This “clean and conventional energy superpower” construct pops up a lot in recent government speeches and announcements and was the framing for the prime minister’s “Forward Guidance: Canada’s Energy Future” video released just before Canada Day.

The argument is a double-barrelled one.

Let’s start with the clean part of the equation: looking into the future, the world will be powered by electricity, not fossil fuels. Electricity is inherently more efficient, and therefore cheaper for consumers. It’s also something that can be produced domestically at lower and lower costs, and something that we can control, freeing the Canadian economy from the volatility and unpredictability of foreign-caused oil price spikes.

Canada needs to lay track to prosper in this emerging Electric Age, but in the meantime the Carney government argues that the path to that cleaner future will be paved with the profits from expanded oil and gas production. Maximizing this profit requires curbing the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions so that Canadian oil and gas is the “greenest” option in the marketplace (something, it should be noted, that Canadian companies have been claiming for years). This is the “conventional” part of the argument, and there is no doubt, after last week, that the federal government is prepared to throw everything but the kitchen sink at it to make it a reality.

In fact, it appears Ottawa is even prepared to ignore an important aspect of the recently signed Alberta–federal memorandum of understanding related to the necessity of the new pipeline having a private-sector proponent. With none in the offing (which Canadian Climate Institute board chair Peter Nicholson predicted would be the case in a widely read recent article) the Alberta and federal governments are contemplating up to 90% public ownership.

What isn’t yet clear is the extent to which the federal government is prepared to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to sparking the “clean” side of its energy superpower ambitions.

The prime minister’s statements last week could not have been more categorical. Invoking the name of the visionary founder of Ontario Hydro, he said, “Our new plan will help build clean energy on a scale that would astound even Sir Adam Beck.” Later in his video, the PM underlined the broad societal benefits of electrification: “The path to affordability is electrification. The path to competitiveness is electrification. The path to sustainability is electrification.” He’s on solid ground with all of this, and recent Canadian Climate Institute research underlines this point.

Thus far, however, the rhetorical enthusiasm for “clean” has not been backed by on-the-ground support at a scale similar to what’s rolling out for “conventional” projects. The duelling announcements last week were a case in point. The press conference by Minister Hodgson referenced above was for a federal government contribution of $26 million for 17 clean-energy projects. A couple of days prior, Prime Minister Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced that Canadian taxpayers may be on the hook for up to 90% of a $35- to $43-billion price tag.

Millions of dollars for “clean” versus billions for “conventional.”

The next few months will provide no shortage of key moments that put the federal government’s “clean” commitments to the test.

Will Saskatchewan keep burning coal in violation of a Harper-era policy? Will the dispute between Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec over hydro development on the lower Churchill River be resolved? Will Alberta continue its de facto moratorium on low-cost renewables while building new unabated natural gas plants for artificial intelligence?

There will also be ongoing tests of the commitment to shrink the emissions of Canadian oil and gas production: it’s not clear at the moment whether the revised industrial carbon price will actually enable the long-promised Pathways carbon-capture project.

After last week, it’s clear that Carney intends to forge an entirely new way forward on climate and energy – one he views as more strategic and sustainable than climate policies of the past and aligned with a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. In his own words: “The climate crisis is still with us and our commitment to fighting it is absolute.”

Achieving that goal requires deliberate policy choices. Net-zero isn’t a switch that can be flipped in 2045; becoming a clean-energy superpower requires steady, sustained effort. The most interesting question to watch in the months ahead is whether Carney’s government assembles a new climate and clean-growth plan with sufficiently ambitious detail to achieve the outcomes the prime minister has now personally set.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute.

The post Getting serious about clean energy in Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But what if the projects Carney is fast-tracking will not actually make Canada stronger? Most of the energy-related projects of national interest currently on the table for billions in taxpayer subsidies and other support would see Canada further expanding fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Many of these are likely to be terrible investments, further entrenching our economy with inefficient and declining energy platforms – at the exact moment when technological advances are driving many global buyers to rapidly shift their energy systems in the other direction.

Instead of propping up sunsetting industries, we think Canada needs a hard pivot. Our organization Adamant spent this spring working with many smart partners on a vision built around saying “yes”: yes to large-scale, transformative, distributed energy megaprojects. If these projects are supported in the same way as fossil fuel and nuclear megaprojects, they would deliver more jobs, more economic independence and help with affordability – all with less market risk and far less pollution.

Here are five clean megaprojects that are worth building a nation around.

Triple our clean-energy capacity

Imagine paying the equivalent of 25 cents a litre to fill your tank. Imagine your heating bill dropping by half because your heat pump runs on cheap, clean electricity. Imagine hundreds of thousands of new jobs in every part of the country, while Canadian entrepreneurs and factories win global contracts because their products are made with clean power.

All of that is possible, but only if Canada builds enough clean electricity to make it happen. The Public Policy Forum notes that Canada’s power output will need to be two to three times larger by 2050 than it is today and that we need to build more electricity infrastructure in the next 25 years than we built in the previous 100.

Carney’s grid plan announced in May is a good start, but the vision should be more ambitious, it should happen faster, and it should go all-in on clean. First Nations are already showing the way. The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Alberta owns three solar farms. Henvey Inlet Wind is a massive project on Georgian Bay, generating enough power for a quarter-million Ontarians. Almost all of B.C. Hydro’s recent clean-power proponents are Indigenous co-owned. Let’s keep going.

Get serious about energy efficiency

Energy efficiency could be Canada’s most cost-effective economic lever. Building efficiency into our aging buildings and homes would cut energy costs by more than 60% and create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Every dollar invested in energy efficiency produces $4 to $7 in gross domestic product growth, a productivity multiplier larger than virtually any other infrastructure investment category.

With two-thirds of Canadian buildings built before 2000, transforming residential and commercial heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems is a big undertaking, yes, and will require an integrated approach. But the payoffs are immediate.

The results will be worth it, driving down energy bills while creating up to 200,000 jobs in all areas of the country. Good, local jobs that are tariff- and AI-proof. The question is whether Canada is ready to treat energy-saving innovations as the nation-building priorities they are.

Wire Canada together

Canada has some of the world’s best wind, solar and hydropower resources, and huge geothermal potential. The problem is that these resources are spread across provinces that don’t have the transmission lines to share them.

Right now, more than 80% of Canada’s electricity trade flows south to the newly unreliable United States, while our own provinces barely trade with each other. This weakens grid reliability and saps local economies.

Wire the country together with new transmission lines and the payoff is real: doubling the B.C.–Alberta connection alone is projected to return nearly $6 for every dollar spent. Nationally, upgrading the grid would create tens of thousands of jobs. The Ontario East–West Tie, a single 450-kilometre line, generated 2,600 person-years of work and more than $200 million in economic benefit, with Indigenous workers making up more than half the crew.

Revolutionize the housing industry

The scale of our housing crisis demands big new ideas. The government’s Build Canada Homes initiative tinkers around the edges, delivering only 26,000 homes over five years, a sliver of the half a million we need every year just to regain some margin of affordability. Here’s something that will: a massive smart-modular-homes industry built right here in Canada.

Canadian workers in regional factories could build 150,000 energy-efficient modular homes per year by 2050. These high-quality, high-tech homes manufactured in worker-friendly conditions are faster and cheaper to build and offer residents permanently low utility bills thanks to innovative energy-efficient technologies – also made in Canada. We could create up to 100,000 jobs and significant affordability benefits for people locked out of today’s broken housing markets.

Fanciful? Sweden already did it in the 1960s, building a million homes in 10 years and turning prefabrication into a national industry that still works today. Japan has produced an average of 150,000 units of modular housing per year since 1995. Why not Canada?

Unlock Canada’s geothermal bedrock

Geothermal is the biggest clean-energy opportunity that most Canadians have never even heard of. We sometimes forget that the earth under our feet is an infinite source of energy. Canada produces today only enough geothermal energy to power a small town, while Europe runs more than 150 geothermal power plants that already supply electricity to 11 million people. That’s on top of another 400 district energy systems that provide direct heating and cooling.

