Henry Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs Group chief executive and financial crisis-era treasury secretary, spearheaded a report last year called “Risky Business” in an attempt to convince investors that climate change is bad for their bottom line. One of the advisors listed on the report? Former Goldman co-chairman and Clinton treasury secretary Robert Rubin. Meanwhile, another Goldman alumnus has developed into one of the most respected voices on climate investment risk: Robert Litterman.

In the small world of quantitative finance, Bob Litterman is a household name. As one of the world’s leading risk managers, Litterman first gained acclaim through his pioneering work at Goldman Sachs where he co-developed in 1992 the Black-Litterman Global Asset Allocation Model.

Making partner in 1994, Litterman went on to head up the firm’s risk department and then the quantitative group in the asset management division. In the latter position, he oversaw a group that, at its peak, managed over $185 billion (U.S.) in assets. It was during this time that he was asked to join the board of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

While not very familiar with conservation and other environmental issues, Litterman brought a unique perspective to the board. He’d studied human biology at Stanford University as an undergraduate, where he became interested in the way humans responded to incentives. He decided to transition over to economics and pursue a PhD after a brief stint as a journalist, moving on to spend a few years teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and working at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Litterman joined the WWF board in 2007 just as global awareness was beginning to spike around sustainability issues, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore sharing a Nobel Peace Prize for their work around climate change that year. “Having worked in academia, central banking and then risk management on Wall Street put me in a position to have a framework when thinking of climate risks that’s a little bit unique,” Litterman explained in an interview with Corporate Knights.

After leaving Goldman Sachs in 2009 and helping to found Kepos Capital, an asset management firm, Litterman started to grow more concerned about the calamitous risks that climate change posed to the planet. But it was the release of the Carbon Tracker Initiative’s seminal publication in July 2011, “Are the world’s financial markets carrying a carbon bubble?” that set him on a new path.

Bubble trouble

The central premise behind the carbon bubble is that global action is needed to keep average global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius to avoid catastrophic climate change – that is, to keep climate change somewhat manageable. As governments around the world take increasingly assertive action to limit emissions, a significant chunk of coal, oil and other carbon reserves (likely more than two-thirds) will have to be left in the ground. These unburnable assets have yet to be adequately accounted for by the market, with significant implications for the market valuations of fossil fuel companies.

“It’s not just that we have yet to price climate risk appropriately, but today’s equity markets believe that any actions to institute adequate pricing are far down the road,” explains Litterman. “The biggest short-term risk to investment portfolios is that companies with stranded assets are going to be re-priced downwards by the market as the prospect of carbon pricing becomes more immediate.”

So why does drastic action need to be taken to reduce emissions immediately? As an individual steeped in risk management, Litterman is fixated on the worst-case scenarios. The scientific evidence for climate change is overwhelming, he explains, but there remains a great deal of uncertainty about exposure to the most dire climate scenarios.

“We’re doing an experiment by altering the climate here that has never really been done before, and scientists have been consistently preaching to expect the unexpected,” says Litterman.

As global temperatures continue to rise, so does the likelihood of a calamitous shift in the Earth’s ecosystem. “The most prudent way to guard against such a scenario is to hit the brakes hard at first – hard enough, in fact, that you expect to solve the problem,” adds Litterman.

Over the past four years, Litterman has transformed into an ardent advocate for carbon pricing and protecting portfolios from climate-related risk. From speeches around the country to op-eds in the pages of USA Today and others, he’s been busy trying to educate Americans on what those risks are and how to manage them.

He even took his arguments to the pages of Regulation Magazine, published by the Cato Institute, an American libertarian think-tank that once counted conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as editor. He’s joined the boards of the Asset Owners Disclosure Project and Climate Central and recently teamed up with Henry Paulson and others to fund climate change research papers.

Over the past two years, the notion of stranded assets has begun to gain acceptance in the mainstream. Major financial institutions, such as Citigroup, HSBC and ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, have acknowledged the risk stranded assets pose, and the Bank of England is currently conducting an inquiry into the potential overvaluation of fossil-fuel companies.

Bank governor Mark Carney warned last year that the “vast majority of [fossil fuel] reserves are unburnable” under a 2-degree scenario, while the deputy head of the bank’s prudential regulation authority, Paul Fisher, told an insurance conference in March that the stranded assets risk is real.

Investments in fossil fuels “may take a huge hit,” said Fisher, pointing to “specific examples” of it already happening but stopping short of describing them.

Skepticism within the financial community remains, however, even among so-called climate hawks like economist Larry Summers, another former U.S. treasury secretary and former Harvard University president turned professor. Summers, having spoken with some of the world’s smartest investors on the topic of “unburnable carbon” and stranded assets, said most don’t consider it a threat – at least not in the near future.

“There are real limits on how much you’re going to move investors,” he told a group of investors during the World Economic Forum.

Litterman has proven otherwise.

Hedging, not divesting

To be clear, Litterman isn’t a big fan of wholesale divestment of fossil fuel holdings – at least not yet. He doesn’t feel like there’s a strong economic case. Instead of dumping specific funds with fossil-fuel company exposure from WWF’s endowment, he designed a separate financial product that hedges against the risk of stranded assets. It’s a technique he encourages other investors to embrace.

This derivatives contract, the WWF Stranded Assets Total Return Swap, is attractive for a number of reasons. First off, explains Litterman, it’s a straight-forward tool. Conducting a company-by-company analysis to determine its level of exposure to emissions pricing would be a difficult task, but making valuations based on the level of coal and oil sands reserves is simpler.

To avoid having to sell off assets or seek out external managers and ask them to change their investment approach, Litterman decided to leave the underlying WWF portfolio untouched and add a derivatives contract on top, which shorts the dirty guys. “It’s very clear what we’re doing, we’re betting that stranded assets are going to underperform the S&P 500, and that’s certainly a bet I like,” he says.

The product has performed exceptionally well, returning around 85 per cent since January 2014 (performance numbers updated Feb. 2016). “So if you think of it from a fiduciary position, you have no reason not to do it,” says Litterman. “It both reduces risk and increases expected return, and in the case of the World Wildlife Fund, it aligns our portfolio with our mission, which is to protect ecosystems throughout the world.”

In a way, the threat of divestment has helped his strategy. This past year has seen a number of high-profile announcements from large institutional investors, municipalities, universities, and religious organizations committed to phasing out fossil-fuel holdings through divestment. Litterman feels this movement has impacted the valuations of the targeted companies.

Understanding that it’s not the only factor – other people would point to the fortuitous decline in oil prices for one – he still finds it notable how closely aligned performance is with some of these big divestment announcements over the past year.

“Remember, it’s not just the actual pricing of emissions that affects the valuation of these assets, it’s also the expectations of emissions pricing coming sooner and at higher levels than people previously expected, and I think that that has certainly happened over the last year,” he adds.

Rather than base its entire responsible investment strategy on the stranded assets total return swap, WWF has also hired funds to invest in the green economy. Litterman doesn’t think that clean energy investments are a bad idea, but they’re not as sure a bet.

“Both sides of the equation make sense, but it’s just more obvious what’s going to be negatively impacted than what’s going to be positively impacted,” he says.

Considering Litterman is an inductee into the Risk Hall of Fame – yes, there actually is one – it’s a perspective that would be unwise to ignore.

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Climate change and the eventual draconian measures to keep it under control – declining country-assigned population caps, for one – would drive the narrative through characters who, in an increasingly carbon-constrained world, suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves among society’s most vulnerable.

Working title: Cap and Cull.

Why venture into fiction? It seemed to me like a better way to educate people about an otherwise complex – and I expect for most – boring topic. I tried to do this in my book Mad Like Tesla. The idea there was to lure people into learning about alternative energy technologies and climate challenges by telling the stories of real-world inventors and entrepreneurs doing some pretty inspiring, and arguably wacky, work.

