Canadians have been voting by paper ballot in federal elections since 1867. A national survey, however, found that 85% of Canadians supported the introduction of Internet voting as an additional way to cast their ballot. Through our smartphones or computers, we could vote from the convenience of our homes, workplaces, local libraries or any other public place with internet access. Embracing online voting would also make sense for governments, both fiscally and environmentally.

The financial savings alone would be impressive: a 2010 assessment showed that the usual cost of a federal election is $10 per eligible voter whereas online voting costs roughly $2 per voter. For each federal election, Elections Canada prints enough ballots for every eligible voter + 5%. That means that during this year’s election, 28.6 million ballots will be printed. If more people voted online fewer ballots would need to be printed.

Some municipalities in Canada have already added online voting to their list of voting options. In the City of Markham, online voting has been available to residents since 2003. Since being introduced, not only has voter turnout gone up 10%, but during the 2018 municipal election, 91% of all votes were cast online. For Markham, online voting has nearly eliminated the need for printed ballots.

But what’s even more valuable when it comes to creating a greener Canadian economy is online voting’s ability to reach people who may never otherwise have voted. The City of Geneva allowed citizens to vote online in 2004 during the Swiss federal election. Research done after the election revealed that a whopping 55% of Genevans who identified as “regular [voting] abstainers” actually voted online that year. In fact, Geneva’s election data showed that one in four people who voted online said that they frequently abstained from voting in the past.

E-voting could encourage the Canadian demographic that currently votes the least, the youth vote, to start casting their ballots, as they have in Geneva. In 2015, Canadians aged 18–34 had the lowest turnout in the election, just 57%. This is lower than the overall turnout of 68%, and drastically smaller than the highest turnout by age, which was 78% for people 65–74 years old.

Right now, young Canadians are leading the charge on demanding that the environment and climate change be addressed by our governments. Hundreds of thousands of youth took to the streets for last month’s Global Climate Strike in Canada. Other climate focused movements have emerged as well, such as Our Time, an environmental movement led by young people who are making a Green New Deal for Canada an election issue for 2019. A recent poll showed that 40% of those age 18–34 (the same group prone to low voter rates) believe that Canada needs to “do everything we can to fight climate change immediately, even if the economy slows as a result and jobs are lost.”

If we’re to ensure that strong climate action happens in Canada, we need to get young people to cast their ballot, and the best way to do that is by bringing the election to them by making voting digital. Though simply making online voting an option isn’t going to cut it. Just this year, the Northwest Territories used online voting for their territorial election but people aged 35+ cast 60% of the online ballots. We’d need to increase online marketing that encourages young people to vote, and expect that it may take a few election cycles for online voting to reach its full potential.

The threat of cyber security attacks would also need to be addressed. In Switzerland, the only western democracy to use online voting federally, the government sends voters a series of codes and security keys through the mail which allows one to vote online, and keeps user names and addresses anonymous. Markham uses a three-step system: residents get a voter card in the mail, they register and create a personal passcode online, and then receive a PIN number in the mail that lets them vote.

Although it has not yet been piloted, blockchain technologies, such as those that power Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, are also being considered as a way to increase security in online voting.

Despite these challenges, online voting could be a fairly straightforward way to make our elections greener overall. And it has the potential to get more young people casting ballots to ensure that climate conscious candidates are elected to Parliament.

Nahum Mann is a political organizer and former candidate for Toronto City Council in his home riding of Davenport. He is currently working on a new platform, Everysay, that lets Torontonians vote on local policy issues.

The post Why online voting could lay the foundation for a greener economy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

We’re also in the midst of an environmental crisis—the House of Commons drove this home when it declared a national climate emergency last month. With rising temperatures, the melting of polar ice sheets and catastrophic weather events, now more than ever, it’s crucial for governments and businesses to take drastic, meaningful steps towards sustainable energy use to combat these global issues before they become irreversible.

Unprecedented population growth is placing additional strain on green energy initiatives, however. By 2050, the world’s cities will be home to an additional 2.5 billion people. With this increased urbanization comes a standard of living largely reliant on technology. Another 50 billion devices – everything from smartphones to smart fridges to smart factories – will be connected globally within the next five years, which will increase our consumption by at least 50%. If our desire is to move towards a low-carbon economy, we must strive to reduce our carbon footprint by half. The only way to do this is to use energy three times more efficiently around the world. We’ll need technology to get us there.

Policy changes, both global and domestic, will play an important role in our efforts to find energy efficiencies and combat climate change. Many nations, including Canada, Australia, France and Denmark, have implemented a tax on carbon emissions. France and the United Kingdom plan to eliminate gas-based vehicles by 2040, and Norway by as early as 2025. And in British Columbia, discussions are in place to ensure that all new cars, SUVs and light-duty trucks are zero-emission starting in 2040.

However, it isn’t exclusively up to the world’s governing bodies to drive these improvements. Business and industry must also lead the charge. And they have more opportunity than ever in our digital age to make sustainable and profitable shifts.

When businesses embrace digitization and connected solutions to automate how they use energy and analyze data for smarter decision-making, this drives a more productive, profitable and sustainable economy. Digital transformation could help the electricity, logistics and automotive industries alone avoid 26 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions between 2016 and 2025.

At Schneider Electric, we’re on track to shift our global operations to 80% renewable energy by 2020. At the Clean Energy Ministerial conference in Vancouver in May, we announced our commitment to support the Electric Vehicle Initiative’s EV30@30 campaign and its goal to reach 30% sales share for electric vehicles by 2030. Schneider Electric plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030 and have a fleet of at least 30% electric vehicles.