If low-cost, always-on energy isn’t enticing enough, geothermal uses virtually the same drilling skills and equipment as the oil and gas sector. As the technology advances, it is opening up what the International Energy Agency predicts could be a $3.5-trillion industry. Act boldly and Canada could be a global leader in geothermal energy – both as a low-emissions domestic energy source and a booming global technology export industry.

With our abundant clean natural resources, highly educated population and advanced economy, Canada has significant advantages in the global energy transition. Instead of doubling down on the dirty and inefficient energy systems the world is rapidly leaving behind, why not build Canada better? These clean, distributed energy projects will provide more jobs, save Canadians money and align us with the direction the rest of the world is fast pursuing.

Excited? Read our full project plans on the Build Canada Better section of the Adamant website and sign up to use your voice to advocate for better choices from our governments.

Jason Mogus is the chair of Adamant, a new public policy organization promoting smarter economic choices for Canada. Tyee Bridge is a journalist and researcher and a coauthor of the net-zero scenario report Jobs for Today. 

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Since 1983, Canada has experienced more than 300 catastrophic weather events (extreme weather occurrences causing more than $30 million in insured losses; $25 million prior to 2022). Four decades ago, Canada averaged about two catastrophic events annually; by the mid-2020s, that figure climbed to roughly 15 per year. From 2009 through 2025, insured losses from climate-related disasters jumped to average nearly $3 billion annually versus $400 million to $700 million typically each year from 1983 to 2008.

As disturbing as these figures are, they do not capture the full extent of losses. For every $1 of insured losses, there are usually another $3 to $4 of uninsured costs. Nor do insurance figures convey the lives lost or the full extent of the economic, financial and health impacts of catastrophic weather. The former includes the tragic loss of 619 lives during British Columbia’s heat dome in 2021. The latter includes large gross domestic product and income losses and the much higher government spending that occurs. For example, total economic loss estimates and the large-scale government firefighting and emergency assistance for the widespread Canadian wildfires in 2023 exceed $10 billion.

These and other tragic impacts and escalating costs from extreme weather make greater resiliency through climate adaptation both essential and long overdue.

Yet three major political barriers prevent effective Canadian adaptation from being a key policy goal: lack of understanding, inadequate will and weak policy capacity. The problem of understanding is that adaptation is not seen as core economic and fiscal policy as well as crucial environmental and health policy. The problem of will reflects the longstanding, excessive focus of government on announcing policy versus genuine and practical action, and the dominance of other priorities in the political agenda. The problem of capacity is evident in the modest funding for, and limited in-house expertise of Ottawa and the provinces in, adaptation design and implementation.

Creating a national office for climate adaptation is a critical step toward addressing these deficiencies. A national office would help lessen problems from the lack of understanding and political will. It would provide much-needed analytical and advisory capacity to improve federal policy design and implementation.

1. Lack of political understanding

Climate adaptation and mitigation are both essential

Mitigation means preventing or reducing greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change. This is an existential Canadian need now and, especially, over the medium to long term. Adaptation refers to protecting or lessening the impacts on people, business and infrastructure from climate change and extreme weather. Adaptation is vital to contain the rising costs and risks of climate change while giving Canada the opportunity to make substantive progress in mitigation.

Effective climate-change policy comprises adaptation and mitigation. It is a false narrative that there is choice between them. Mitigation depends upon adaptation to allow the time for its measures to succeed. Adaptation will not work if climate change is not mitigated. Success depends crucially on both.

Adaptation is a fundamental economic, fiscal and financial requirement

Federal adaptation funding and resources as well as program implementation have been a small fraction of those for mitigation. Leading experts point to the imbalance of “$1 spent on mitigation for every $0.05 spent on adaptation,” or approximately a 20:1 ratio. Adaptation has received too little federal and provincial attention apart from weather disasters. Even then, governments’ focus tends to ebb away quickly once the emergency phase ends.

Ottawa’s funding approach, and that of most provinces, demonstrates a clear lack of understanding that climate adaptation is fundamental economic and fiscal policy. In addition, populist leaders at both levels continue to make deeply flawed arguments such as there being a choice between economic growth and preserving natural assets (e.g., wetlands and forests) that are critical to adaptation and mitigation. They have created and sustained the mistaken view that Canadians cannot afford essential adaptation investments.

Yet the reality is the exact opposite. Wetlands lessen flood damage and risk. Forests sequester carbon and help regulate water flows. Ecosystems help reduce coastal communities’ impacts from storms and erosion. Urban green spaces reduce heat stress and improve public-health outcomes. Moreover, adaptation requires sustaining and enhancing natural (green) infrastructure and improving the resilience of built (grey) infrastructure. Canadian communities, businesses, households and governments depend heavily upon high-quality green and grey infrastructure for their economic, financial and health needs.

Extensive international and Canadian research shows that climate change and catastrophic weather reduce gross domestic product, productivity and incomes. This occurs through multiple channels. Supply is reduced from damage to utility, transportation and communication networks as well as harm to or destruction of commercial buildings and equipment. Extreme heat reduces workers’ cognitive and physical capacity, while heat stress and wildfire smoke increase absenteeism. Lesser income from these supply impacts reduces key sources of demand such as investment and consumption, further decreasing GDP.

Increasing fiscal costs result from surging expenses for emergency assistance and infrastructure repairs and growing need to invest in resilient infrastructure. A 2026 study on proactively upgrading grey infrastructure assets to adapt to extreme rainfall and rising heat estimated that Canada could save up to $9 billion annually in net costs compared to not making these adaptation investments. The savings exceed $4 billion per year relative to a reactive approach, where upgrades are made only at the time of asset replacement.

For businesses, extreme weather means higher insurance premiums plus the costs of immediate repairs, long-term recovery and investment in more resilient offices, factories, warehouses and equipment. Individuals face income disruptions, time away from work and lower personal productivity. Households are confronted by fewer mortgage options in high-risk areas, plus repair and rebuilding costs not covered by insurance.

2. Inadequate political will

Too little long-term thinking and the absence of a systems approach

It is difficult for governments to think long-term when acute crises and large-scale shocks occur, especially when these create a polycrisis whereby multiple, inter-related crises and shocks occur simultaneously. From the pandemic and the surge in inflation and interest rates in the early 2020s to the ongoing geopolitical shocks (as of June 2026) from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, major wars in the Middle East, and structural U.S. disruptions in trade, defence and Canada–U.S. relations, the polycrisis has led to near-term needs dominating government focus.

The polycrisis challenges have meant that long-term thinking and strategy to deal with climate risk – despite its chronic nature becoming devastatingly acute this decade – received far too little attention from Ottawa and the provinces apart from mainly short-term responses to catastrophic weather events.

This insufficient long-term thinking has been compounded by the absence of a systems approach. The lack of systems policymaking was and is evident in the priority of short-term economic (e.g., building housing in high-risk flood areas) and fiscal (e.g., delaying investments in resilient infrastructure) benefits at the expense of higher medium- and long-term costs. It also meant that serious harms to the environment and health of Canadians occurred from the failure to factor the adverse effects on these related systems into policy.

Policy and strategy announcements with very modest follow-through

Over the past 15 years, there have been numerous federal announcements of adaptation programs and initiatives, culminating in the 2023 National Adaptation Strategy. Despite the proliferation of these efforts from 2015 onwards, and various laudable objectives and selected notable content in the NAS, federal spending on adaptation during the Justin Trudeau years was a small fraction of the outlays on mitigation.

Under the Mark Carney government, mitigation remains the main climate-change policy focus, even though overall funding and policy support have fallen compared with the Trudeau era. While the National Adaptation Strategy remains in place, adaptation spending continues to be much lower than on mitigation, accounting for only a small share of climate-related expenditures from 2025 through June 2026. Ottawa’s emphasis has been on carbon capture and electrification to fight climate change and, more recently, a renewed goal of sustaining natural capital, which included citing nature assets’ role in adaptation. For their part, provincial funding and focus continue to be insufficient.