The book did okay, at least by Canadian standards, selling about 5,000 copies. A far cry from the 600,000 sold as part of Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy, or for that matter the 30 million copies of Hunger Games – both books set in a world disrupted and devastated by climate change.

Despite being popular with Tesla and energy nerds like myself, the problem with my book is that it preached largely to the converted. The challenge, and this is where I think good fiction becomes important, is to reach the people not already singing in the choir. That means telling a compelling story. It is through protagonist and antagonist, action, love, suspense, treachery and dare say a dose of hope that historical and scientific facts about climate change, and an informed perspective about its impacts on our future, become more accessible – and palatable – for the masses.

I’m not alone in this thinking. Bernie Bulkin, former chief scientist at oil giant BP, wrote a commentary for Huffington Post in 2013 that spoke to the growing importance of what has come to be known as “cli-fi” – or climate fiction.

“It has seemed to me lately that cli-fi has to be one part of the answer to the problem many of us are trying to solve: How do we engage people more broadly and more deeply on climate change?” he wrote.

The word cli-fi, as far as we know, has been around since climate blogger Dan Bloom coined it. It started to gain traction, however, after writer Scott Thill, reporting for Wired magazine, included it as a keyword in a movie review of The Age of Stupid, a pseudo documentary about of a climate-ravaged world in 2055 and the missteps of humanity that led to it.

Since then, it seems the presence of the cli-fi genre in popular culture has grown, perhaps alongside our collective angst as the real impacts of climate change and the challenges of managing it become clearer. It’s not that eco-apocalypse theme novels are new, but it’s clear those anchored specifically around climate change have been on the rise in recent years.

So much so that B.C.’s Moon Willow Press launched a website in August 2013 called Clifibooks.com (since renamed Eco-fiction.com), which reviews cli-fi novels and maintains a database of such books. Many of those books are aimed at young adults – apropos for our just released youth-themed issue of Corporate Knights. These include Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis, Floodland by Marcus Sedgewick and Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015.

And let’s not forget self-publishing, yet another cultural barometer of the public’s climate angst. Diana Rissetto, a New York-based publicity agent for self-published authors, approached me last November about Declan Milling’s Carbon Black, a cli-fi thriller we review in the most recent issue and which you can find here.

At the time, I asked Rissetto if she’d seen a rise in the number of self-published cli-fi books crossing her desk. “Actually, yes!” she replied, as if surprised by her own answer. “We’ve had three in just the past few months.” Prior to that, she hadn’t seen any.

Film, of course, is also playing a big role. Again, we’ve seen movies in the past that can be interpreted as cli-fi, even though they don’t mention the words climate change. George Miller’s 1979 classic Mad Max and its superior sequel, Road Warrior, are among my favorites. Another (lower quality) example is the 1995 film Waterworld, starring Kevin Costner trying to survive in a world flooded by melting ice caps.

But as a dystopian theme, climate catastrophe seems to be a more popular backdrop these days. The South Korean film Snowpiercer, the blockbuster Interstellar by Christopher Nolan, and Young Ones starring Michael Shannon are recent examples.

To what degree are cli-fi books and movies impacting today’s youth? It’s difficult to say, as one could just as easily ask how much youth are impacting growth of the cli-fi genre.

What’s clear is that today’s teenagers and young adults, as digitally connected as they are, know more than any other generation that the fiction they see in popular culture could well be the reality they inherit. One thing I learned while producing the most recent issue of Corporate Knights is that Millennials are not ducking the challenge.

If there’s going to be a sequel to any cli-fi book or movie, they’re going to create it.

Hopefully, there will be no capping and culling involved.

The post Will the rise of “cli-fi” spur youth into climate action? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It is this information that Corporate Knights’ annual Best 50 ranking counts on.

But many companies falling under that $2-billion threshold, as captured by our Future 40 Responsible Corporate Leaders in Canada ranking, are arguably taking sustainability disclosure just as seriously. More importantly, they’re showing a willingness to catch up to their larger peers.

For example, year-over-year disclosure across a number of metrics – specifically, energy use, GHG emissions, water consumption, and waste generated/recycled – has improved considerably for the 83 companies that formed this year’s Future 40 short listed.

Of this short list, 84 per cent disclosed energy consumption, versus 71 per cent a year earlier. An impressive 85 per cent reported GHG emissions, compared to 73 per cent in 2014. (If we zero in on just the Top 40 corporations, only two companies were found not to disclose GHG emissions this year, compared to seven last year.)

Waste and water indicators showed relatively lower disclosure rates, but still big year-over-year improvements. Nearly half – 48 per cent – disclosed water consumption, compared to 39 per cent the year before; and 51 per cent reported how much waste they generated, versus 44 per cent the year earlier. Within the waste category, reporting on waste recycling also improved – to 45 per cent from 34 per cent.

“One can only speculate on such impressive year-over-year improvements, but it’s likely that smaller companies are beginning to take their cues from Canada’s corporate giants,” said Michael Yow, director of research at Corporate Knights Capital. “The message is getting out that, at some point in time, this information will have to be disclosed. The leaders in this group are being proactive, and for some, it’s just the right thing to do.”

As the trend works its way down to smaller companies, it opens up more opportunities for socially responsible investors and their portfolios, Yow added.

Signi Schneider, vice-president of corporate social responsibility at Export Development Canada (EDC), which topped this year’s Top 40 ranking, said one of the best investments her organization made was assigning and training one person who thoroughly understood the disclosure requirements of the Global Reporting Initiative, which promotes global standards for sustainability reporting.

“It’s really pushed our level of disclosure,” said Schneider, suggesting that companies that don’t currently have a dedicated person give it some consideration. “It might not be as expensive as they think.”

For companies on the larger side, it’s not that significant of an investment to try to benchmark internal reporting to the GRI, she added. “It has been an excellent annual exercise for us. It forces you to have a conversation about who’s accountable for this information.”

The information that makes up the Future 40 is collected from publicly traded companies that disclose their environmental, social and governance data either through CSR/sustainability reports or some other publicly accessible medium. That data is aggregated by organizations such as Bloomberg. For non-publicly traded companies, we rely on reports identified by the GRI.

Corporate Knights considers the Future 40 as a kind of farm team that feeds future sustainability leaders into the big leagues of our Best 50 ranking. In this respect, the Future 40 offers us insights into how performance on the Best 50 might change over time.

Ultimately, our aim is to get small and medium-sized companies in Canada to start asking questions that will become increasingly important to their businesses as they grow: How do we use resources? How do we assure good governance? Are we treating employees and the communities in which we operate fairly and respectfully?

Answering these questions transparently, and reporting the data that supports those answers, isn’t just the future of sustainable business – it’s the future of business.

Big companies = Bigger CEO pay day?

The difference between Corporate Knights’ Future 40 ranking and its Best 50 ranking has to do with the size of the companies represented. To be on the Best 50, companies need to have at least $2 billion in revenues. Under that, companies fall into the Future 40.

We decided this year to zero in on CEO pay relative to average worker pay. Is the gap, on average, larger in the Best 50 universe compared to the Future 40? Some industry groups simply don’t disclose this information. However, we were able to draw comparisons between six industry groups that met our disclosure threshold: energy, financials, industrials, materials, telecom services and utilities.

As you’ll see below, CEOs of big companies on average make substantially more than their smaller peers, when measured against average worker pay. Shocking? No surprise? Visit Facebook.com/corporateknights and tell us what you think.

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The Equator Principles, established in 2003 and now into their third iteration, are voluntary and self-regulatory standards for responsible project finance. As a risk management framework for lenders that is very much a work in progress, the standards impose certain environmental and social obligations on borrowers.

So far, 79 financial institutions from around the world have signed up, including seven from Canada. EDC, a federal export credit agency, is the only Canadian bank that sits on the organization’s steering committee, an indication of how seriously it takes the principles.

But Signi Schneider, vice-president of corporate social responsibility at EDC, said international project financing has become a murkier business since the Equator Principles were created.