Partly through consumer demands for green initiatives and partly through internal business priorities, global businesses are already making the transition to sustainable energy. In 2017, corporate leaders like Google and Wells Fargo met their goal to use 100% renewable energy. As of January, 122 multinational companies, including Schneider Electric, joined RE100 and committed to becoming 100% renewable.

Despite these initiatives, government and industry face a daunting task. To reduce our carbon footprint and ensure a healthy planet for generations to come, we must leverage the technology, initiatives and capabilities we have today, and continue to support the innovations that will make increased efficiencies possible tomorrow. Only when government, industry and citizens prioritize the same end goal will we have a chance at a clean energy future.

Susan Uthayakumar is President and CEO of Schneider Electric Canada.

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MacLaren’s cloud-based digital asset management company, MediaValet, had grown and spread around the world. With customers in Europe, he knew he had to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) – the new global gold standard when it comes to privacy – or face the prospect of hefty fines.

It was a challenging process that took six months. But MacLaren says being among the first North American companies to become GDPR compliant has made a big difference. “It has attracted new customers, increased customer retention and overall grown our business. It has increased market share because it helped us win deals from other existing digital asset management providers.”

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and with the GDPR’s entry into force in May, privacy issues and ethical questions about what companies do with the data they collect have been in the spotlight.

In October, Apple CEO Tim Cook issued a call to action. He warned that privacy was a human right and the collection of huge amounts of personal information on individuals was hurting society.
“Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency,” Cook told an international gathering of privacy commissioners.

Cook praised the GDPR and called on the United States to follow Europe’s lead.
While California has adopted a consumer privacy act that is scheduled to go into effect in 2020, privacy laws in the U.S. are often weak or nonexistent.

Canada has the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which governs private businesses, and the Privacy Act, which spells out the rules for federal government departments, but neither has kept pace with changes in technology. With the GDPR now in effect, some experts are concerned Canada’s privacy laws will soon no longer be considered equivalent to those in the EU, which could complicate life for Canadian companies doing business with European companies or customers.

Described as the world’s strongest data protection rules, the GDPR sets out how the private information of European residents must be handled. It backs up those rules with the threat of stiff fines – up to €20 million or four per cent of a company’s worldwide annual revenue for the previous year, whichever is higher.

Fines can be imposed on any company around the world that breaks those rules – even if it has no offices in Europe.

European officials told Reuters in October that there has been a 53 per cent increase over the past year in privacy complaints under the GDPR in France and Italy alone. They expect data protection authorities to soon begin levying fines.

European data protection authorities can also use order-making powers to enforce the new privacy rules.

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“Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency.”

-Tim Cook, CEO, Apple

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For example, the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner, Canadian Elizabeth Denham, has issued an order directing a British Columbian company involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal to destroy all the personal information it collected on British citizens once B.C.’s information commissioner’s office finishes its investigation into the scandal.

The GDPR’s new rules are wide ranging.
One of its key provisions – privacy by design – actually originated in Canada, the brainchild of former Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian. With privacy by design, privacy considerations are baked into systems from the start, not added as an afterthought.

Companies that have a data breach must notify affected customers within 72 hours of becoming aware of the breach. Businesses must ask people, using clear language, for consent to use their information. Individuals can withdraw that consent, and request access to information a company has regarding them. They can take their data with them if they switch to another company.

Among the other provisions is the right to be forgotten, which allows an individual to ask for information about them to be erased.

Canadian Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien says the GDPR is inspiring privacy policy in other countries.

“Should we apply the GDPR exactly in Canada? Not necessarily. I don’t think so. We have a Canadian context. But there are many, many positive things in the GDPR.”

Scott Smith, senior director of intellectual property and innovation policy for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, says many large Canadian companies that operate internationally have already moved to comply with the GDPR.

However, he said many smaller companies don’t yet realize that they may need to comply as well.
“You run an Airbnb. You have a European traveller who happens to be here. You keep their name, their address, their e-mail address and phone number – that’s all personal information of an EU citizen. Theoretically, you need to be GDPR compliant.”

The GDPR comes at a time when data and personal information have never been more valuable.

“I’d say it is paramount,” says Smith. “Data is the way we are going to create new products, solve problems. Having timely, accurate and extensive data allows companies to understand their market, understand their customers, understand what their customers want and deliver it in ways that are more efficient and effective and convenient and lowers prices.”

Elisa Henry, a partner with Borden, Ladner, Gervais, says that for many companies, data has become their main asset.

“If you don’t properly take care of your data and you don’t handle it properly, then you’re putting your main assets at risk.”

Being GDPR compliant is rapidly becoming an asset when it comes to sales and business deals, Henry adds.

“If you cannot say that these days and your business is relying heavily on processing personal information, then you’re out of the game very quickly.”

Chantal Bernier, who leads the privacy and cybersecurity practice at the law firm Dentons, says companies could also have difficulties exchanging data with European businesses if they aren’t GDPR compliant.

“In the GDPR there is a mandatory requirement for any organization to only transfer data or to only hire a vendor that is GDPR compliant. So in addition to the competitive advantage with branding, there is a legal requirement that is a huge differentiator when you can put forward right away that you are GDPR compliant.”

The cost of complying can vary widely, says Bernier. A small website selling products to Europe might be able to comply with the law for $50,000. A larger company that uses artificial intelligence, algorithms, a large amount of personal information, has European employees and sells services to Europe could end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to do everything necessary.

Cavoukian, who now leads the Privacy by Design Centre of Excellence at Ryerson University, says a lot of businesses have been coming to her for privacy by design certification that they can then tout to their customers.