Looking at just local government needs alone, a 2020 analysis determined that municipal infrastructure and other local adaptation requirements were $5.3 billion annually, a figure that would be substantially higher in mid-2026 given inflation over the past six years and the increasing occurrence and impacts of catastrophic weather events. It bears emphasis that this figure does not include the spending and investment needed by firms, homeowners and senior levels of government to achieve more robust adaptation resilience.

3. Lack of policy capacity

Resilience in Ottawa’s nation-building strategy will be crucially dependent on building right the first time. As of June 2026, more than $25 billion in federal capital spending has been announced in defence, housing and other infrastructure. Important additional investments in these areas include multibillion-dollar commitments from the private sector.

Given the scale and pace of these investments, it is imperative that Canadian infrastructure and other economic assets be designed and constructed from the outset to better withstand extreme weather. Resilience needs to be embedded in the design and construction of military installations and other critical infrastructure such as transportation, energy, hospitals, water systems and emergency operations. Greater climate adaptation in new and existing housing is also vital for homeowners and communities alike.

Yet the federal capacity to make policy and to advise and assess these resilience needs is far too disparate, limited and uncoordinated.

Ottawa’s robust strengths in climate forecasting and weather analysis are clear. Significant specific knowledge about natural assets exists in the public sector, including Statistics Canada’s expertise from its Census of Environment efforts and selected staff in leading municipalities such as Calgary and Mississauga that have implemented unaudited disclosures of natural assets on their balance sheets. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s work in housing and climate change resiliency is a notable advantage.

Yet far more capacity is present in the non-profit sector. Examples include the advanced economic analytical and modelling capabilities on climate change impacts in organizations such as the Canadian Climate Institute and the Smart Prosperity Institute. Robust technical abilities in adaptation analysis, practical implementation and related expertise reside in leading national entities like the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation and the Climate Risk Institute. Various government-funded non-profit regional climate service entities – CLIMAtlantic, Ouranos (in Quebec), the Ontario Resource Centre for Climate Adaptation, ClimateWest in the Prairies, and the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium in British Columbia and the Yukon – offer local and regional adaptation knowledge and capacity.

The problem is that not enough adaptation intelligence and know-how resides within the federal government – even though it designs national policy and plays a key liaison role with provincial and municipal governments in climate adaptation. Ottawa’s capabilities are neither sufficient nor are they set up to provide sustained analytical and information support, let alone coordination advice, for: the federal policy reset, especially the massive investments in defence, housing, infrastructure and major projects; and for initiatives across two or all three levels of government.

The latter problem is particularly acute for most municipalities, especially small and medium-size local governments, given their constraints in budgets, staff and systems. The adaptation challenge is accelerating faster and in more complex ways than municipalities can handle.

Beyond these absolute needs and problems, the very large disparity in resources, especially staffing versus other federal priorities, stands out. The modest budgets and other resources for federal adaptation policymaking and program design and implementation contrast starkly with the funding and staffing provided to defence, housing and infrastructure. The Major Projects Office and Defence Investment Agency, set up in mid-2025 and early 2026, respectively, illustrate the far greater priority and support federally for these areas.

It is hard to describe federal support in terms of funding and other institutional resources for adaptation other than as decidedly inadequate given the creation of these and other new agencies in the first year of the Carney era, the financing provided to them, and their respective mandates to operate as separate entities from government departments and to hire an array of private-sector expertise to build their “in-house” capacity. 

4. Why a national office helps address these challenges

A national office for climate adaptation would provide Canada with a much-needed policy focal point, bolster federal analytical and information capacity, and create a non-partisan adaptation champion within government. Its ability to hire experts from the non-profit and private sectors should be stressed. The Major Projects Office’s and the Defence Investment Agency’s successes in attracting non-public-sector expertise are notable. Indeed, the scale and scope of these two new entities relative to traditional federal departments merit highlighting even though we are not advocating for similar scope and powers for a national office’s role.

Canada’s adaptation policy needs to have a clear catalyst and robust assessment capacity. A national office for climate adaptation would be a central entity to help address the vast array of design implementation and other construction, equipment and systems requirements for effective climate resilience in defence, housing, infrastructure and major projects. These tasks include building grey infrastructure assets for resilience from the start of their design and construction. In green infrastructure, examples include understanding and applying the lessons from leading countries such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in integrating natural capital and ecosystem service information into public policy to boost resiliency and mitigation such as in new infrastructure, land use and housing development.

Lastly, in strongly advocating for a national office for climate adaptation, we want to avoid being overly prescriptive in its specifics. Such detail is beyond the scope of this article, including whether this entity would be a new agency or whether it would report to the Privy Council Office, the Prime Minister’s Office or the minister of the environment, climate change and nature. We also recommend solid links to Public Safety Canada and the Ministry of Finance given adaptation’s importance for both.

The crucial minimum aspects for a national office for climate adaptation are (1) its ability to hire private- and non-profit-sector expertise and (2) a mandate to examine, assess and provide information support on adaptation requirements across applicable federal, provincial and municipal activities.

Conclusion

Extreme weather and climate change continue to be escalating threats in Canada. Major prairie hailstorms; serious flooding in central Ontario, Montreal and the Prairies; and severe wildfires in Western Canada and the Northwest Territories have occurred already in 2026. With El Niño underway, the likelihood of climate extremes globally, rising costs and growing risks for Canada are clear.

In 2015, then Bank of England Governor Mark Carney presciently identified and described the tragedy of the horizon from the severe repercussions of climate change occurring well beyond the short-term focus of political and business cycles, and of technocratic authorities. In 2021, while UN special envoy on climate action and finance, he devoted a whole chapter to “Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon” in his book Value(s).

The reality with climate adaptation in Canada today is that the tragedy is no longer on the horizon. The tragedy is unfolding now and will be far worse unless an effective national office for climate adaptation is created and soon.

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

Hugh O’Reilly sits on a number of boards including the Rick Hansen Foundation, is a member of the advisory committee for the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation and is the former CEO of a Canadian public sector pension plan. 

The post A national office for climate adaptation in Canada is essential and overdue appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Interest in Canada is growing by major European investors as they shift assets out of the United States to flee the chaos of the Trump administration. European investors also want data on corporate climate emissions, risks and policies to satisfy stringent sustainability reporting rules there, and demand for environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment funds.

Unfortunately, Canada is poorly positioned to meet Europe’s requirements for climate information. Policy work to align Canadian corporate disclosure rules with global climate reporting guidelines was halted in April 2025. Regulators said the time wasn’t right to impose new disclosure regulations given the uncertainty of rapidly changing economic and geopolitical conditions.

In response, researchers at the Institute for Sustainable Finance (ISF) at Queen’s University in Kingston have mounted a major initiative to study this disclosure gap. The project points to a firm conclusion: the absence of mandatory climate disclosure is hurting the country’s financial independence.

In a study published in early June, From U.S. Dependence to Global Capital: The Role of Climate Disclosure, ISF researchers examined changes in foreign investment in 206 Canadian companies after the United States announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs in early 2025. They also compared how much investment changed between firms without formal climate disclosures and companies reporting under the globally recognized Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).

Results surprising

TCFD-reporting firms experienced a 24.6% higher increase in foreign holdings over non-reporting companies after the Liberation Day tariffs.

“I was really surprised how strong the results were comparing the Canadian companies that disclose climate risk and the companies that don’t,” says Yrjo Koskinen, a finance professor at the University of Calgary and research director at ISF.

The 24.6% differential “is a strong, strong result,” he says in an interview. European investors accounted for almost all of the difference between TCFD-reporting firms and non-TCFD companies. “It shows that climate disclosures are very important for European institutional investors.” (The differential is based on a model of capital measures controlling for factors such as firm size and sector and market-wide trends. It helps to better isolate the TCFD reporting effect.)

The ISF discussed the results of this study along with other research at a roundtable event on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 15 attended by representatives of business, the investment industry and academics. The roundtable was moderated by Daniel Tisch, chief executive officer of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce.

Evidence presented at the roundtable showed that the benefits of mandatory climate disclosure outweigh corporate costs, according to a briefing note on the discussion. Stronger disclosure is associated with better liquidity of company shares, a lower risk of share price crashes, more efficient risk pricing and stronger access to foreign capital.