The path to the financial crisis of 2008 is littered with intricate financing mechanisms, such as asset-backed securities, which are risky precisely because of their lack of transparency. Similar instruments are being used for international project financing, she says, and they’re becoming increasingly complex.

“A decade ago, building a port might have always been financed through a particular kind of financing structure that allowed for getting to the heart of that port’s environmental impacts,” Schneider said. “That’s changed massively. It’s not as obvious, compared to 10 or 20 years ago, what the long-term ethical and sustainability questions are.”

It’s not that EDC doesn’t ask the questions; it’s that it doesn’t always get the answers – let alone the right answers. For this reason, Schneider is supportive of efforts that encourage organizations to embrace the disclosure of sustainability performance. Corporate Knights’ Future 40 ranking and the data it collects is a valuable example, she said, of how transparency is rewarded and recognition is given to those who do it well.

“We see the utility of being more transparent ourselves, and we appreciate going to the source and getting good information and not having to ask additional questions, especially on environmental matters,” she added, pointing to EDC’s dealings in Russia, where getting information about the environmental practices of a company or project is like pulling teeth.

Not that all projects are black holes of information. A massive refinery project in Turkey, where EDC led a $3.3 billion (U.S.) financing in December, was found to exceed standards based on the Equator Principles. Not a “clean” project per se, but not as “dirty” as it could be.

Asked whether there are certain projects EDC simply won’t invest in, Schneider said the bank doesn’t have a do-not-invest list, but issues such as carbon risks are increasingly being considered during project evaluation. “There’s been movement. People are talking about things differently,” she said. “Just because you don’t see a large pronouncement doesn’t mean there’s not a thriving debate going on.”

The story is different where EDC has more direct control. Embracing sustainability disclosure is part of that. The bank has been putting out a comprehensive corporate social responsibility report for nine years. In 2009, it declared transparency, climate change, and human rights as strategic priorities.

It has proven an important source of financial support for Canadian clean technology companies looking to export products and services deemed too risky for traditional banks. With 1,150 full-time employees, EDC has also nurtured a culture of sustainability within its own ranks – starting with leadership from the top.

“Being a responsibly run company is at the core of sustainability, I really believe that,” said Benoit Daignault, president and chief executive officer of EDC since February 2014. “I’m fortunate in that EDC already has strong governance and CSR policies, so my impact is really about making sure that we live those policies day to day.”

Schneider credits the employees at EDC for really embracing a sustainability mindset. She said multiple departments in the bank are responsible for different sustainability performance targets, “a testament to the fact that everybody is committed.”

Where weaknesses are identified, people in the company have shown a willingness to step up. Gender diversity is one example. “We’ve been working on this for a number of years,” said Schneider. “There was a feeling we needed to work more on diversity issues, so women leaders at EDC took it upon themselves to ask: What can we do to start supporting this particular issue?”

As for its primary purpose as an export credit agency, the bank broke ground last winter by issuing its first green bond, raising $300 million (U.S.) to support Canadian firms (and their products and services) tackling climate and environmental issues in other countries.

Schneider said the green bond is an example of how the company is willing to experiment where others won’t – even if it proves challenging. “We just kept plugging away to see if we could make it work,” she said. “There is a supportive atmosphere here for people doing things a little bit unconventional, and that’s moving the stick forward for our organization.”

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“I will always remember her saying, ‘How am I going to do this? Why is it so expensive?” Brochu recalls.

That incident made it clear to Brochu, vice-president of business development at the time, that the company had to do something to help out struggling customers.

In 2001, Gaz Métro became the first natural gas distributor in Canada and the first energy distributor in Québec to implement an energy-efficiency program that encouraged its customers to use less of a product it profited from.

Brochu eventually became the company’s chief executive officer in 2007. Since joining Gaz Métro 10 years earlier – and after 25 years working in the energy industry – her passion for serving people and finding solutions to Canada’s energy problems has not waned.

No wonder Brochu, 51, is asked often to enter politics – a request she dismisses as out of her character. “I spend quite a lot of time with MPs, ministers and deputies. I see all the compromises they have to make and everything that’s involved,” she told the Montreal Gazette last fall. “It’s not for me.”

Instead, Brochu believes she can achieve more as head of Quebec’s largest gas utility. And she’s doing this by speaking out on touchy subjects. She’s openly adamant, for example, that Canada needs a national energy policy, even though the last round of talks failed miserably more than 30 years ago.

She was also the first industry leader to speak publicly against TransCanada’s proposed Energy East project, which aims to transport over one million barrels of crude oil from Alberta and Saskatchewan to refineries in Eastern Canada.

It’s not that she doesn’t support western provinces in their bid to get Canada’s oil to foreign markets. What she’s critical of is TransCanada’s proposal to convert parts of its gas pipeline network to oil. Brochu argues the plan will lead to gas shortages and higher prices for Quebecers, which would threaten economic development.

It is unusual for the CEO of a natural gas utility to publicly challenge another energy company, let alone one of its key suppliers. But putting the customer first runs in the blood of the company, says Brochu.

Knowing the passion that she brings to her job, it is no surprise that Gaz Métro ranked in the top 10 of Corporate Knights’ Future 40 ranking for the second year in a row. We sat down with Brochu to talk about the company’s approach to sustainability, the future of energy in Canada, and the role women can play in transitioning to this future.

The following conversation was edited for length and clarity.

CK: How does Gaz Métro make decisions about sustainability?

BROCHU: We look at environmental goals as if society were immortal. We ask, “If we were immortal, would we still consume energy?” Yes we would. Would we consume it at the rate that we are? We don’t believe so. Would we invest in new technologies now instead of waiting until we lack petroleum? Of course.

I’ll give you another example. Ten years ago we said, “One day people will produce energy out of domestic waste.” We had seen the start of the science. So we started to look at what others were doing. There were not that many examples, but we stuck to our guns. And last Friday, the Quebec energy board authorized Gaz Métro to buy bio-methane produced in municipalities close to Montréal. The municipalities will take waste, put it in a digester, produce biogas, treat it and inject it into our network to heat homes. If we hadn’t started to think about that 10 years ago, we wouldn’t be here today.

CK: You must get a lot of pushback from other companies and the public. How do you deal with that? How do you “stick to your guns”?

BROCHU: Yeah, we stick to our guns. When new things are launched, they cost a little bit more. So, first we work within the size that we are. And then we choose what is most important to our customers. We start from the customers’ needs because if you do it from the top down, it gets very difficult.

For example, in Vermont we produce electricity with cow manure. And we give our customers the choice. Obviously if you take cow power, it’s a bit more expensive than the grid. But you know what? We don’t have enough. Many people are perfectly fine paying a higher price in order to be able to light their houses with the cow of their neighbour. But this wouldn’t work if we imposed it.

CK: When it comes to energy efficiency, it seems counter intuitive to encourage customers to use less gas.

BROCHU: To be completely transparent, we didn’t do it for environmental reasons. You know, 15 years ago, politicians were not talking about climate change. Nobody was talking about that. But for us it was very obvious that our goal in life was to have as many customers as we could, and once they’re hooked to have them consume as less energy as possible.
So it’s a weird business when you think about it. We’re putting solar panels on the walls of our customers so they can preheat the air before it enters the building and it helps them reduce their consumption of natural gas. And we still do it today even though gas prices are very low; we have not slacked at all in our efficiency programs. We actually have deployed efficiency programs to half of our customer base.

CK: You are a strong advocate for a national energy policy. Why?

BROCHU: I would say a national energy approach. There was a proposed national energy policy that was ill conceived in 1984. The idea was for oil to be cheaper, and Alberta went berserk – rightfully so. Since then, every time we have started to talk about a national energy policy, it’s like asking people that have been burned to dance around fireworks. They don’t want to do that.