Many of the provisions of the GDPR highlight ethical questions for businesses – even those who don’t do business in Europe.

Among them, says Henry, is the use of artificial intelligence and entirely automated decision-making or profiling that affects individuals – something restricted under the GDPR.

“There are a lot of questions that as citizens we should be asking and ethics has to be embedded in privacy. They go hand in hand. And the GDPR suddenly played a big role in raising awareness about that.”

In Europe, the new, tougher rules are being well received, she added. “People are more and more conscious and worried about surveillance, about monitoring of their behaviour, about automated decision-making.”

Another ethical issue for business is the temptation, once you have a database chock full of personal information, to use it in a variety of ways.

Cavoukian says it is important to make privacy the default setting and not to use information you gather for any purpose other than the purpose for which it was collected.

“The beauty of doing that is that it builds trusted business relationships, which are lacking. There’s a huge trust deficit,” she says.

“So, I actually believe it gives businesses a competitive advantage and allows them to retain the customers they have, gain their loyalty and it attracts new opportunity.”
MacLaren agrees.

He says the most challenging part of becoming GDPR compliant was reviewing all of the company’s licensing agreements with their lawyer. That review and making sure all aspects of MediaValet’s operations complied with the GDPR cost “north of six figures.”

But MacLaren is glad he did it.

“In the end, if it’s good for our customers and their users, it’s good for us and our businesses.”

Elizabeth Thompson is an award-winning journalist who has covered Canada’s Parliament since 2001.

The post Privacy profits appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Hero:  Seychelles’ blue bonds

First, in 2007, came the “green bond,” the debt instrument that has raised hundreds of billions of dollars for projects to combat or adapt to climate change. Now, a decade later, the Indian Ocean island nation of Seychelles has made a splash with the world’s first “blue bond,” aimed at easing environmental pressures on our oceans and marine life.

The proceeds of the 10-year, US$15-million issue will go towards overhauling the Seychelles’ fishing industry, the biggest contributor to the economy after tourism. Eligible projects include the development of aquaculture, training programs, new equipment and promotion of environmentally friendly fishing practices.

Arunma Oteh, World Bank vice-president and treasurer, described blue bonds as “yet another example of the powerful role of capital markets in connecting investors to projects that support better stewardship of the planet.” The World Bank helped pioneer green bonds in 2007, and has played a key role in the Seychelles’ issue by rounding up investors and advising the government on how best to spend the funds.

If green bonds are any guide, there will be no shortage of appetite for blue bonds among both issuers and investors. The Climate Bonds Initiative, a U.K.-based non-profit, estimates that governments, international organizations and businesses around the world were on track to raise US$210 billion from green bonds in 2018, up from US$162 billion in 2017.

EY, a global consultancy, says the main challenge for green bond issuers has been to absorb the extra costs compared to a normal bond without having to offer higher interest rates to investors.

According to a recent EY report, “These costs may include additional expenditure for defining the green criteria, monitoring and maintaining the proceeds as green, and transparently communicating performance to investors over the lifetime of the bonds.” Another challenge is to nail down the definition of a “green” project so that it meets investors’ needs and can withstand scrutiny from environmental activists.

The “blue” market will face similar hurdles. The three U.S. institutions that subscribed to the Seychelles bond – Calvert Impact Capital, Nuveen and Prudential Financial – will earn a handsome interest rate of 6.5 per cent a year. By contrast, Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island, paid interest of just 3.65 per cent for a much longer 25-year bond issued in 2017.
Good news for the Seychelles is that it will end up paying just 2.8 per cent for its funds, thanks to a World Bank guarantee and support from the Global Environment Facility, a partnership of governments, non-profits and private businesses. Alas, not all future blue bond borrowers can bank on such a sweet deal.

Zero: Facebook

Amanda Vermeulen Bowey, a freelance writer living in Sydney, Australia, told her Facebook friends in mid-November that “after thinking about it for some time, I’ve decided to close my Facebook account.”

The final straw, Bowey said, was a blockbuster New York Times story, published a few days earlier, which exposed how the social media giant’s top executives chased growth even at the expense of undermining democratic processes around the world. The story revealed how

Facebook bankrolled a smear campaign against competitors and critics, planting fake stories on right-wing blogs and suggesting that George Soros, the liberal philanthropist, had funded anti-Facebook protestors.

The NYT scoop was the latest in a series of revelations which suggest that the company that once took pride in its ability to “move fast and break things” has ended up moving far too fast and breaking too many things. Regulators, politicians and users like Bowey are increasingly questioning Facebook’s corporate governance, from its privacy policies to its tardiness in responding to malevolent users such as Russian “troll farms” and U.S. white supremacists.

At the heart of Facebook’s problems is its evolution from a distribution platform to a publisher. From its origins as a fun way for users to share stories and pictures with far-flung family and friends, Facebook has played an increasingly active role in deciding who sees what, and when.

Attracting advertising dollars has become a top priority. Yet, as the recent revelations show, Facebook’s top executives have shied away from the transparency and accountability that typically come with such market power.

These missteps are starting to take a toll on the company’s business. Facebook reported 2.27 billion active users in the third quarter of 2018, 10 per cent more than a year earlier but down from the 16 per cent growth rate in the previous 12 months. Its shares lost more than a third of their value between August and December 2018, costing investors close to a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post’s media columnist, wrote in November that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 34-year-old founder and chairman, “should declare mission accomplished — and find something else to do for the next few decades. Because he’s shown that he’s incapable of leading the broken behemoth that is Facebook.”