Given that 40 jurisdictions are currently using or moving toward the global disclosure guidelines of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), Canada “is increasingly out of step with major markets,” the briefing note states.

Several roundtable participants also argued that publicly available ISSB disclosures will become more important as artificial intelligence models become more prevalent in ESG and financial analysis.

An illustration of how AI is being used in ESG analysis was revealed earlier this year when Norges Bank disclosed that it uses Anthropic’s Claude AI model to continually screen for ethical and reputation risks of companies in Norway’s $2-trillion pension fund.

“Standardized disclosure will become even more strategically important as AI increasingly shapes investment analysis,” the ISF briefing note states. “In that environment, weak, inconsistent or fragmented Canadian analysis could place Canadian issuers at a growing disadvantage in AI-assisted capital markets.”

Regulators continue to be opposed

Despite the growing body of evidence for mandatory reporting, the Canadian Securities Administrators – the network of provincial securities commissions – is adamant that its pause will continue. “The pause remains in effect until otherwise signaled by the CSA,” a spokesperson writes in an email to Corporate Knights.

One of the barriers to mandatory climate reporting in Canada is the power of the oil and gas industry, which has opposed mandatory reporting on climate scenario analysis and end-use emissions. Corporate reporting issues are also complicated by the recent oil-pipeline and carbon-capture agreement between Alberta and the federal government. By significantly raising oil-sands production without assurance of long-term demand or guaranteed carbon dioxide reduction, the agreement raises the industry’s climate risks.

The Alberta Securities Commission has expressed skepticism about mandatory climate reporting, saying disclosure costs are high for small companies, disclosure increases liability concerns, and mandatory reporting could hurt the industry’s competitiveness with the United States. Since the Canadian Securities Administrators is a network of provincial securities commissions, large provinces like Alberta can veto changes.

In a commentary published in the Toronto Star, Koskinen and Tisch responded to the Alberta Securities Commission’s concerns. They argue that mandatory climate reporting should be phased in, starting with large companies that are responsible for the majority of Canada’s carbon dioxide emissions. They also argue that the focus should be on “straightforward and impactful” information, such as direct Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions.

Interest grows as investment summit approaches

The ISF research initiative comes at an important moment in policymaking as the government prepares for an international institutional investment summit in Toronto in September.

European institutional investors are expected to form a large contingent of the asset managers, investment funds and pension plans invited by Prime Minister Mark Carney. Climate change is expected to be top of mind among the European representatives after Europe’s record-breaking hot temperatures this spring and summer. They’ll be looking for companies that have low emissions and negligible climate risk, especially if they are involved in climate transition sectors, such as clean power, environmental industries, green steel and critical minerals.

The federal government is pushing for enhanced climate disclosure even though the provinces are directly responsible for securities regulation. On June 5, Ryan Turnbull, member of Parliament for Whitby and parliamentary secretary to the minister of finance, announced an additional $10 million in funding for the International Sustainability Standards Board office in Montreal, in addition to $8 million already allocated in 2022. Turnbull, who attended the ISF roundtable on April 15, has been a strong advocate inside the government for sustainable investment policies.

Turnbull was not available for comment for this article, but a Finance Department spokesperson says the federal government “is working closely with provinces and territories to support the uptake of internationally aligned climate disclosure standards across the economy. Roundtables that bring together investors, issuers of climate disclosures, academics and other experts provide valuable feedback to inform this work and help to ensure a broad range of perspectives is considered. The government will provide an update on its engagement with Canadian regulators in the coming months.”

Despite the foot-dragging by the provincial securities commissions, Koskinen believes policy is moving forward in Canada. “For the first time in several years I am optimistic that we can actually get something done,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Time to start implementing mandatory climate disclosures in a gradual and pragmatic way.”

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

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The Wolastoq, also known as the Saint John River, is a nearly 700-kilometre waterway that winds from Quebec and Maine to the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick. It’s home to several species at risk: wood turtles nest by its shores, pygmy snaketail dragonflies buzz on the water’s surface, and wild Atlantic salmon swim upstream. It’s easy to see why its name means “beautiful and bountiful river” in the language of the Wolastoqiyik, or the “people of the beautiful river.” The river is central to their identity and culture.

But in the Wolastoq watershed and the cities and towns it sustains, the impacts of increased industrialization and the changing climate are felt deeply. Today, the river is crisscrossed by roads and rail lines, disrupted by large hydroelectric dams, and bordered by farms and shoreline real estate that often run right up to the water’s edge. As a result, the Wolastoq has lost much of its ability to absorb surges in water levels during winter snow melts and heavy spring rains. Surrounding communities are forced to battle intense flooding when the river jumps its banks, causing costly damages. In 2019, record-level flooding carried $93.2 million in damages, and thousands of residents were forced to evacuate. Severe flooding occurred again in 2023, and the province is bracing itself for more to come in 2026.

Restoring ecosystems along the Wolastoq – such as by planting trees, working with farmers to restore degraded agricultural sites by riverbanks, and increasing waterside vegetation to rehabilitate floodplains – could be key to a multi-layered solution. To make those opportunities a reality, WWFCanada and Wawanesa Insurance, a national mutual insurance company headquartered in Winnipeg, have teamed up in supporting local partners to help the river better absorb and slow water currents during extreme events, enhancing flood protection and other forms of natural resilience.

Investing for impact

For Wawanesa, which has a strong membership base in New Brunswick, the Wolastoq is a logical place to focus part of its annual $2 million investments in climate resilience throughout Canada. Wawanesa partnered with WWF-Canada because of its proven track record, strong technical expertise and deep relationships with local experts and community members, says Mitch McEwen, the insurer’s director of sustainability, climate resilience and community impact. “Our contribution is bringing the focus on reducing climate related losses,” he adds.

In New Brunswick, through their partnership with Wawanesa and others, including government and private foundations, WWF-Canada supports on-the-ground experts to identify local restoration projects with the highest impact both for people and nature.

In the town of Edmundston, which experiences flooding year after year, this funding enabled project design and site assessments for floodplain restoration work with broad community support.

“We’re using nature-based solutions like planting native trees and shrubs to mitigate flood risk and deliver several environmental and social benefits,” says Stéphanie Paradis-Léger, a researcher in applied ecology with INNOV, a local organization supported by WWF-Canada and Wawanesa. Paradis-Léger says the positive outcomes from their work became quickly apparent. “During a freeze thaw in December, ice jams formed, but the restored floodplain held the overflow, likely preventing flooding,” she reports.

Long-term advantages

Nature-based solutions are not only highly effective in the short term, but they also help companies identify where their philanthropic investments can have the greatest impact on climate resilience. Investments in restoring nature don’t require as much maintenance compared to other types of infrastructure, and they tend to improve progressively as ecosystems develop and recover. “Naturebased solutions get better over time, generally speaking, as they become more mature,” McEwen says.

Another core benefit of nature-based solutions is reflected in WWF-Canada’s overarching priority for comprehensive ecosystem regeneration. In the Wolastoq watershed, investments in things like restoring wetlands and planting native species along riverbanks can offer significant benefits to the more than 500,000 people who live in the region, as well as the wildlife – which includes nearly 50 species at risk of extinction – and the land and river ecosystems.

“We really strive to create ecosystems where both wildlife thrives and also the humans that live in those communities,” says Alex Portman, head of corporate partnerships at WWF-Canada. For example, by doing restoration in the upper reaches of the river near Edmundston, WWF-Canada is creating cascading benefits for the entire watershed, notes Lauren Stead, senior manager of ecosystem restoration at WWF-Canada.

Restoration takes root

Restoration projects in the Wolastoq are part of a broader 10-year strategic plan WWF-Canada is deploying through to 2030 called Regenerate Canada, which has three pillars: 1) catalyze the restoration of one million hectares of degraded ecosystems across the country, 2) steward and protect 100 million hectares of ecosystems, and 3) reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere by 30 million tons using nature-based solutions. “All of the work we do ladders up into these three main goals,” Portman says. “For corporate partners, that means their investment is directed toward science-based, high-impact projects that deliver measurable results on the ground.”