The result was that we started to develop independently. Every province started to do things north-south; started selling their energy to the United States. We had very little talk and need for one another. But now, the United States doesn’t need us as much. All of a sudden we’re looking at one another and saying “Oh, you need to move your oil across the country to reach the coast?” We need to start talking amongst ourselves. But we cannot do in three months what we have not done in 30 years.

CK: Would you say it’s a good idea to work from the consumer up on a national energy policy as well?

BROCHU: You’re touching a fundamental point. When we have big discussions on energy in Canada, we rightfully think and talk about energy production, which is very important. But there are customers using energy and we don’t talk about them. Ninety per cent of the energy efficiency achieved in our country last year was by the customer. And at the end of the day, the customer pays the energy bill. And they care. So we need to start from the reality of the people in this country and work our way up, not the other way around.

CK: Let’s talk about the initiative you’re working on with other female leaders. Why did you start this project?

BROCHU: Yes, we just launched L’Effet A. We’re five businesswomen and we give ourselves five challenges that we need to complete in 100 days. The goal is to stimulate other women to pursue their ambition. We believe women have as much ambition as men, but for one reason or another, women see ambition as almost pretentious. Ambition can be a positive fuel or a negative fuel, which is true for men as well as for women. I have this deep conviction that as women start leading, we are allowing many men to be closer to who they are. We’re giving everybody permission to be who they are. But business has been so mainstream, so black and white.

CK: What role do you see women playing in the energy industry?

BROCHU: I started my speech about Energy East by saying “I am for this project,” and I finished my speech saying, “This project is very important to Canada.” But in between I say, “There is something that doesn’t work.”

I’m sad to see that there are some stakeholders, especially out west, who feel that I am viciously opposed to this project. They say, “You’re either for us or against us.” And I say, that’s bad, bad, bad, bad. If we cannot have a nuanced approach to these big projects, we’re going to have a problem. And I think that the discussion nationally is about nuance. And I think nuance is something that women tend to be more comfortable with.

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The post Running it right appeared first on Corporate Knights.

They wanted me to fix everything! I suggested that, working together, they might be able to do something themselves. After our discussion, the students went back to their schools, formed groups with others who shared their concerns, and we had another, bigger meeting.

Thus was born Roots & Shoots, now a global network of young people of all ages who become involved in hands-on projects of their choosing: one for their local community, one for animals (including domestic animals), and the third for the environment. There are always some young people who love animals, some who want to help people, and many who want to help the environment. They discuss local problems. They ask if there is something they can do to improve things. If so, they work out a plan, roll up their sleeves and take action.

Back in 1991 there was an explosion of activity, and volunteerism was born in Tanzania as a result. My first group of 17 to 19 year olds was mocked for cleaning up a beach littered with plastic bags and refuse without being paid. In Tanzania at that time, you only worked without pay for your parents – and only because you had to.

Well, Roots & Shoots groups are now in nearly 140 countries, with members from pre-school through university. An increasing number of adults are also forming groups. Today, there are some 150,000 groups around the world. The collective impact is huge. And because we encourage young people to take action and listen to their voices, they are empowered. (And they influence their parents and grandparents as well as their friends).

The individual efforts of hundreds of thousands of young people around the world together are making monumental change. With an overall theme of learning to live in peace and harmony with each other, they are learning to respect others and thus break down barriers between nations, religions, cultures, old and young, rich and poor, and between “us” and the natural world.

The Roots & Shoots program, and its philosophy, is the reason why Kofi Annan, then Secretary General of the UN, asked me to become a Messenger of Peace, and why Secretary Ban Ki-moon re-appointed me.

The main message is this: Every single one of us matters and has an impact – every single day. And we have a choice of what sort of impact we will make.

There is an oft-heard saying, “Think globally, act locally.” But thinking globally, thinking about the harm we have inflicted on the planet, the poverty, greed, violence and so on, often leads to a feeling of helplessness – “What can I do that could possibly make a difference?” And so we do nothing.

But our Roots & Shoots groups see the impact their actions can make, such as installing trash bins on a school campus, cleaning a stream to re-introduce fish, planting indigenous trees and shrubs in the school yard to encourage birds and butterflies. Knowing that hundreds of other young people are also creating change in this way – acting locally – they then dare to think globally.

A generation of changemakers

We are working on ways to show the extraordinary difference our young people are making around the world. Some groups tackle long-term projects such as removing invasive species from an area of prairie in Texas, or a wetland in Taiwan. There is a lot of tree planting.

Some have changed laws such as a group from Santa Monica that was instrumental in banning plastic bags in California. Many schools grow vegetables – without chemical pesticides of course. Some volunteer in shelters for the homeless or for dogs and cats. They raise money for earthquake or hurricane or war victims in other countries, or become Chimp Guardians.

University students return to the local community to help start Roots & Shoots groups in primary or high schools near their campus. Members join another group, or develop their own campaigns – to help save elephants and rhinos and tigers, for example. They collect and recycle cell phones; they lobby for labeling for genetically modified products.

Art, theatre and music have always played a big part. I love to hear 10-year-old kids in the middle of nowhere in Tanzania performing plays about the damaging effects of deforestation and overfishing. In the Bronx, African-American and Latino kids performed a skit where one student was the head of a large company, and another student informed him about the environmental harm caused by his product. In the end that group succeeded in banning polystyrene from their school lunches – and got to perform in front of the mayor.

Roots & Shoots develops differently in each country. Sometimes the program is embedded in a school curriculum, thus reaching all the children in the school, and increasing the number of kids willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work on projects. This is often because the education ministry asks us to provide a curriculum. A whole class or school can become involved, or a family group can form – there’s room for all.

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My vision is to realize a critical mass of young people with a shared philosophy – the Roots & Shoots philosophy. Once students have been active Roots & Shoots members they are impacted for life, as so many have told me. I asked one of the young men who was part of the original group of 12 what aspect of Roots & Shoots had been most significant.

After a moment, he replied: “I know that wherever I go in the world, even if I know no one, if there is a Roots & Shoots group I have found my family.”

Jane Goodall was a renowned expert on chimpanzees and a world leader in conservation and animal protection. 

The post Young people working together can achieve monumental impact appeared first on Corporate Knights.

For both, the Internet is an appendage, climate change is a nagging reality, mobility is just the way things are, and the weight of the future is on their shoulders. It’s for this reason the United Nations says youth from around the world must be an active part of all levels of decision-making related to sustainable development. “It affects their lives today and has implications for their futures,” the global agency says.

Corporate Knights, with sponsorship support from paper-products manufacturer Kruger Products, decided it was time to shine a light on Canadian youth who have already demonstrated themselves as leaders of sustainable development. The results, as you’ll see below, is our Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders list – an impressive collection of young entrepreneurs, activists, corporate professionals and students eager to make our world a better place.

An Abacus Data report on Millennials released in 2010 called this all-digital demographic a “largely untapped political force” in Canada. “Strengthened by social networking tools and an almost immediate access to information, if and when Canadian Millennials are ignited to act the impact will be huge.”

Can you hear the boom?

Jonathan Lachance, 28

Calgary

Green buildings, affordable housing and resilient cities are what drive Jonathan Lachance when he wakes up in the morning. A senior property manager at Arcturus Realty Corporation, he helps manage 2.4 million square feet of commercial real estate in Alberta. With an appraised value of $1 billion, all Arcturus properties are certified through the Canadian Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED for Existing Buildings) and the Building Owners and Managers Association’s Building Environmental Standards program (BOMA BESt). Currently enrolled in the University of Oxford’s Master of Science program in sustainable urban development, Jonathan is researching the value of green rating systems in the Canadian commercial real estate industry. Increasingly, he’s being turned to as an expert on the subject. He was the youngest panelist to participate in BOMA Canada’s Annual Energy and Environmental Report where he discussed sustainability issues with industry leaders. On the side, Jonathan implemented a furniture-recycling program in partnership with Habitat for Humanity’s Re-Store, and he remains actively involved in developing affordable housing in Calgary.