Meanwhile, Bowey in Sydney has expressed mixed feelings about her decision. “Giving up Facebook is going to be like giving up chocolate, coffee, wine and cigarettes all on the same day – tough,” she said in a private message. “But it also means I’ll spend more time reading and maybe painting, instead of hours hooked to scrolling through my social media feeds.”

The post Heroes & Zeros: Seychelles vs. Facebook appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Whether they work in healthcare, education, justice or agricultural reform, social innovators savour Skoll World as an opportunity to reflect and recharge – especially in today’s era of me-first nationalism. To revive and refresh your own inner activist, here are seven takeaways from the 2018 Skoll World Forum:

1. The event began with a welcome from Skoll World cofounder Stephan Chambers to “entrepreneurs, artists, activists, investors, scholars, innovators and resistors.” He said, “You make so much that is warm, humane and inspiring… You are a barrier against disinformation, duplicity and destruction.” If nothing else, it’s clear the Trump presidency has given social entrepreneurs a new sense of purpose.

2. Every year, Skoll World presents its Global Treasure Award. Previous winners include Bono, Nelson Mandela and Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai. This year’s winner was former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, 93, who’s been building homes with Habitat for Humanity while Donald Trump was licensing his name to shiny towers with gold bathroom fixtures. As president, Carter negotiated the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty, and later founded the Carter Center to resolve conflicts, protect human rights and combat disease. (The centre targeted Guinea worm, a devastating tropical disease, when there were 3.5 million cases. Today, the caseload is down to five.)

Carter recalled that upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, he’d declared inequality of income the world’s biggest challenge. Today, he says, the issue is gender discrimination. He says the world is missing 160 million women – mainly due to prenatal screenings that encourage families to terminate pregnancies if they find it’s a girl. “I have pledged, for the rest of my life,” he said, “to devote my time to fighting for the equality of people on earth.”

Carter encouraged his audience to oppose today’s growing intolerance. “I think we have a great opportunity ahead of us, of excitement and purpose in life, as we reach out to people who are different from us and find out how wonderful they are and how much they can add to our own lives.”

3. The philosophy driving social entrepreneurs was best expressed by 24-year-old Alpha Ngwenya of Zimbabwe. Now a business student at Arizona State University, Ngwenya is founder of his own non-profit, Strong Woman Strong Love (SWSL).

Two years ago, Ngwenya was volunteering at a women’s shelter in Phoenix. He was cleaning a washroom when a client pounded on the door. She later explained she was in a rush because the shelter didn’t provide feminine hygiene products. So Ngwenya bought 40 pads at a dollar store to donate to the shelter. At his next shift, the woman smiled and said, “Something happened! They have feminine-hygiene products now.” Her positive response inspired Ngwenya to launch SWSL to distribute hygiene products to women’s organizations around Arizona. He also founded a chapter in Kampala, Uganda, to teach women in safe houses to make and sell their own feminine products.

“The fact that I listened to what someone else experienced helped me make this impact,” said Ngwenya. “If everyone in this world starts to care about things that don’t concern them, a lot of things are going to change.”

4. Through its theme, The Power of Proximity, Skoll World urged social entrepreneurs to rediscover their missions, their clients, and each other. The need is all around us, noted Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard-trained lawyer from Montgomery, Alabama. Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to represent Alabama prisoners who’ve been denied a fair trial. The EJI also defends anyone facing the death penalty, as Alabama is the only state that denies legal assistance to prisoners on “death row.”

“It is in proximity to the poor, the excluded, the neglected, that we understand things we cannot understand from a distance,” Stevenson said. “Many of us have been taught that if there’s a bad part of town, you need to stay away. Many of us have been taught that if there are parts of the globe where there is conflict and suffering, you should stay far away… All of us need to get closer to the marginalized, the disabled, the disfavoured, the excluded and the incarcerated.”

5. The most harrowing story came during a panel session on the growing use of virtual reality (VR) to tell more compelling stories. One panellist, Raja Ebenezer of Chennai, India, revealed that as a child, he was enslaved along with his parents at a brick quarry after they failed to repay money they borrowed to fund their daughter’s wedding: “The loan was made to trap us in a system we couldn’t escape from.”

Ebenezer and his family worked 19 hours a day making and stacking bricks. Two years later, they and over 100 others were freed in a rescue organized by International Justice Mission (IJM), which protects the poor in the developing world from everyday violence. That includes 40 million people trapped in slavery, and millions more in sexual violence and sex trafficking.

Ebenezer, now a lawyer with IJM, worked with New York City filmmaker Lindsay Branham on a just-released VR experience called The Hidden, which documents the rescue of a family of 10 from a rock quarry where they’d been confined for a decade. IJM founder Gary Haugen hopes this immersive media project will help more people realize this issue is real. “Slavery sounds like a word from another century,” said Haugen. “With 360-degree virtual reality, you’re transported physically to this place that people try to keep hidden.”

6. How can you drive big change? Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, described how Elon Musk’s space-exploration company evolved from flailing startup to a firm that’s now reusing heavy rockets and planning interplanetary travel. Shotwell’s formula for making change:

• Execute missions that seem impossible.
• Relentless focus on progress and improving every cycle.
• Drive feedback to ensure we learn and fix quickly.
• Superior staff is the only way to achieve great things.

7. Canada had a low profile at Skoll. The sole Canadian speaker I heard was Angela Code, a young filmmaker and human-rights advocate from Whitehorse, Yukon. As a member of Sayisi Dene First Nation, from Manitoba’s far north, Code grew up without running water and drove a dog team to school. “Our people are suffering and living in poverty,” she told a Skoll audience. “We have to work to establish our culture, because Canada has systematically repressed us.”

