validation that climate ventures need. Dispersa, based in Toronto, has created biodegradable chemicals derived from wood waste that replace petrochemicals in cleaning and industrial products, cutting both toxicity and carbon footprint.

These are not concepts in search of a market. They are proven technologies, validated by independent experts, tackling urgent challenges across food systems, oceans and the built environment.

The bottleneck lies in moving solutions from validation to deployment, at pace. The issue is not talent; it is risk aversion. Too many promising technologies stall between proof of concept and market because our funding ecosystem remains too rigid and too slow at the critical stages. We need agile mechanisms to de-risk innovation in the eyes of investors, customers and strategic partners.

De-risking the path from validation to scale

What does connective infrastructure look like in practice? It starts with rigorous, independent validation: technical due diligence, third-party testing and feasibility assessment that de-risks breakthrough innovation for investors, customers and strategic partners.

This requires structured pathways where capital, innovation and government converge, not once a year, but as a permanent operating rhythm within Canada’s climate ecosystem. Initiatives like the Climate Solutions Prize are bridging that gap across seven innovation tracks, from energy to water to agriculture to the built environment.

The countries that lead the next economy will be the ones that not only invent breakthrough technologies but also create the fastest path from invention to adoption.

– Galith Levy, CEO, Climate Solutions Prize

The evidence suggests that the model works. When catalytic capital meets validated innovation at the right inflection point, investment follows. More than $12 million in prize funding has helped unlock more than $111 million in subsequent capital. That ratio reveals something critical: for many climate ventures, the barrier is not the calibre of the technology. It is the confidence gap, the hesitation – among investors, customers and partners – to be first to deploy a validated technology at commercial scale. That is where most climate ventures lose momentum.

A pragmatic path forward

I often hear climate innovation framed as a trade-off: growth versus responsibility, economy versus environment. I see it differently. The most compelling solutions I encounter are not the ones that ask the market to make a sacrifice. They are the ones that win because they are simply better: cheaper, faster, cleaner, more resilient or more profitable.

The countries that lead the next economy will be the ones that not only invent breakthrough technologies but also create the fastest path from invention to adoption. Canada has more invention than we often recognize. Our weakness is what comes next. Too many promising technologies stall between proof and scale because they cannot secure a demonstration project or attract the catalytic capital needed to move from a promising idea to a real industry. The countries that win will be the ones that solve that challenge fastest and figure out what risks are worth taking. That is the real race now.

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What Canada lacks is not science, entrepreneurs or capital. It lacks a system built for speed.

The point is not innovation for its own sake. It is innovation that succeeds on its own economic merit and delivers measurable impact. What we need now is the willingness to move faster, take smarter risks and build the connective infrastructure that gets the right capital to the right technologies at the right moment.

This is not a uniquely Canadian challenge. But Canada has an opportunity few countries do: world-class research, extraordinary founders, and growing pools of capital looking for credible, high-impact opportunities.

The innovators are already here. The question is whether Canada will move fast enough to let them win.

Galith Levy is the CEO and co-founder of the Climate Solutions Prize. The 2026 Climate Solutions Prize Festival takes place June 8 and 9 in Montreal. For more information: climatesolutionsprize.com/2026festival.

The post Canada’s climate innovators need a faster path to market appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In early 2025, European lawmakers drastically minimized the scope and scale of corporate sustainability disclosure requirements – cutting by up to 90% the share of companies that are required to report. Then, in December, European Parliament members delayed a law that would help reduce deforestation and forest degradation around the world. That same month, another law that was set to ban production of new combustion-engine cars in Europe by 2035 was watered down. In every case, global competitiveness was among the main reasons cited for the scale-back. 

But oscillating between climate leadership and regulatory retreat could also mean that Europe loses its place as a climate pioneer and an industrial power. “If Europe continues with this deregulation drive,” says Andreas Rasche, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, “the climate rules for European businesses will be written elsewhere in the world.” 