“The torch has been passed to a new generation to reverse the negative trends in built environments. The challenge is to create sustainable and resilient cities for future generations.”

Afzal Habib, 26

Toronto

He had a six-figure salary at the Boston Consulting Group, where he advised Fortune 500 clients, but Afzal Habib was looking to inject more meaning into his work – and he did exactly that. Afzal quit his job in Canada, moved to Africa, and in just one year turned what many considered a crazy idea into Kidogo, a thriving, fully functional social enterprise with 22 staff. The company’s mission is to bring high quality, easy-to-access and affordable early childhood development (ECD) programs to poor developing-world communities. It does this by setting up full-service “hubs” in targeted communities that employ certified teachers and host up to 80 students. Those hubs, once embedded in a community, provide training, marketing and curriculum support for micro-franchised “spokes” created by locals in smaller, nearby villages. The first pilot hub in Nairobi broke even in less than a year.

“To me, sustainability is core to running a successful business, not just something on the periphery.”

Hilary Kilgour, 29

Vancouver

Hilary is on the front lines of climate change as sustainability manager at Grouse Mountain, a ski resort in British Columbia that is feeling the direct effects of a warming climate. A lack of snow this year meant ski hills were closed and events had to be cancelled. Part of Hilary’s job is to create programs that educate Grouse Mountain’s employees and visitors about these challenges. Earlier in her career, she was a director at social enterprise Me to We, and held sustainability-focused positions at Lululemon Athletica and consultancy Nsansa. Hilary is also co-founder of Unati Strategies, a social enterprise that helps organizations build teams that do purposeful work.

“We have the technological tools and resources to address our current global challenges, but I believe we need people who can build collective will for this change to happen. The complex global challenges we face require the best teams we can put forward.”

Alice Park, 27

Port Moody, B.C.

Alice was attending Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business in 2012 when, during a visit to the school’s parking-services office, she learned that more than 25 university parking passes had been bought by fellow students living in her neighbourhood. Why don’t these people share a ride instead of driving separately, she thought to herself? A year later, Alice co-founded Go2gether, a Vancouver-based technology start-up that has since developed a ride-sharing app that’s gaining traction in British Columbia. The company’s mission is to reduce the amount of single-occupancy vehicles on roads. Since its launch, Go2gether has created more than 20 jobs and is being used on a trial basis by the university, the Vancouver Airport Authority and financial co-op Vancity. A big fan of the growing collaborative consumption movement, Alice is herself an active carpooler, describing her most memorable ride as a trip from Vancouver to Toronto with a guy named Chris – and his dog, Bruno. She has mentored over 50 aspiring social entrepreneurs and was a vice-curator of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shaper Hub in Vancouver.

“I’m simply doing my part to shape economic transformation through sharing resources and building more resilient communities. I’m grateful that I’m not alone and I remain hopeful.”

Emma Rogers, 29

Toronto

It was while working at the Ontario Ministry of the Environment – her first job – that Emma learned to look at environmental issues from many different perspectives and propose solutions with broad appeal. Since then, she has helped Sears Canada (as its eco products manager) and Tim Hortons (as its environmental affairs specialist) align their corporate interests with public policy objectives. Emma is especially proud of the role she played getting Tim Hortons to consider the environment across the lifecycle of its packaging. She also helped the iconic Canadian coffee and doughnut chain divert waste from landfills during its 50th Anniversary Convention.

“I am lucky to work daily to support decision-making that benefits the environment.”

Andrea March, 27

Toronto

Since earning her Masters in Environment and Sustainability from the University of Western Ontario, Andrea has built her young career around supporting socially and environmentally responsible business practices. While working at the consultancy Innovolve Group, she brought together business and government leaders for the 2011 and 2012 Canadian Water Summit, which examines water risks across the country. While at Green Living Enterprises, she helped organize the annual Green Living Show. Today, she is manager of research and partnerships at RBC, where through the RBC Social Finance initiative she’s supporting the growth of social entrepreneurship, impact investing and social finance in Canada.

“I believe we can do better. Better means challenging the status quo until sustainability is the cornerstone to how we run our communities, businesses and governments. These changes inevitably encounter resistance. As sustainability leaders, our job is to embrace that resistance and propel positive change.”

Slater Jewell-Kemker, 22

Janetville, Ontario

A dual Canadian-U.S. citizen – born in L.A. but now living on an Ontario farm – Slater spent her teen years worrying about the impacts of climate change and, as a budding filmmaker, was determined to raise awareness of it. She began shooting video at the age of 15 as a youth delegate at UN climate summits and over the years has documented her participation in climate-related global gatherings by interviewing young people about their concerns and the actions they are taking. After six years of filming in seven countries she has collected more than 200 hours of footage, some of which has been turned into documentary shorts. One of those shorts is An Inconvenient Youth, which tells the story of the global youth climate movement and those kids living on the front lines of climate change. Slater is now working to turn this short into a full-length documentary, with the final act turning the camera on Canada and the United States.

“I am blessed to now live on a farm. There is a quiet I find walking in the woods, a deep contentedness sitting in a field listening to the blossoming life around me after a cold winter. What drives me is a simple desire to protect this and share it with my children.”

Megan Wallingford, 26

Toronto

Megan is currently the program manager for Global Compact Network Canada, the local chapter of the largest corporate responsibility network in the world, the UN Global Compact. Since June 2013, she has been instrumental in increasing by 30 per cent the number of Canadian companies that have signed up to the compact, which supports organizations trying to improve their sustainability performance. Megan also led development of the network’s highly praised peer-review program, through which participating companies exchange feedback on their sustainability reports and share good practices. She has also been actively involved with two social enterprise start-ups.

“We need a diversity of individuals who think critically about the issues we face, thoughtfully debate a mutually desirable path forward, and lead by example.”

Andrew Hall & Jeremy Bryant, 25 + 25

Vancouver/Edmonton

Andrew and Jeremy are cousins who graduated with business degrees but didn’t want to end up working for a larger company. They also aspired to create a business that helped people who needed it. This is how Calgary-based social venture Mealshare was born. The idea behind Mealshare is quite simple: The company partners with restaurants that agree to put a Mealshare logo beside certain menu items. When that item is purchased, the restaurant commits to donating a meal locally (Calgary Drop-in and Rehab Centre) or internationally (Children’s Hunger Fund). The cousins knew their business was having an impact the day they helped serve 1,000 Mealshare-funded dinners. The program proved popular and continues to grow. Its first restaurant chain partnership was with Original Joe’s, which signed up 63 locations. That deal was a “legitimizing massive step,” Andrew and Jeremy said. Today, the company employs six people and last year was awarded the Calgary Small Business Award for Community Impact.

“We’ve learned that the way business has been conducted over the past century or so is completely unsustainable and needs to change. We want to help lead the generation that pivots humanity in the right direction to make it sustainable for future generations. We want our careers and lives to have meant something.”

Kourosh Houshmand, 20

Toronto

How many 20-year-olds can say they’ve interviewed Noam Chomsky? It’s just one of Kourosh Houshmand’s many accomplishments as a social and environmental activist and community volunteer. In 2012, Kourosh inspired over 15,000 students across Canada to participate in Stick It to Fast Food, an organized boycott of fast food in schools. A year later, he founded Solar for Life, an international non-profit social venture that raises money – with the help of more than 200 volunteers from across Canada – to purchase solar lights for communities in Uruguay and South Africa. While in South Africa, he regularly speaks at schools about youth empowerment in sustainability and energy. Closer to home, he has represented more than 2.6 million students as vice-president of Ontario Student Trustees, and is a former student trustee for the Toronto District School Board.

“Leadership in sustainability must be a growing hallmark in the professional ambitions of Millennials. We have an obligation, not only to protect the world, but also rebuild it in a new direction. My goal is simple: to create a lasting platform that Millennials can utilize to maximize their own efforts at sustainability.”