It was tough to hear Code call out Canada on a global stage. But this was a wakeup call. As Canadians promote social justice and human rights around the world, we still have work to do at home. Proximity starts chez nous.

The post Back to Skoll appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Up to 25 students will begin the four-year program in September, which will combine a common law education with Aboriginal legal principles. Graduates are awarded degrees in both Canadian Common Law (Juris Doctor) and Indigenous Legal Orders (Juris Indigenarum Doctor).

“Indigenous law is the most vital and exciting legal work being done in the world right now,” Val Napoleon, director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit, said in a statement. “The University of Victoria’s Indigenous Law Degree program will equip our students to take up that work at every level – local to national, private to public, and beyond. This is the very first law degree of its kind, and it is going to be a vital part of rebuilding Indigenous law to meet today’s challenges.”

Law professors Napoleon and John Borrows have been developing the program for over a decade, taking inspiration from McGill University’s joint law program that teaches the common law of Canada and Quebec’s civil code concurrently. The University of Victoria Faculty of Law is already home to the country’s only Indigenous law research unit, and briefly ran an Iqaluit-based law school named Akitsiraq steeped in Inuit law.

“[Graduates] will benefit areas such as environmental protection, Indigenous governance, economic development, housing, child protection and education – areas where currently there is an acute lack of legal expertise to create institutions that are grounded in Indigenous peoples’ law and to build productive partnerships across the two legal systems,” explains the law school.

Despite having secured critical start-up funding in the 2018 provincial budget, the faculty is looking for an additional $18 million to construct an Indigenous Legal Lodge to house both the program and the Indigenous Law Research Unit.

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Because the world’s enslaved persons are producing the world’s consumer goods, anti-slavery activists have called on corporate leaders to do more. Boycotts, greater media attention and private investor concerns have thus pushed western regulators to act. New anti-slavery legislation requires that corporations monitor and act on supply chain labour practices. California’s Transparency in Supply Chains Act, passed in 2010, requires large manufacturers and retailers to disclose what they are doing to eradicate slavery. In 2015, the U.K. enacted the Modern Slavery Act to boost transparency on supply chain labour practices. France and the Netherlands followed in 2017 with laws calling for corporate vigilance in human rights and child labour, respectively.

Nevertheless, whether the result of new regulatory requirements or brand reputation pressures, new corporate-led initiatives are also challenging modern slavery and other human rights abuses in supply chains.

A better definition of corporate governance

Recently, corporate representatives and leaders from human rights organizations examined the issue of sustainable governance under the lead of the Center for Sustainable Business at ESMT Berlin, an international business school. The executives agreed that improving corporate governance has become vital to addressing a host of human rights concerns, including modern slavery.

Modern slavery is a critical issue for the business sector, and not only because of the reputational risks it poses with consumers who increasingly demand ethically sourced and manufactured products. Yet global brands have often distanced themselves from labour responsibilities along many points in their supply chains. But as Quintin Lake of Hult International Business School said in a roundtable discussion, “leading companies have found that in addressing modern slavery risks to workers, they ultimately address the risks to the business as well.”

In 2016, Hult along with the Ethical Trading Initiative surveyed 71 corporations, including 25 leading global brands and retailers, about their role in addressing modern slavery. Some 77 per cent conceded that it is likely that forced labour is occurring in their supply chains. Yet too many companies define corporate governance’s part in this too narrowly, just reacting to current regulation for the sake of bureaucratic expediency. This is a significant corporate blind spot.

“Short-termism is very bad for human rights,” said Mauricio Lazala, deputy director and head of the Europe office of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. As he sees it, companies are not giving real attention to what is happening across their value chains. This especially hurts human rights defenders (HRDs), who are working to safeguard labour rights and raise visibility on abusive working conditions. “We registered 900 incidents of attacks against human rights defenders in the last three years,” said Lazala. “We have examples of companies abusing human rights every day.”

Human rights defenders should not shoulder the burden of creating safe supply chains alone. As many in the room agreed, responsibility for the human rights part of corporate governance should go all the way to top executives and back.

Best practices in corporate governance

Fortunately, best practices in human rights are emerging. When, in 2015, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders stated that businesses should do more to support HRDs in their sectors, the Adidas Group did just that.

In 2016, Adidas became the first company to release a policy statement on HRDs. The company also launched its Modern Day Slavery Supply Chain Evaluation program. Additionally, the company introduced a mobile app for some 300,000 factory workers in Cambodia, China, Indonesia and Vietnam to support anonymous reporting of labour rights violations.

The KnowTheChain partnership rates global companies on how well they understand and address forced labour risks throughout their supply chains. Adidas ranked number one among four top-scoring global fashion brands: Adidas (81/100), Gap (77/100), H&M (69/100) and Lululemon (69/100).

Where the reward of “doing good” has not been enough, the threat of financial losses has motivated more reluctant players. Many global businesses now require their suppliers to sign codes of conduct that include explicit renunciation of forced labour, child labour and prison labour. These are further backed by audits, whereby companies evaluate suppliers to ensure compliance with human rights goals.

Industry-wide networks like those in the telecommunications sector have already made use of these tools in their supply chains. “We noticed that our suppliers were also used by others,” said Yves Nissim, vice president and head of transformation and operations for Orange, in a roundtable discussion. “So we constructed a platform for all [sector] suppliers, formed a forum with other telecom companies, and shared all our audits. When one of our suppliers did not reply to the company’s individual urging for improvements, 16 letters from all other network members provided the answer within a week.”