As restoration projects take root in the Wolastoq watershed, WWFCanada is working to activate more impactful partnerships in the region and beyond. For its part, Wawanesa is on board for more of this type of collaboration, where “partners with the local technical expertise drive a coordinated approach to identifying the appropriate solutions that actually get them off the ground,” McEwen says. “We hope to be able to scale that over time.”

Learn more about partnering with WWF-Canada: wwf.ca/partnerships

Illustrations by Chanelle Nibbelink

The post Rebuilding resilience along the Wolastoq appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The perennially besieged airline industry responded by cancelling thousands of flights, cutting in-flight passenger services and threatening to impose fuel surcharges on tickets. The European Union also announced it would seek to “optimize” jet fuel distribution among member states and look for alternative supply.

You’d think this geopolitical convulsion might mark the long-promised inflection point for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), a class of biodiesel additives seen by some as a way of weaning air travel from its reliance on fossil fuels. “Iran really is a ‘sharpen the markets’ case for domestic-waste-based SAF,” says Chris Cooper, CEO of XCF Global, a Reno, Nevada–based producer. The war, he adds, “[exposes] the fragility of the fossil crude inputs and supply. We’re fighting with other countries just to produce a product that brings more conflict to the global economy.”

Yet the reality is that SAF – despite years of research and development and policy stimulus on both sides of the Atlantic – has failed to establish itself as a bona fide low-carbon additive to one of the highest-emitting fossil fuels. There has been a conspicuous silence on the part of aviation players that, not so long ago, enthusiastically promoted SAF as a pathway to reduce the sector’s carbon consumption and meet its climate goals. Neither Air Canada nor the Greater Toronto Airports Authority responded to requests for comment on their own adoption timelines. Nova Sustainable Fuels, the company behind a planned multibillion-dollar SAF plant in Nova Scotia, won’t talk. And Delta yanked references to SAF from its sustainability reports a month into the war, Bloomberg reported.

All this circumspection is telling. If SAF can really decarbonize the aviation industry, why are the proponents staying quiet in the midst of the worst fossil fuel crisis since the 1970s?

Mixed signals

Among all transportation modes, aviation has been the most resistant to the adoption of alternative fuels, despite years of efforts to develop jet fuel substitutes. About 5% of fuel for road transport comes from low-carbon sources, such as biofuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Aviation has seen the highest growth in fuel demand; however, SAF still accounts for only 0.7% of all jet fuel production, with European carriers among the main users.

Not so long ago, the prospect of fostering an SAF market and supply chain generated all kinds of official and policy enthusiasm, such as the “SAF Grand Challenge Roadmap” concocted in 2022 by the U.S. departments of Energy, Transportation and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency. The European Union last year even mandated that all jet fuel supplied at European airports contain 2% SAF, with that benchmark rising to 70% by 2050.

The Trump administration has gutted climate policy, yet the waning of enthusiasm for SAF predates his election. In 2024, the International Air Transport Association bemoaned the “disappointingly slow growth” in SAF production, despite all the mid-pandemic progressive hype. “Governments are sending mixed signals to oil companies, which continue to receive subsidies for their exploration and production of fossil oil and gas,” the association’s director general, Willie Walsh, said at the time. “Investors in new-generation fuel producers seem to be waiting for guarantees of easy money before going full throttle.”

The regulatory nudges didn’t seem to be working. “Several countries have put policies and regulations in place to increase SAF use, such as SAF mandates in the European Union and the United Kingdom,” the International Energy Agency noted in a 2025 report. “In the accelerated case, the global SAF share climbs to 15% by 2035.” However, the operative term here is “accelerated,” which makes it more of a fond wish than a takeoff trajectory.

In the United States, some of the SAF-related tax credit from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act survived Trump’s backsliding. But the new credit tends to favour biodiesel, says Andy Navarrete, a researcher for the International Council on Clean Transportation, so SAF production remains limited.

Technical holdups

The delays in SAF adoption are also a direct result of the difficulty in ensuring that the chemistry behind these formulations is both reliable and resilient. “We identified very early on that aviation was going to be a particularly difficult sector to decarbonize,” says renewable-energy expert Warren Mabee, a Canada Research Chair at Queen’s University. Jet fuel, he says, has to remain stable under extreme temperatures and pressure changes to ensure that planes don’t suddenly experience a loss of power in mid-air.

Emerging SAF technologies that rely on cellulosic materials, like corn husks and other types of agricultural residues, or certain forms of municipal solid waste, promise lower carbon emissions but have not yet reached full commercial viability, Navarrete says. “There is a good amount of that material that’s available, but it’s not easy to convert into a liquid fuel.”

So for now, the adoption continues to be dogged by the same sorts of hard questions that orbit around other types of biofuels – namely, the source and quality of the feedstock. The EU discourages the use of waste cooking oils because of limited supply, even though such feedstocks, on average, promise an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional jet fuel and are considered to be the least expensive feedstock. “SAFs that use crops as feedstock may not reduce life-cycle [greenhouse gas] emissions at all,” Navarrete adds. “When land is cleared and repurposed for agriculture, carbon stored in the soil and vegetation can be released.”

The EU, in turn, has pushed producers to disclose the full life cycle of their production methods.

Sustainable aviation fuel made from virgin oilseeds like canola, Mabee points out, also tends to be insufficiently dense in terms of chemical makeup, rendering it less suitable for power-hungry jet engines. “This is one of the things about these fuels, they’re not chemically identical to what goes into today’s jet fuels,” he says. “But it has to be similar enough that the engines respond the same way, because there’s really no room for error in these fuels.”

Alternatives to the alternative

Some investors are looking at new alternatives to the old alternatives, such as waste biomass from forestry or municipal solid waste. Nova Sustainable Fuels, based in Halifax, late last year won conditional approval for a large-scale SAF and renewable methanol processing plant powered by wind and solar energy. The facility is to be located in Goldboro, N.S., and will run on a diet of sawmill waste and underbrush from forest management operations, with the resulting SAF exported overseas.

While the company hasn’t formally released the size of the investment, recent media reports estimate that it will cost $4 to $6 billion, with the bulk of the financing coming from Octopus Energy, a leading British renewable-energy supplier with operations around the world. Despite the size of the project (situated on 313 hectares of private and public land) and its positioning as a future mainspring of Nova Scotia’s green energy sector, Octopus didn’t respond to requests for comment, while Nova declined to schedule an interview.

XCF, the Reno firm, has an annual production capacity of 38 million gallons of SAF on a 10-acre site and is expanding its Nevada plant as well as building two others in Australia, thanks in part to new incentives adopted by that country’s national government. Cooper, an oil industry veteran, says XCF uses waste oils created by the ethanol industry, as well as by soybean processing. “We produced the product through our refinery, and then we sold all of the production back to [the oil refiner] Phillips 66,” he says. XCF’s current off-take agreement is with BGN, an energy trader based in Houston.

The most established player in this space is the Finnish energy giant Neste, which generated €19 billion in revenues last year and earned profits of nearly €1.5 billion. The company has plants in Finland, the Netherlands, California and Singapore and is the world’s largest producer of biodiesel. SAF, which is just one of Neste’s products, is processed using waste materials such as residual biomass and cooking oil.

According to its 2025 annual report, Neste’s global SAF production capability is 1.5 million tons per annum, which will grow to 2.2 million tons per year by 2027 after the expansion of its Rotterdam facility. (The company, which is partially owned by the Finnish government, makes most of the world’s SAF.) “We have seen very positive developments recently within the U.S. and in Europe regarding renewable fuel policies,” a Neste spokesperson said in a statement to Corporate Knights. “They provide a solid outlook for years ahead. Renewables provide an alternative for fossil markets that are heavily Middle East–dependent, therefore governments should see renewables as a means to increase energy supply security.”