Sean Campbell, 27

Waterloo, Ontario

As an educator at the University of Waterloo and an advocate in civil society, Sean has become a champion of sustainability through collective action in the Waterloo Region. In advance of the 2011 Ontario provincial election, he acted as lead author and project manager for “Ontario’s Energy Future: A Climate Change Perspective,” which was co-published by Sustainable Waterloo Region and the David Suzuki Foundation. Currently, Sean supports undergraduate students along their personal and professional journeys through a social innovation and entrepreneurship program called St. Paul’s GreenHouse, where he works as program coordinator. On top of this, he is leading an effort to create the world’s first sustainable commercial aircraft in the form of a liquid hydrogen-powered hot air balloon.

“Sustainability for me is about justice, equity, and respect for the beauty of our natural and built environments.”

Michael “Ryan” Manchee, 29

Toronto

Ryan is a business development specialist at Jinko Solar, a global leader in the solar PV industry. While attending Ryerson University, he founded an award-winning not-for-profit called EnergySavers. In incubation at the Ryerson Centre for Urban Energy, this social venture helps Torontonians cut their energy bills by empowering and educating them on the value of conservation and performing energy-saving home retrofits. Ryan is also the founding director of Bata Energy, a cooperative also known as Muskoka Community Energy. He even finds time to be director of communications for Emerging Leaders for Solar Energy, a program founded by the Canadian Solar Industries Association.

“For me, sustainability is about the preservation of our natural global ecosystems and the improvement of social well-being.”

Eden Full, 23

Calgary

As a Thiel Foundation fellow, Eden Full was given $100,000 in 2011 to forego college and work on an innovative project for two years. Since then, she has created a low-cost device that allows solar panels to track the sun as it moves across the sky. Designed for easy installation in developing countries, SunSaluter has grown to become a non-profit organization with manufacturing in Bangalore, India. The device has now been deployed in over 15 countries, impacting more than 8,000 people living in poverty worldwide. Full also serves as director of new technology for EES Ventures, a Houston-based VC firm that provides seed funding for cleantech companies.

“Legacy is everything to me. What kind of world am I leaving behind for my children? Sustainability work is one of the most important contributions for ensuring a meaningful legacy.”

Bree & Hailey Hollinsworth, 21 + 23

Thunder Bay, Ontario

Sisters Bree and Hailey have always had an attachment to nature, having grown up on a farm in Northern Ontario. Avid horse lovers, they are understandably big advocates for animal rights and environmental responsibility more generally. In 2012, they decided to anchor those values behind a new clothing business called Ungalli, named after the tree in the children’s book The Name of the Tree. Ungalli Clothing makes shirts, hoodies and hats out of 100 per cent recycled material, such as used plastic water bottles and scrap cotton from factory floors. The clothes are ethically made in North America and carry the Ungalli brand, but can also be “white labeled” so other companies looking to operate more eco-friendly can give their own branded clothing to employees or customers as part of special events. The sisters also donate $1 from the sale of special edition t-shirts toward The Born Free Foundation and The Nature Conservancy of Canada. Their mission is to break the stereotype that sustainable clothing is frumpy and boring. On the contrary, they say, Ungalli clothes are durable, comfortable and stylish even though making them results in less water use, waste production and GHG emissions.

“We all stand for the same mission and we are all fighting the same fight. Along with producing great products, business is now also about creating something real, something that makes a difference, and something that people want to be a part of,” says Bree.

“There’s something different in the air among youth business leaders. We want to redefine success as being about more than just money and power,” says Hailey.

Mustafa Nazari, 28

Richmond Hill, Ontario

Mustafa is the first member of his large Afghan family to ever attend university, and he has made the most of it. Beyond high academic performance, in both undergraduate and graduate studies, Mustafa is, according to one professor, “one of the most collaborative and generous people I have met in my entire career.” As a volunteer he has trained hundreds of undergraduate, graduate and high school students on how to develop solar projects using the most innovative solar measurement tools. As a new solar entrepreneur, Mustafa has focused on designing and commercializing an innovative modular solar PV carport for charging electric vehicles. As a student at York University, he helped the university improve the energy efficiency of residences and has calculated the solar generation potential of York’s main campus. He’s currently a researcher and designer at Kinetic Solar Racking and Mounting in Toronto.

“I strive to live a sustainable life by making informed decisions and developing sustainable solutions. I hope that I will inspire others along the way.”

Dominique Souris, 22

Ottawa

Currently living in Geneva as an environmental management intern at the United Nations Environment Programme, Dominique received the University of Waterloo (UW) Federation of Students Engagement Award in 2014 for her significant involvement in the university’s community life. She was also awarded the Co-op Student of the Year Award (2012) for her time working at the Ontario Energy Board. She has represented the voice of Arctic youth at the Arctic Circle Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, as director of the International Partnerships and Strategy of the Youth Arctic Coalition, and in 2013 attended the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP19) in Warsaw, Poland, as a designated youth delegate.

“We are told we are leaders of tomorrow, but for me, a sustainability champion is about challenging the notion of tomorrow. The world needs young people to be leaders of today.”

Mark Trevitt, 29

Vancouver

Mark works at the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), where he is associate director of its Industrial, Clean and Energy Technology Venture Fund. In this role, he helps guide the bank’s investment strategy and works with entrepreneurs to grow BDC-supported ventures. Mark’s investment career began in London in listed equities, where he helped build the first sustainability enhanced investment strategy at Inflection Point Capital Management. He also led product and algorithm development at Trucost, the global leader in environmental analysis and data for investors and corporates. On top of this, he launched a pitching competition for cleantech entrepreneurs and has authored several publications on the intersection of investing and sustainability.

“We need to harness the will and ingenuity of humanity to create new technologies and foster new ways of thinking.”

Cindy Chao, 27

Toronto

Cindy has been working as a consultant with Deloitte’s Sustainability and Climate Change practice for nearly four years, contributing to several projects aimed at advancing sustainability performance in both the private and public sectors. She currently serves as chair of EcoSpark, an environmental NGO that helps communities and schools monitor their environment and take action for positive environmental change. At the Ontario Hospital Association, where she previously worked as sustainability coordinator, Cindy worked to “green” Ontario’s hospitals.

“I want to protect nature and create a poverty-free world for future generations by working with organizations to eliminate the negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts of our economy.”

Michael Nemeth, 29

Saskatooon

Michael is using his skills as a building designer and mechanical consulting engineer to create a greener and more livable version of Saskatoon. He is currently leading the development of a co-housing project called Radiance Cohousing. The building will be certified as a Passive House, which means it will use the power of the sun and super insulated walls to regulate the temperature while saving massive amounts of energy. Nemeth promotes provincial building energy efficiency standards and is involved in a community wind energy development in Saskatoon. He is also an advocate for active transportation and walkable urban design.

“A new economy is growing. The job growth and economic stability this offers is very exciting. Plus, it deals with this pesky problem of climate change.”

Liam O’Doherty, 28

Toronto

Liam’s sustainability-themed accomplishments are too long to list here. A social innovator, entrepreneur and organizer, Liam works as the community partnerships coordinator at TakingITGlobal, where he’s part of a team that empowers youth to understand and act on the world’s greatest challenges. He co-founded Greenshades, an ecological concert series, and founded Avoid.net, a wiki guide to sustainable consumption. Internationally, Liam represented Canada – and Canadian Youth – through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by attending three consecutive UN climate summits. A long-time member of the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, Liam was honoured as an “Agent of Change” in 2011 by the Centre for Social Innovation.

“Being a sustainability champion is a great motivator for me to take deeper responsibility for my actions and to engage meaningfully with incredible, inspiring people around the world.”