Following the UN’s lead

Corporate governance can address a wider number of pressing issues – modern slavery, yes, but also issues such as corruption, climate change, pay equity and sustainability. Some business leaders are thus connecting company governance goals to international ones. The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – within which Goal 8.7 calls for the end of modern slavery – offer a helpful framework to businesses looking to do more on human rights.

Examples from companies as diverse as Aegon, Covestro, Orange and Siemens show that businesses are integrating SDGs into their corporate governance strategies and providing examples for others to follow.

“Look at Goal 1 on ending poverty. You might think that’s primarily the responsibility of governments and public institutions,” said Linda Midgley, a senior manager for PwC Netherlands, in a roundtable discussion. “But whether people are living in poverty is heavily influenced by the wages paid by businesses – themselves and throughout the value chain. Taking a good look at your value chain might very quickly pull Goal 1 up the priority list.”

Toward greater transparency and accountability

The results from these diverse approaches to improving corporate governance remain mixed.

For example, the U.K.’s Modern Slavery Act includes a provision that requires commercial enterprises with an annual turnover of at least £36 million and operating in the U.K. to publish an annual slavery and human trafficking statement. Yet an independent investigation conducted by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre in 2017 revealed that only a handful of FTSE 100 companies were meeting the act’s requirements.

Data from the State of Responsible Business Report 2016 also showed that more than half of companies ignore the SDGs. Others have blocked them or used them as cover – so called “SDG washing,” whereby businesses hype their positive contributions on certain goals while disregarding their negative impact on others. As Roel Niewenkamp, chair of the OECD Working Party on Responsible Business Conduct, explained the term: “A car company may market their electric cars as saving the climate. Yet the cobalt in their batteries may be mined by five-year-old kids in Congo.”

Nevertheless, corporate governance can and should serve a broader purpose. Moreover, the burden of sustainable and humane solutions in corporate governance must be shared by investors, corporate boards, executives and business networks alike.

Said Hult’s Quintin Lake: “Companies helped create these issues. Companies must play their part to solve them.”

Joanna Radeke is the manager of the Center for Sustainable Business at ESMT Berlin. Tammi L. Coles is the digital editor at ESMT Berlin.

The post Better corporate governance can end slavery in supply chains appeared first on Corporate Knights.

She zooms in on the dot on the map that represents Marieta, a female stork that took her first, clumsy test flights in 2016, at an abandoned brick factory along the Rhine. Dorner collects Google Earth screenshots from places Marieta has visited: the lush, rolling fields outside of Lyon, France, for example, or a landfill outside of a Moroccan city. In Spain, dots along the concrete wall of a maximum-security prison suggest that Marieta had found an ideal hunting perch.

“A curious picnic area,” Dorner says.

Dorner is a citizen scientist animal tracker, and there are tens of thousands like her worldwide. Their numbers are growing in tandem with the ambitions of migration scientists, who are finding novel uses for ever-smaller GPS satellite transmitters, which they are able to place on new species every year. With the aim of engaging the public and enhancing research, scientists are eagerly sharing animal movement data through websites like the Movebank database or apps like the Animal Tracker. And while some critics worry about the unintended consequences of arming thousands of laypeople with the ability to track wildlife movement in real time, advocates argue that the data is providing scientists with valuable information – and also creating the kind of community that some experts believe is needed to augment conservation efforts.

Take the reintroduction in Europe of the northern bald ibis, or waldrapp, led by Austrian biologist Johannes Fritz. In the spring of 2004, Fritz adopted seven waldrapp chicks from the Vienna Zoo and the Zurich Zoo. That fall, after they had imprinted on him as a parent of sorts, he taught them how to migrate, guiding them with an ultralight aircraft.

Today, there are around 90 birds. About one-third were born in the wild, and they learned migration routes from their parents or other older waldrapps. With their glossy black feathers, shocking pink, bald faces, and narrow feathers spiked atop their heads – punk-rock style – the birds have garnered many fans. “When you see the bird for the first time, you feel it’s ugly, but the more you see it, the more it’s fascinating,” says Fritz. The ugly-beautiful waldrapps are all carrying transmitters and they’re cheered along their migration route – virtually and, sometimes, in person.

During last fall’s migration over the Alps, a juvenile bald ibis named Waldemar got left behind during a snowfall. It was Waldemar’s first flight, so he didn’t know the way. Fritz knew the bird was lost, but he didn’t know where: The transmitter’s solar-powered battery had conked out.

Fortunately, a woman in Austria had been following the migration on Animal Tracker. When the birds’ signals neared her village, she ventured out to find them. But instead of finding the flock, she spotted Waldemar, by himself, in a snow-covered field. The woman contacted the waldrapp project. Soon, the bird was collected by a team member, housed overnight, and transported further south to an older waldrapp, about 40 miles away.

In addition to contending with the weather, waldrapps must also survive migration along a heavily hunted corridor from northern to central Italy. Fritz has set up a volunteer task force of around 700 people who live along the route, including bird watchers, citizen scientists, and hunters. Communicating through WhatsApp, the volunteers alert hunters to be careful when the birds are nearby. Waldrapps are still shot, at least one every year, but Fritz says the number of downed waldrapps is decreasing in proportion to their growing numbers. With so many watching out for the bald ibises, would-be poachers know their chances of being caught, and prosecuted, are high.

Citizens are also playing a key role in academic research. Wolfgang Fiedler, the lead researcher for the white stork study, says citizens are the scientists’ eyes on the ground. “They can give us all kinds of information that the trackers do not,” says Fiedler.