Simplification vs. deregulation 

Opponents of the European Union’s ambitious policies say they have overly complicated reporting structures and impose too much bureaucratic red tape. 

Rasche says that, in theory, regulatory simplification is a good idea, but “the problem comes in where simplification itself is politicized and is turned into an unjustified deregulation.” 

Fewer reporting requirements tend to mean lower costs, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into competitiveness. “The logic is that you increase competitiveness [by] reducing costs with compliance,” explains Hanna Ahlström, senior adviser and sustainability business developer at Æra, a consultancy firm in Oslo. But even if costs are cut and a company’s profitability increases, it doesn’t necessarily make a company more competitive, Ahlström says. For that to be the case, “the money [saved] needs to be reinvested in ways that makes the company competitive, and not all firms will do this.” 

While investing in new technologies is something that can help make a business more competitive long-term, the EU’s policy inconsistencies have also made businesses more hesitant to act. 

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For instance, Yara International, a fertilizer company, said in January that if the EU suspends its carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which came into effect on January 1, they will have to rethink a major low-carbon ammonia project in the United States. CBAM, which has so far avoided suspension, taxes EU companies importing steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizers, hydrogen and electricity based on the origin of the import. Yara CEO Svein Tore Holsether told Reuters that CBAM helped improve the business case for low-carbon ammonia products, but that regulatory uncertainty makes it difficult to bank on more expensive low-carbon investments.   

Businesses that make the first moves tend to also reap economic benefits as trailblazers, says Marcin Menkes, an associate professor at the Warsaw School of Economics and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. But when geopolitical turbulence is met with inconsistent behaviour on the part of the EU, it stifles not only innovation but also competitiveness, he argues. In order to make investments, companies bet on new rules and regulations being implemented. Uncertainty might incentivize businesses to be cautious instead. 

Even if a new approach, product or technology has an environmental benefit, if the rules change the business will incur the costs of being a first mover. “We must protect those businesses that boldly try to experiment, to deploy new environmental technology, technology solutions, without surprising them with different . . . regulatory approaches,” Menkes says. 

Regulation can mean opportunity, too 

When EU regulations stay in place, like CBAM has so far, there are business opportunities for companies willing to invest in compliance to gain access to the EU’s single market of approximately 450 million people. 

Canada, which ranks fourth in aluminum and 16th in steel production, could seize the opportunity to become a bigger player in the European market. Canadian aluminum and steel are largely produced by hydroelectricity, giving Canada one of the lowest carbon footprints among the world’s major producers. “Given the dependency on U.S. markets and the tariffs in place,” says Michael Lenaghan, associate director at Anthesis, a U.K.-based consultancy firm, “CBAM couldn’t have come at a better time for Canada and for steel and aluminum.” 

With the Canadian government looking to diversify trade, there is now an opportunity to become a major player under the CBAM regime, Lenaghan says. Currently, the EU imports most of its steel and aluminum from China, India and Turkey, he says. When comparing the emissions values to Canadian production, it’s significant: Canadian emissions are “between 50% and 70% lower across these materials, and that translates into a significant cost savings for EU importers when they’re looking at where to buy.”  

Lenaghan says that he doesn’t think that Canadian producers are fully tuned into CBAM yet. But it’s not every day that your competitiveness over other exporters is altered so drastically. “That’s what CBAM is doing,” Lenaghan says. 

It’s also an illustration that ambitious EU climate policies can co-exist with profits and competitiveness in a global market. “For me,” Copenhagen Business School’s Rasche says, “ambitious climate policy and competitiveness is not a contradiction.” It depends on the time frame. If competitiveness is looked at in the short term, there will be cost savings. Rasche, however, believes that competitiveness should be seen as a long-term horizon: “For that, you need an ambitious climate policy, and you need to decarbonize.”  

Ashley Perl is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Stockholm.  

The post Europe’s green retreat risks damaging its own businesses appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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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