Adam Camenzuli, 26

Moshi, Tanzania

An Ontario native, Adam was first exposed to Tanzania on a yearlong stint with Street Kids International, where he learned Swahili and established a strong passion for social enterprise. After graduating from York University’s Schulich School of Business, Adam and three classmates began brainstorming ways to help take advantage of Africa’s growing economic clout. Leveraging both familial and personal familiarity with Tanzania, Adam and his team focused on the dangerous and unhealthy reliance that local households had on kerosene, which they burned in the evenings as a source of light. The team started work on an alternative: a simple solar lamp. After leaving his high-paying banking job in Toronto, Adam co-founded KARIBU Solar Power and became its executive director. The company sells solar lamps on a rent-to-own basis through small franchise operations spread through the country.

“By being featured as a sustainability champion, I hope to bring more support to our cause of bringing affordable energy to the world.”

Mélanie-Rose Frappier, 18

Sudbury, Ontario

Still a teenager, Mélanie-Rose has given more back to the community than most people do over their entire lives. In 2013 she was selected by the U.S. State Department for its Youth Ambassador program, which exposed her to the themes of civic education, community service, youth leadership development and entrepreneurship. The experience led her to create It’s Cool To Be Healthy, a non-profit organization that has educated thousands of students about the benefits of exercise and healthy eating. This past January, she travelled to the Garland Hall Orphanage in Jamaica to deliver school supplies and other donated items, as well as money so the orphanage could purchase a commercial washing machine. An aboriginal Métis and Francophone youth, Mélanie-Rose regularly addresses her peers about the importance of community service, on top of volunteering at the YMCA and aboriginal organizations, such as the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples and the Métis Nation of Ontario. Not surprisingly, she has received a number of awards recognizing her work. Oh, and she’s also an honour roll student who is president of her school’s student council.

“Being a sustainability champion is important to me as it will empower other young adults to also become trailblazers. No matter how old you are, you can set new goals and redefine what is known as impossible.”

David Berliner, 27

Montreal

David may be in his 20s, but he is quickly becoming recognized as an expert in the field of clean energy. He has consulted for the New York City Mayor’s Office on renewable energy. He was sustainability coordinator at the University of Toronto. He worked at the Carbon Disclosure Project. He was also an associate at Inerjys, a Montreal-based clean energy investment fund. In 2013, the Canadian Solar Industries Association recognized David as an “emerging solar leader” for his work as founding co-chair of its Emerging Leaders for Solar Energy program, which trains students how to run solar energy advocacy campaigns. The same year, he decided to start a business of his own called CoPower, which uses an online technology platform that let’s anyone – “people who care about their portfolios, their communities and their environment,” according to the company’s website – invest in community-scale clean energy projects. So far, this crowdfunding-like platform has helped raise $400,000 in loans for two projects: an energy-efficiency upgrade at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre and a commercial rooftop solar installation in Windsor. David expects to significantly grow the number of projects that CoPower’s platform finances in 2015. In the meantime, he continues to work with colleagues in the solar industry on ways to reduce the cost of building solar power projects in Canada.

“Every day I direct my passion, energy, and skills toward creating a clean energy future. I see how my enthusiasm can be contagious and motivate others – both young and old – to also become champions for sustainability and clean energy.”

Klaudia Olejnik, 27

Toronto

Klaudia Olejnik has already proven herself as a leader in the field as sustainability manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada (PwC). After joining the consultancy in 2013, she completed her MBA at York University’s Schulich School of Business with a focus on sustainability. Her blog, thegoodcorp.com, helps consumers make informed decisions and guides businesses as they develop their own corporate social responsibility strategies. Klaudia has become a trusted source of advice for emerging leaders interested in pursuing careers in corporate social responsibility. She speaks frequently at universities about trends in the field and hopes to start a national dialogue around sustainability issues in Canada.

“As a sustainability champion, I am a decision maker for tomorrow. I can influence behaviour that leads to change. That’s what drives me.”

Raymond Wang, 16

Vancouver

This isn’t the first time Raymond Wang has been recognized for his innovative thinking on sustainability issues. Last year, he was named to Plan Canada’s Top 20 Under 20 for his Weather Harvester, which converts wind and precipitation into energy. He is also the founder of Sustainable Youth Canada, a nation-wide, non-profit organization that helps young people engage with sustainability issues. He has won multiple gold medals at the Canada Wide Science Fair for his renewable energy and waste management projects and was selected as one of 90 semi-finalists from around the world to participate in the Google Science Fair.

“Sustainable Youth Canada is creating opportunities and a united identity for passionate youth across the nation.”

Kevin Davies, 23

Calgary

Kevin already has two sustainability start-ups under his belt. The first is Green Start Initiatives, whichhelps companies reduce their waste by giving employees ways to monitor their personal sustainability levels. Since its launch in 2012, Green Start has diverted over 300,000 pounds of waste from landfills, helped save more than 490,000 kWh of energy and prevented 32,000 kilograms of air pollution. After Davies’ dog was poisoned by conventional fertilizer, he launched his second start-up, Hop Compost, to create what he claims is North America’s cleanest fertilizer. He turned a warehouse in Calgary’s inner city into Canada’s first urban composting facility, which now collects over 73,000 kilograms of food scraps each month from Calgary’s top 40 restaurants, cafes and grocers. In its first year, the company is on track to diverting two million pounds of waste from local landfills and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 4,500 tonnes.

“The myth of sustainability is distance: polar bears and hundred-year projections. The reality hits close to home. I strive to make our most intuitive action our most adopted one.”

Faizan Ahmed, 23

Mississauga

Faizan is distinguished by having the most Top 30 under 30 nominations. Workers within the City of Mississauga, which have benefitted from his passion for sustainability, praised Faizan for his “superb vision” and “sense of responsibility.” He developed and implemented a program called Green Leaders, which engaged city employees in green behaviours, and he helped improve the municipality’s organics waste management program. He also assisted in developing a cycling ambassador program that gets residents to voluntarily ride Mississauga’s trails and report problems back to city staff, and he worked on a grants program aimed at developing community gardens for city residents. To pursue his passions even further, he is enrolled in the inaugural Master of Science in Sustainability Management program at the University of Toronto, where he has been equally praised. “He truly wants everyone to excel in the field of sustainability,” says a classmate who nominated him.

“As a sustainability champion, I can combine my passion for sustainability with my dream of becoming an innovative leader.”

Jamieson Saab, 28

Toronto

Convincing executives to change their minds about sustainability is one of Jamieson Saab’s proudest accomplishments. Saab is now the manager of environmental programs at Home Depot Canada. Before that, he helped Canadian Tire develop its first carbon disclosure report and was instrumental in the company’s vehicle-oil recycling program. While at OfficeMax (Grand & Toy) in 2011, he helped develop the company’s Boomerang Box program. It aimed to reduce box consumption by 80 per cent through the use of reusable, environmentally friendly shipping options. In its first year, 45,000 boxes were eliminated from OfficeMax’s supply chain. Jamieson has a certificate in “responsible leadership” from Queen’s University and an environmental studies degree in sustainable supply chain management from York University. He’s fluent in four languages and hopes one day to work for the United Nations.

“Being a sustainability champion means not standing still as great beauty and life are destroyed. It means believing in the ability of nature of humanize us.”

Jillian Rodak, 26

Toronto

Jillian began her career working at Ashoka Canada and later at FlipGive, Canada’s first certified B Corp, where she helped top brands use technology to improve their corporate social responsibility programs. After an internship for a social enterprise accelerator in Argentina, she enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Waterloo to focus on environment and business. While studying, Jillian is working as a program officer at the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to improving the quality of life of Canadians and creating a more sustainable and inclusive society. She also led and grew GreenJuice, an initiative for the Jewish community that showcases and promotes innovation around sustainable business and eco-conscious lifestyles.

“I see the risks ahead very clearly, and feel that it’s my responsibility and purpose to help lead Canada and the world through what will be a challenging yet unavoidable shift toward sustainable development.”