In the winter of 2014, for example, a French bird watcher emailed Fiedler to let him know he’d be travelling to Senegal. “Is there something I can observe for you?” he asked. Fiedler wanted to know what one of the tracked storks was doing along a river there. The volunteer altered his itinerary, and sent back pictures of roughly a thousand storks, who were hunting in the farmlands along the river. Research has shown that, increasingly, stork populations are making very different decisions about how far to migrate and what to eat, due to climate change, new landfill sites, and habitat loss. The details about the bird’s diet, along with the news of additional storks, provided “very valuable information,” says Fiedler.

In other cases, users simply upload photos or observations to the Animal Tracker app. Download it to your phone and you can see movement data for 17 species, including 75 white storks, nine turkey vultures, and 14 rough-legged buzzards. Click on Zozu, a white stork, and you’ll read that she was born in 2013 in south Germany and has two living siblings. Click “add observation” and instructions pop up: “Is it alone, together with conspecifics, or with individuals of other species? Is it feeding? Can you identify its food?” Fiedler says Animal Tracker users tend to choose favorite birds to follow closely. “It could be one from their village but often it’s chosen randomly and they look every day at what this bird is doing.”

In March, the app will be updated to include movement data for more species including whales, baboons, and bears. Users will be able to define a radius, say 12 miles, and get notifications when a tracked animal is in their vicinity. And users will be able to communicate with each other. This is key for strength-in-numbers conservation advocacy, says Michael Quetting, who is leading the redesign at the Max Planck Institute.

For all the excitement over such public involvement in migration research, some scientists have voiced concerns over the potential downsides of making this sort of movement data public. “Should animals have privacy?” said Steven Cooke, a Canadian biologist who has put trackers on fish. “Every time a bloody stork lands, does it need to have binoculars on it?”

In the October issue of the journal Conservation Biology, Cooke and his co-authors explained their concerns about the public sharing of animal GPS data. For one, the data can be used for non-conservation purposes: wildlife photography, for example, or even poaching. Some degree of human observation may be benign, but a well-known study published in 2004 showed that juvenile hoatzins from nests visited by eco-tourists had higher death rates, possibly because of their more frequent stress hormone surges.

Cooke isn’t saying migration data should never be shared, but he thinks the citizen science tracking projects should be rolled out more slowly and on a smaller scale, with carefully controlled studies to monitor any deleterious effects. And Fiedler, the stork researcher, agrees that caution is necessary, “especially with some species and the time of year.” The community of Movebank users, meanwhile, is in the early stages of developing guidelines to monitor and mitigate harms.

But when it comes to their research projects, both Fiedler and Fritz think citizen trackers yield far more benefit than harm.

Like it or not, they say, humans are affecting animal migrations, with powerlines, lit windows, pollution and bullets. As Fritz sees it, citizen trackers can make their communities care more about the struggles of migrating animals by sharing their names, stories, and even memories.

“It’s not just rational for people but emotional,” he says. “You protect what you know.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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As they replace fossil fuels, leading clean energy technologies – wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear energy – as well as emerging ones, such as electric vehicles and batteries, will reorganize power balances between energy producers and consumers and shift U.S. diplomatic interests.

Recognizing the massive shifts ahead, this week the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) set up a commission to examine the geopolitical effects of clean energy technologies as they displace fossil fuels. The commission will examine changing trade patterns, cybersecurity risks and rare-earth mineral access.

And in a timing coup, we’ve managed to simultaneously publish a new book chapter on exactly this topic! Our chapter adopts a U.S. perspective and examines many of the same themes that IRENA will take up, as well as several others. We imagine a future in which clean energy has substantially displaced fossil fuels by midcentury, and we describe five ways that the geopolitical landscape could shift as a result. Anticipating these shifts will require farsighted policymaking to safeguard U.S. interests and retain leadership through the transition from old to new energy systems. Here are the five most important geopolitical implications of a clean-energy future:
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1. America’s military footprint in the middle east could shrink

In a plausible future in which electric vehicle sales skyrocket and countries around the world stock up on strategic petroleum reserves, the U.S. economy will require less oil to function and will be more resilient to potential supply shocks. This could clear the way for America to scale back its longstanding strong military presence in the Middle East. This is likely to bring benefits to the United States, which could cut spending or redirect its military elsewhere, for example to the Asia-Pacific region, to address other pressing threats. Importantly, the United States does have regional interests beyond securing the free flow of oil; in a future dominated by clean energy, the Middle East’s oil-producing states might succumb to instability owing to lower oil revenues, posing security threats to the United States. Still, America could maintain a lighter footprint that mirrors its current military posture in sub-Saharan Africa, where its fewer bases focus more narrowly on counterterrorism operations.
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2. Russia and China could dominate the nuclear industry, thwarting U.S. geopolitical goals

Although nuclear energy seems to be in secular decline in the developed world, it may well thrive in the world’s emerging economies in the future. Many developing nations may opt for nuclear generation to fuel economic growth while working toward increasingly ambitious emissions reductions plans. And innovative reactor designs might also attract new countries to nuclear energy by lowering financial and geographical barriers to entry. However, the United States, which created and led the global nuclear market for decades, is not positioned to benefit. Instead, Russia and China, America’s two greatest geopolitical rivals, lead the growing market. They may use their dominance in nuclear exports to build up coteries of client states willing to advance their geopolitical interests. In a double whammy, global nuclear security standards – an important U.S. security concern – might degrade under Russian and Chinese leadership of the nuclear industry.
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3. A modernized power grid could strengthen North American cooperation but create cyber-threats

Clean energy technologies could transform the North American power grid. To balance increasing amounts of intermittent wind and solar generation, Canada, Mexico and the United States will be tempted to band together to interconnect their national grids. In such a scenario, solar energy from Baja California could power San Diego while wind power from the Oklahoma panhandle could light houses in Mexico City. Such connectivity would require deep levels of intergovernmental cooperation, which could anchor the continent even if other tensions over issues like trade persist.