Perhaps the most promising policy can be found in the United Kingdom, Navarrete says. There, regulators have mandated a minimum ratio of SAF for all jets. But over time, a progressively smaller proportion of the SAF can come from spent cooking oils. As well, the government has fixed a price floor for producers, an approach they also used to drive wind power investment. A combination of a mandate and a price guarantee provides demand-side and supply-side incentives for SAF refiners looking to invest in newer technologies that offer scalable production – without gobbling up valuable agricultural land. “We don’t have anything similar to that in the US,” he says.

Asking the right question

For the foreseeable future, there’s no technology competition for SAF, notwithstanding a very limited number of experiments with battery-powered small planes, such as Harbour Air’s “e-plane,” a refurbished six-seat de Havilland Beaver, which flies around B.C.’s lower mainland. If a large aviation manufacturer like Airbus or Boeing decided to develop a battery-powered passenger jet, it would likely take well over two decades to design, engineer, test and certify such a vehicle, Mabee says. “The commercial biofuels are the only real option on the table.”

Besides the lingering technical difficulties associated with blending biodiesel into jet fuel, the SAF industry’s main problem is that the price differential is too great; the financial incentives, too thin. Mabee learned this implacable fact while working with farmers on the potential for biodiesel. “Farmers will tend to deviate towards the market that’s going to give them a lot of value,” he says. “I can tell you that with biofuels, the value-add is not necessarily there. They can generally make more money selling their product for food than they can for fuel.” Which is just as well, given how ethanol distorted U.S. corn farming.

Indeed, when the International Council on Clean Transportation a month prior to the Iran war tallied up the cost of SAF compared to conventional jet fuel, the price differential was bracing. A litre of SAF cost about eight times more than a litre of jet fuel, and a range of EU-adopted regulatory subsidies reduced the gap by less than a half.

XCF’s Chris Cooper says that state and federal tax and carbon offset credits, both to biofuel refiners as well as to suppliers of the feedstock, have been instrumental in making a business case for its product. (In Canada, Mark Carney’s Liberal government last year launched a consultation about amending federal clean-fuel regulations so they stay abreast of what’s on offer for biofuel producers in the United States.) But, Cooper adds, the most salient selling point is that SAF offers essentially a hedge against the price volatility caused, in part, by geopolitical conflict. “What we’re actually providing the airlines is a bit of stability when these prices are moving.”

Should climate-forward governments be stoking a fuel that’s stuck in neutral? To answer that question, it’s worth noting the largesse that fossil fuels enjoy. As the International Energy Agency has noted, the world spent $600 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2023. The calculus around SAF, in other words, might finally change if the price of jet fuel wasn’t being kept artificially low.

“The danger is that the environmental element gets lost in the shuffle,” Navarrete warns. “If [policymakers] start to see SAF as a good on its own, without thinking about the sustainability implications, then we might be shooting ourselves in the foot.” 

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.

The post The moment appears ripe for sustainable aviation fuels, but the market’s still hedging appeared first on Corporate Knights.

High oil prices are seen as a net positive for Canada. For energy sellers, that’s true. For everyone else, it means crisis: the largest oil shock in history is headed our way, and nothing can stop it. If the strait stays closed long enough, Johnston warned, the economic impact “will be like the pandemic without COVID.” This time, Canada must get the crisis response right.

My non-partisan report, Outrunning the Storm, explored risk scenarios at $90, $150 and $200 a barrel. At every price, critical national systems are at risk. It’s more than energy: petrochemical inputs underpin the entire food system, including fertilizer; the entire healthcare system, including medical supplies and pharmaceuticals; the lifeline to remote First Nations communities. In Ontario, car sales, manufacturing and a risky finance sector are exposed –industrial capacity Canada cannot lose.

The report includes 90 urgent recommendations which will deliver a $10 to $15 return on every dollar – because that is what it will cost if we wait. Some are near-costless, like lowering speed limits and extending Ontario’s Bruce Nuclear licence to protect Ontario’s energy supply. Others, like investing in farm upgrades and establishing stockpiles of fuel, fertilizer and pharmaceuticals will cost between $6 to $7 billion at today’s price of oil, my analysis finds. Wait until $150/bbl and the same measures will cost $17–39 billion.

While Canada’s governments should be racing to shield residents against next winter’s food, fuel and supply shocks, the only way to weather this storm and emerge stronger is to permanently reduce our reliance on fossil fuels through sustained, transformative investment.

For many northern First Nations, that means ending reliance on diesel-powered generators and replacing it with solar energy and an expanded electric grid. A green ammonia plant powered by hydroelectricity would end prairie farmers’ dependency on imported fertilizer. Ramping up Canadian pharmaceutical production to increase domestic supply is a matter of economic security.

A national passenger-rail renewal program could serve several needs at once. High oil prices can trigger a cascade of shocks through sales and manufacturing for aviation and vehicles. My analysis has determined that retooling auto and aviation plants to build passenger rail cars, paired with payments to owners who recycle vehicles, could create or preserve up to 358,000 jobs. Night trains and expanded auto ferries could replace short-haul flights on routes like Vancouver–Calgary and Calgary–Edmonton. Over its 80-to-100-year operational life, a national rail network would avoid an estimated 475 million to one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Another major opportunity is converting Canada’s waste methane to hydrogen and carbon materials – methane that is being freely vented from coal mines, landfills and Alberta’s 80,000 stranded wells. Methane to hydrogen and carbon could create 100,000 jobs, many requiring the current skills of oilfield workers; it would be a new source of sought-after synthetic critical minerals, all while reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 33% and generating billions in new revenue.

Acting now pays twice: higher oil prices improves the payback on alternatives, and these investments will never be cheaper.

Canada and the world are already in the most serious crisis since the 1930s. The United States is undermining our economy with tariffs, with the president openly threatening to make us the 51st state, and Alberta separatists are helping. Extraordinary times demand wartime-level economic responses. The Depression-era and wartime policies of C.D. Howe, William Lyon Mackenzie King and the Bank of Canada offer a proven path. These investments will toughen our economy and transform our infrastructure; the private sector has a role, but Ottawa must lead.

We do not have years or months. We have days. The sooner we act, the better the outcome – and fortune favours the bold.

Dougald Lamont has been a public policy researcher for 30-plus years. He was leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party and MLA for St. Boniface for five years and has lectured in government–business relations in Canada.

The post Why Canada needs to declare a critical supply emergency now appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Kalasinga is a boda boda driver who earns a living by ferrying people and goods. Before he carries his first passenger, the 25-year-old stops at a gas station and pours $4.64 worth of fuel into his tank (all figures in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted), money he earned the previous day. “On a bad day I spend up to 1,000 shillings [$7.70] on fuel, and with the current surging fuel prices, things are getting worse,” he says.

In April 2026, petrol and diesel prices in Kenya jumped sharply, hitting some of the highest levels in the country’s history. Based on recent reports from the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA), a Kenyan government agency, petrol was selling for between $1.52 and $1.59 per litre, and diesel was about the same. EPRA attributed the increase in local pump prices to the rising cost of imported petroleum products as a result of the Iran war. Kenya’s Ministry of Energy has since trimmed taxes, enabling prices to dip by a few cents. But this reduction has done little to improve the economic picture for many boda boda riders. “Things are usually bad, but even with the rising fuel prices, we cannot hike the fares we charge because we will lose clients,” Kalasinga explains.

Kalasinga’s story is echoed by hundreds of thousands of motorcycle riders across Kenya. Motorcycles have become the backbone of last-mile transport, supporting livelihoods, small businesses and urban mobility. But behind this economic engine lies a costly dependence on fossil fuels that is squeezing incomes and, in the process, locking riders into a cycle of poverty.

Kenyan boda boda riders spend up to 60% of their daily earnings on fuel, according to research by the asset-financing company Mogo. In Nairobi, where congestion forces riders to idle in traffic, fuel consumption is even higher.

“Fuel is our biggest enemy,” Kalasinga says. “You work the whole day, but at the end what remains is very little.”

The electric advantage

To improve their margins, boda boda drivers are turning to electrified transportation. The past few years have seen an increase in the number of electric motorcycles, especially among those providing taxi services. Data from Kenya’s transport sector show that total EV registrations rose from 65 in 2018 to 4,047 in 2023 across vehicle categories, including motorcycles.