The modern grid will also integrate an exponentially increasing number of internet-connected devices. While these technologies will help grid operators manage the complex two-way, decentralized electricity flows, they also expose the United States to cybersecurity risks. Unless the U.S. government invests in cyber-defense, resilience and deterrence, savvy adversaries like China, Iran and Russia could credibly threaten the United States.
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4. The rise of clean energy could provoke global trade wars

The clean energy transition could fundamentally reshape the global economy. Clean energy products are not inherently tied to resource rich nations like fossil fuels. As wind turbines, solar panels and batteries supplant fossil fuel predecessors, trade disputes could become more frequent, as countries seek to stake their claim as the new energy exporters. Indeed, the benefits an energy-dependent nation could yield from domestically producing and exporting its own energy may outweigh any penalty from flouting international trade rules. Yet the slow erosion of trade norms could threaten the global trade order from which the United States has reaped prosperity.
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5. America’s stance on climate and clean energy technology leadership could profoundly affect its global standing

While our chapter lays out grave geopolitical risks posed by a clean-energy transition, there are also important opportunities for the United States. If America leads on climate action and energy innovation in decades to come, it could carve out a new axis of international cooperation. As climate change rises on many countries’ diplomatic agendas, so too would the benefits that America yields from helping other nations address it. Such a strategy would also grease the wheels of diplomacy in other international arenas critical to U.S. interests. By contrast, if the United States cedes leadership to countries such as China, it will not only jeopardize prospects for limiting climate change but also alienate allies and adversaries alike.

A transition to clean energy will shake up the geopolitics of energy. IRENA’s commission on the topic recognizes the tectonic shifts ahead. Now it is up to U.S. policymakers to determine whether the shifting energy landscape will serve America’s interests or force it to cede its privileged position at the centre of global geopolitics.

This post is co-written by Sagatom Saha, Fulbright fellow in Ukraine and visiting fellow at the Dixi Group. It originally appeared on cfr.org. Read Varun Sivaram and Sagatom Saha’s new book chapter, “The Geopolitical Implications of a Clean Energy Future from the Perspective of the United States” in the edited volume, The Geopolitics of Renewables (Springer, 2018, ed. Dan Scholten) here.

The post Future earth appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot.”

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

My first job out of college was with a junior mining firm that had the prescience to buy the website investment.com just before the dot.com boom. This turned out to be the company’s most valuable asset, and soon justified a makeover from mining to new media.

My job was to write about personal finance. One of the first big projects was writing personal finance articles for a five-part series with a newsweekly which was sponsored by one of Canada’s big banks. The first week, my article was on ethical investment funds. The bank sponsor was not happy with the choice of topic as it didn’t have ethical or socially responsible funds on offer at the time. The next week, I wrote about how the mutual fund industry would consume 60 per cent of the average investor’s lifetime returns through high fees. The headline? “The feeling is not mutual.” The bank sponsor had a similar feeling about my article and the series was abruptly cancelled. Not long after, the dot.com era went dot.bomb and I was looking for my next gig.

I liked writing about how businesses impacted society and thought it would be nice to focus full-time on the topic. My friend Peter and I trundled down to the book store to see if there were any magazines of this ilk. We didn’t see anything, so Peter asked “Why don’t you just start one up?” That was the beginning of Corporate Knights, a crazy experiment – delivered to your doorstep via the Globe and Mail and Washington Post – to see if getting the right information into the right people’s hands would start to make a difference and lead to better decision-making.

Inspired by the lore of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, we set out to humanize capitalism by inspiring business leaders to embrace their noble instincts and be chivalrous. We have not shied away from calling out laggards, but our modus operandi has been to shine a light on the leaders and solutions, guided by the adage that “you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” This may sound naive to some, but it would be even more so to think we can solve big problems like global warming or poverty without harnessing the formidable power of business and markets.

Fifteen years into the experiment we have some preliminary findings. Our rankings are more than beauty contests; they are useful feedback mechanisms that can change corporate culture over time, provided the criteria are clear and credible. For instance, 15 years ago almost no large company linked the CEO bonus to sustainability targets; today the majority do. But whatever progress has been made, it is clearly not enough.

At current rates of progress we won’t reach gender equality in the boardroom until sometime after 2065. Inequality is so out of control that the world’s eight richest people have the same wealth as the poorest 50 per cent (3.6 billion people).  And half of all species could be extinct by the end of the century.

Who is running this show? It would be easy to lay the blame on businesses or government. But a big part of the answer is investors, which turns out to be you and me. About 500 million of us around the world have close to $100 trillion in savings that is invested by professionals who for the most part show zero regard for anything we might care about, aside from short-term financial performance against the benchmark (and have a difficult time at that).

Capital is oxygen for the economy. Investments have moral consequences. The demise of apartheid in South Africa was accelerated when investors made it a priority and turned off the taps. Where we invest today determines what kind of world we live in tomorrow. With the stakes so high, why are most investors – us – missing in action?

It’s not because we don’t care. Survey after survey shows that upwards of 70 per cent of us would prefer not to invest in an ethical vacuum, yet less than one per cent does anything about it.

It’s because we don’t know how. It has not been easy to figure out which investments align with a world we want to live in, or to understand the potential financial implications of investing with our values.

Stay tuned. That’s going to be changing soon.

The post Money matters appeared first on Corporate Knights.