Electric boda bodas have a clear advantage for drivers – lower fuel costs – while offering wider social benefits in the form of increased energy security and lowered pollution. In Nairobi, road transport is responsible for about 40% of fine particulate matter, which has been linked to respiratory illness, heart disease and premature deaths.

“[Electric vehicles] present environmental benefits because they produce zero tailpipe emissions and align with Kenya’s largely renewable electricity mix, which is over 90% green, driven by geothermal, hydro and wind,” explains Paul Mabonga, managing director of Sentimental Energy Ltd., a solar solutions company.

Drivers have doubts

But barriers have slowed the uptake of electric motorcycles. The high cost of batteries combined with lack of accessible and affordable charging infrastructure have prompted some riders to question the product. “There have been concerns about battery range, durability and service continuity affecting adoption, especially for those whose livelihoods rely on consistent daily uptime,” explains Winnie Miranyi, operations and research associate at Africa E-Mobility Alliance, an organization focused on accelerating the transition to electric and sustainable transport across Africa.

“Interest is there, but infrastructure is not,” says Joseph Mwangi, a Nairobi-based boda boda rider who last year abandoned his electric motorcycle and returned to a petrol-powered one. “Riders ask: Where will I charge? How long will it take? What happens if the battery fails?”

These are valid concerns. “Today, lack of accessible and affordable charging infrastructure is a major barrier to electric motorcycle adoption among boda boda riders in Kenya,” Mabonga says. “Most EV solutions target middle- and high-income consumers, leaving boda boda riders, who form the largest transport workforce, locked out.”

The rise of battery swapping

Spiro Kenya, an electric mobility company, believes it has a fix for poor charging infrastructure: battery swapping. Spiro offers a service where riders visit swap stations and exchange their batteries, keeping them on the road continuously. “Rather than waiting hours to charge, riders simply exchange a depleted battery for a fully charged one in under two minutes,” explains Raymond Robert Kitunga, deputy country head at Spiro Kenya.

According to Kitunga, a full charge costs approximately $2.23 if the battery is completely depleted. “If a rider swaps at 50%, they only pay half, about [$1.12],” he adds. Spiro’s battery-swapping service can save a rider roughly $23 compared to petrol over the course of a month, Kitunga says.

The model appears to be taking root. Currently, Spiro operates in 35 counties in Kenya, with more than 22,000 electric motorbikes on the road and more than 460 battery swap stations nationwide. Across Africa, the company has roughly 95,000 bikes.

Joel Musungu, a boda boda rider from Kimilili constituency, in the western part of Kenya, uses the service. He got his motorcycle in 2022 and hasn’t regretted it. “Now, I take home up to [$4.62] a day, compared to initially where I could only make a fraction of that.”

Not a panacea

There are certainly advantages, but there are also challenges. According to Miranyi with Africa E-Mobility Alliance, infrastructure availability and reliability continue to be a major barrier. The swap stations and charging points are largely confined to urban areas, she says. In Kimilili, a rural town, there is a single swapping station, for example. That can make for long queues, especially during blackouts or if the electrical grid is sluggish, Musungu explains.

It is a genuine challenge, Kitunga admits. The company has concentrated its infrastructure in urban areas, where the demand is highest. “Setting up a swapping station is capital-intensive. It involves both civil works [real estate] and electrical infrastructure, including coordination with partners like Kenya Power,” he explains. Spiro has also tried to address range anxiety through an app that shows users the availability and traffic of swap stations in real time. But the biggest challenges continue to be financing and affordability, according to Miranyi. “Although battery-swapping models help lower battery expenses, many riders still encounter difficulties in securing credit for the motorcycle itself, with prices remaining prohibitively high.”

Pauline Ongaji is an award-winning science journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya.

This story was jointly produced by Corporate Knights and The Energy Mix.

The post Battery swapping is reigniting Kenya’s love of electric motorcycles appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Markham, Ontario, in the 1990s was a city in need of a pivot: away from an era of increasing sprawl and toward denser neighbourhoods with better urban planning. The long-term pressures of climate change and the energy transition were already visible, and in 1999 Markham’s city councillors took the step of investing in a district energy system to heat and cool its downtown core. Instead of relying on individual boilers and cooling equipment in every building, the city backed a shared energy network designed to scale alongside new development.

Now, roughly 25 years later, insulated pipes buried beneath parts of Markham carry hot and chilled water between central energy plants and connected buildings across more than 14 million square feet of development. Markham’s investment paid off. The system has delivered a faster transition to cleaner energy while helping build amore resilient city by improving long-term energy reliability and flexibility as community needs evolve.

“The thing we’re able to do with[centralized plants] is adopt new technologies long before a building would,” says Peter Ronson, COO of Markham District Energy. “And so the buildings on a district energy system benefit from the transition to higher efficiency and lower carbon footprint.”

The opportunity for Canada

When it comes to shared community energy, Canada currently lags behind other regions such as Europe, the Middle East and Asia, where city-based systems are more common. The cities that are leading the charge in Canada are benefitting significantly, like Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, which could save up to $160,000 annually with its district energy system.

A widespread shift to centralized thermal energy networks stands to improve the resilience of Canada’s economy while accelerating progress on emissions reductions. These projects are readily bankable and scale efficiently with private sector investment. Networked systems help municipalities become more resilient to power outages and energy shocks. Around the world, they have proven effective in different kinds of disasters, from ice storms to hurricanes. That’s partly because district energy systems can draw from multiple energy sources and are maintained using higher-grade equipment, says Gerard MacDonald, principal at Reshape Infrastructure Strategies in Vancouver.

Upfront investment, lasting benefits

Despite the economic and environmental advantages, district energy still faces enormous challenges getting projects officially off the ground, Ronson says. Energy systems like these require significant upfront financing. But on the other side of the ledger, they scale well as demand grows. Systems can be launched for just a few buildings and expand over time. Early support from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Green Municipal Fund, which provides grants and loans to municipalities for clean energy and resilience projects, has helped get many of these first-phase systems off the ground.

“District energy is one of the smartest ways to decarbonize buildings,” MacDonald says, because it cuts emissions “with a lot less electricity than you would if you went at it building by building.” That’s why, he says, it is drawing attention not just from the district energy and electricity sectors, but also from politicians and others who care about costs for users.

Investors are noticing too. “District energy is increasingly compelling be-cause, compared to more traditional utility models, it can offer communities local control and greater resilience to fuel price shocks, outages and supply disruptions,” says Marieke Cloutier, senior director of programs at the Green Municipal Fund. “It offers large-scale, net-zero investment opportunities with strong returns and efficient transaction costs.” A crucial early supporter, the Green Municipal Fund continued investing in Markham Centre district energy for 20 years – providing more than $17 million in grants and loans. This system became Canada’s fastest-growing energy utility, attracting more than $270 million in additional capital across multiple stages of expansion, including from the Canadian Infrastructure Bank and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Such early funding from the Green Municipal Fund plays a “de-risking” role for district energy projects, laying the groundwork for investors who want to fund green infrastructure but may find municipal deals too small or complex to navigate. District energy is capital intensive, so being able to borrow at low interest rates and offer reasonable security can be a strong accelerant. The Green Municipal Fund finances early work such as business cases and feasibility studies, so that by the time a project is ready for large-scale capital to come in, it is equipped with reliable data, clearer risk allocation and strong return potential.

Investors like the certainty of long-term infrastructure and utility-scale returns on investment, Ronson says. “Once you connect buildings to district energy systems, they’re typically connected forever.”

Networked for growth

As well as stable power and emissions reductions, cities with networked energy draw further advantages from these systems’ shared infrastructure, Cloutier says. They’re cheaper to run over time while providing municipalities with “more stable long-term revenue streams when compared to other conventional utility models.”

Markham now operates two district energy systems with four energy plants, and it’s commissioning another. The new addition will collect warmth from a large sanitary sewer running alongside one of its plant facilities, using a heat exchanger and industrial heat pumps. Ronson says the system will improve efficiency and provide a return on investment, all while reducing the carbon footprint of Markham’s heating network beginning this winter.

Twenty-seven years after pivoting to efficient thermal energy networks, Markham now leads a wider shift as other cities rethink how they heat and cool their downtowns. As cities and investors weigh their options, MacDonald argues that the real test is what works for the people who pay the bills. “It’s in the public interest to go the route of district energy because it’s lower cost, it can be low-carbon, and it’s not going to break the utility rate.”

FCM’s Green Municipal Fund (GMF) is a globally unique organization providing funding and education to municipalities to help them reach net-zero and build resilient communities. GMF manages approximately $2.4 billion in programs funded by the Government of Canada.

Learn more about how the GreenMunicipal Fund is helping derisk climate investment: greenmunicipalfund.ca/invest

The post Canada’s district energy revolution appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“To see all these young folks from all around the world working together in a shared way, with shared objectives and passion,” he says today, “it really shaped the course of my life.”

Another turning point for Guilbeault unfolded this spring in Ottawa, as the well-known and controversial former environment minister took a bow from federal politics, marking a clear split from the Mark Carney government on environmental and energy policies.

On May 27, Guilbeault, 56, announced his retirement as a member of Parliament, a few months after resigning from Carney’s cabinet. It capped off a heady and influential four years at the helm of one of the most sensitive government portfolios in the country. He served as minister of environment and climate change from 2021 to 2025, with stints as minister of heritage, minister of Canadian identity and culture and minister responsible for official languages before and after.

Upon his announcement, environmental groups heralded his integrity and work, with the David Suzuki Foundation celebrating his “vital contribution to the fight against climate change” and Environmental Defence calling on more MPs to “publicly reject the government’s assault on climate, nature and Canada’s economic and social future.”

“If I had to do it all again, I would,” Guilbeault says of his political career, on a recent morning bike commute from his home in Montreal. “I would fight for the same policies.”

For the first time in recent memory, he has “no plans” – aside from going on a voyage to the Arctic with the non-profit Students on Ice, alongside 40 Canadian youth. He is staying on as MP for a few more weeks to complete projects in his urban Montreal riding of Laurier–Sainte-Marie, such as a youth theatre and a new hub for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.

“I have greatly enjoyed politics. It’s very demanding,” he says, acknowledging the stark challenges from growing populism, online hate and the harmful effects of social media. “The political arena . . . has become more difficult, but it’s also incredibly rewarding.”

At its annual gala on June 24, 2026, Corporate Knights recognized Guilbeault with its Award of Distinction, an honour that has previously gone to Ken Dryden, Tom Mulcair, Kathy Bardswick and Vicky Sharpe, among others.

Politics with conviction

Guilbeault’s list of achievements is long. Born in rural Quebec, he co-founded Équiterre, an acclaimed Quebec-based non-profit environmental and sustainable agricultural organization in 1993 (originally known as Action for Solidarity, Equality, Environment and Development). He worked as an environmental activist for many years, notably with Greenpeace, and engaged in direct actions designed to strike a nerve and raise awareness. In 2001, he scaled the CN Tower with fellow Greenpeace activist Chris Holden to unfurl a banner that read “Canada and Bush – climate killers” as a way to criticize a lack of government action on the Kyoto Protocol. He was subsequently arrested and convicted of mischief.

It was that brand of conviction that drew the attention of Justin Trudeau, who recruited him to his Liberal ranks. In a recent podcast with political strategist David Herle, Guilbeault described how the then-prime minister introduced his environment minister to former U.S. president Joe Biden – as a “real activist” who had been arrested four times. Trudeau, he said, was looking for someone who would bring a “jolt” to the environment file. And in many ways, that’s what Guilbeault did.

As a Liberal, he has been steadfast in his convictions, defending and expanding the Trudeau policy of carbon pricing, publishing Canada’s Clean Electricity Regulations, draft regulations capping oil and gas pollution, single-use plastic prohibitions, and 2035 emissions targets. He was a leading voice brokering the landmark Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity agreement in which 196 countries agreed to restore at least 30% of degraded terrestrial, inland-water, and coastal and marine ecosystems.

“We’ve shown that using public policy you can have an impact. For the first time in our history, emissions were going down while the economy was going up,” he says.

Navigating criticism

But Guilbeault was a target for the Conservative Party – which linked some of his policies to his “radical” past – and particularly for Canadians furious over carbon pricing. “There are things I would do differently,” he says. “I think we were very slow to respond to the anti-carbon-tax campaign from the Conservatives.”

He also navigated fierce criticism from environmentalists when he approved the Bay du Nord deep-sea offshore oil project off the coast of Newfoundland in 2022, which the government said met strict environmental standards but which environmentalists said exposed “Canada’s climate hypocrisy.” Modelling showed that Canada was making progress but falling short of hitting its 2030 emissions targets while Guilbeault was environment minister, and it has slipped further behind under the current government.

Guilbeault has made no secret of his view that the Carney government is headed in the wrong direction on climate policies. He first resigned from cabinet last year in protest of a memorandum of understanding Carney signed with Alberta that paves the way for a new oil pipeline to the B.C. coast. Environmental groups have criticized the MOU for key concessions to the oil-producing province that lower federal targets for the price on carbon. “We need an effective carbon-pricing system,” Guilbeault says. “With the agreement we’ve signed with Alberta, we’ve just delayed by 10 years the implementation of carbon pricing.”

He understands the pressure of tariffs from the United States and the wider shifting geopolitical landscape, but some fundamentals will not change, he says: “We can try to ignore climate change, [but] climate change won’t ignore us. We’ll likely have the mother of all El Niños coming up in the coming months, wreaking havoc in North America [and] around the world. We’re seeing Pakistan with more than 59°C daytime temperatures.”

Climate change has already displaced tens of thousands of Canadians, he points out – a far greater toll than other geopolitical challenges. “Unfortunately, you don’t hear anyone in the government talk about this.”

He says the tools are in place for better action, such as the national adaptation strategy that maps out what needs to be done for Canadians to be better prepared for climate change. “Where are we with the implementation of that?” he asks.

A ‘radical pragmatist’

Mark Calzavara, a prominent environmental campaigner in Canada, says he understands why Guilbeault decided to quit. The pair have known each other for decades, hatching numerous Greenpeace campaigns, including one that saw Guilbeault climb onto a massive piece of bitumen-refining equipment during a freezing Alberta winter, to stall it from being driven from Edmonton to the oil sands. “Nobody was calling in on our side,” Calzavara recalls of the talk-show interviews Guilbeault did at the time. “They were all ‘I hope you guys get shot, or somebody should take you out.’ Steven was remarkable, under difficult conditions, to talk to people and meet them where they’re at.”

While Guilbeault “did as good or better a job as anyone” as environment minister, Calzavara says that his tenure shows the limits of what is possible within the political system. “The power is so centralized in the prime minister’s office, and if the prime minister is not a fan of the ideas you’re promoting, you go backwards.”

For his part, Guilbeault still holds on to a descriptor offered by a friend many years ago that he is “a radical pragmatist.”

Still, the Conservatives continued their criticism as he exited the political arena. During Guilbeault’s departure announcement in the House of Commons in May, Conservative Calgary MP Shuvaloy Majumdar offered a restrained nod to his “deep convictions” while stressing that “his policies caused so much hardship for so many families across this country.”

Bloc Québécois Patrick Bonin, MP for the riding of Repentigny, called him “by far the best environment minister that this country has ever known” during that same farewell session. And Guilbeault’s friend Elizabeth May, former leader of the Green Party, said it was an honour to work with him. “Courage should be respected, regardless of views,” she said in Parliament, her voice cracking. “What we are dealing with is a crisis.”

Of that, there should be little doubt. But like any effective politician, Guilbeault chooses to focus on the positives and the progress that has been made, and on a record of activism and improbabilities that can inspire hope.

“If [you] told 25-year-old Steven Guilbeault who was at COP1 in Berlin,” he says, having reached his destination and parked his bike, that “one day he would be environment minister of a G7 country, working with others to achieve all those things, I’m not sure he would have believed you.”

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

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