Pamela Ogang, 26

Toronto

Pamela studied anatomy and cell biology at Montreal’s McGill University, but her love of science is matched by her belief that diversity in the business world is the path to creating a more sustainable global community. An immigrant from Uganda, her passion is to highlight the accomplishments of visible-minority women and the potential they hold to transform the way business is conducted. She began to realize this vision in December, creating a team of like-minded individuals and charting a sustainable business model that she incorporated in January. Minority Women in Business, or MWB Inc., held its first meeting in February. As founder and
CEO, Pamela hosts gatherings of professional and entrepreneurial minority women to discuss their aspirations and opportunities for collaboration. In essence, through this for-profit social venture Pamela is building a professional community designed to care for and support the growth of its members.

“My purpose is to empower minority and immigrant women who traditionally do not hold power. We need more examples of how businesses can be profitable and still have integrity. Minority Women in Business Inc. is the embodiment of a for-profit that impacts society by helping women find their full potential in business.”

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OMG. Fiction. I don’t do fiction. Self-published. Kindle. About The Most Boring Subject In The World, carbon trading. Just kill me now. But then I look, and it is only 306 pages and costs all of $3.71. And I think, I’m man enough for this. I hit the Amazon one-touch order button, open my Retina-screened sepia toned iPad and start reading. It’s not that bad. Short, declarative Hemingwayish sentences. Cardboard characters, albeit FSC-certified cardboard. Perhaps it’s a candidate for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

But there is a story here. It’s about Emil Pfeffer, who is, don’t hang up, the Director of the Integrity Unit of the United Nations Global Carbon Market Organization (GCMO), “a supervisory body, it oversees the operation of the carbon market; conducts research and analysis; and makes information available to governments so as to help the market work better.”

I am on page six when I read this and want to kill my editor. But wait, Emil starts explaining what he does, and I start learning stuff, like what carbon trading actually is, how the system might work, and how it might be monitored. Oh, and why it’s important.

Reality is, when there is a price on carbon, when it is being traded, there is going to be abuse and there is going to be cheating and we are going to need people keeping things honest. And that’s what gets our hero Emil arrested in Port Moseby, Papua New Guinea (PNG), almost blown up in Frankfurt, drugged in Zurich and mugged in Stuttgart, as the forces of evil try to stop him from figuring out what is going on in the so-called carbon sink-protected forests of PNG. It’s exciting.

There’s sex, cannibalism, drugs and a whole lot of money floating around in this little book, but there are also a lot of questions. Have I just got a relatively painless education in how carbon trading works? I certainly know more than I did, but it doesn’t inspire confidence in the concept.

Five years ago many of us would buy carbon offsets, paying to plant trees to compensate for the CO2 produced during our plane flights. I suspect not many of us do anymore, after seeing so many stories about how carbon offsets really don’t work well.

Carbon Black is a novel built around the premise that nations are promising to prevent deforestation through carbon trading, and yet evil and greedy forces are taking the money and destroying the forests anyway.

Notwithstanding the fact that our hero is a UN-appointed bureaucrat with occasionally fancy footwork and sharp elbows, I am not convinced a whole lot of carbon is being sequestered. It doesn’t inspire confidence in the integrity of the system.

The author, Declan Milling, “has over 30 years experience practising as an environmental lawyer” and a background in environmental science. Working in the U.K. now, he is from Australia and knows the territory geographically and technically. He says in an interview with one of his book reviewers that he has “an interest in trying to make the issues and themes of what is an esoteric, and often inaccessible subject matter, more accessible through putting it into a more generally acceptable form, namely the political thriller novel genre.”

Indeed, it is a challenge explaining carbon trading, why there might be organizations like the GCMO regulating it, why activists like the character Dominik are dubious about it, why anarchists might riot over it, how banks and investors – both honest and corrupt – will try to cash in on it, and then turn it into a book that you want to spend a Saturday afternoon reading.

Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard don’t have to worry about their place in the pantheon. But they weren’t trying to write a story about something as tedious as carbon trading. Milling succeeds in making it interesting and even exciting; after all it’s not exactly, as Dashiell Hammett wrote of the Maltese Falcon, the stuff that dreams are made of.

The post Book review: Carbon Black appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Although they seem like old friends, Giat and Harel have in fact just met as fellow participants in an international youth competition that invites high school students to Israel’s southernmost city to work on solutions to environmental problems. The Sustainergy competition, now in its third year, is part of a broader initiative to turn southern Israel into a hub of green technology.

“Basically it’s perfect,” they say, referring to the motor and talking over each other. “If we can find an investor, you’ll be seeing this motor in every car and train of the future.”

Modesty is not a virtue in the world of Israeli entrepreneurship, particularly among young people. And while Giat and Harel may be exceptional in their engineering know-how, their determination, energy and chutzpah are part of a broader culture adept at marrying problem-solving and money-making.

Having distinguished itself in the realm of high tech, Israel is now turning its entrepreneurial attention to renewable energy. Roughly 130 start-ups in Israel’s “Silicon Wadi”, the coastal region around Tel Aviv, are working on renewable technologies, while Israel’s southern Arava region is fashioning itself as a “Sun Valley” of green energy. Last December, the Israeli government invited international investors, policy makers and media to a week of conferences and exhibitions to display the country’s renewable prowess. (Disclosure: The Israeli government covered Corporate Knights’ travel and accommodation expenses)

There are multiple impetuses behind the green shift. Some Israelis cite the Biblical maxim of Or LaGoyim, the notion that Israel, as a “Light unto Nations,” should provide guidance for the rest of the world in combatting global warming. Others refer to the huge economic potential for renewables, particularly in markets like China and the United States, and the superiority of Israeli technologies in related areas.

The Israeli government, for its part, is absolutely clear in its motives: to stop lining the pockets of its enemies by importing Arab oil. The entrepreneurial drive of the Millennial Generation is a key part of that effort.

Addressing a conference on alternative energy in the transportation sector in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likened the world’s reliance on oil to salt in the 19th century, which ended with the advent of refrigeration. Likewise, he said, “Our dependence on oil is surmountable. We want a cleaner, better and safer world.”

In 2011, Netanyahu established an inter-ministerial authority whose mandate is to replace 60 per cent of the oil used in transportation by 2025. To get things rolling, his office set aside $30 million (U.S.) in support for entrepreneurial efforts in this area.

Roll they have. SoftWheel is a Tel Aviv-based start-up which has, modestly, “reinvented the wheel.” The inspiration came from a farmer in southern Israel whose broken pelvis landed him in a wheelchair, which had such poor suspension it nearly broke the man’s back. The farmer brought his conundrum to an incubator in Tel Aviv where it attracted some young engineers, venture capital and support from the Ministry of Economics.

After three years of tinkering, a small team had developed a wheel with no spokes and a mobile, shock absorbent hub whose suspension reduces by 25 per cent the energy consumption of any vehicle it carries. While the first applications have been in wheelchairs and bicycles, the company is now in conversation with car manufacturers.

SoftWheel could be pulled off the pages of Start-up Nation, the 2009 bestseller in which Dan Senor and Saul Singer ask why Israel, a tiny country with minimal natural resources and maximum political challenges, has ended up with more high-tech startups and a larger venture capital industry per capita than any other country in the world. The authors settle on two main factors: immigration, including the glut of Soviet scientists and technicians that have poured into Israel since 1989, and mandatory military service for young Israelis.

Eliane Rozanes is a 23-year-old biochemical engineer who grew up in Switzerland. Fluent in four languages and with a masters in science from University College of London, she’s a young person with options. Last year, she decided to make Tel Aviv her home. “Professionally, this is a really interesting place,” she says. “And fun. This city never sleeps.”

Rozanes is working on product development for SoftWheel and with all parts being manufactured in Israel, she enjoys the benefits of “in-house production” – nothing in Israel is more than a few hours away from Tel Aviv. She also loves the informality of Israeli culture, quite a contrast from her native Switzerland.

“If you have a good idea here, people listen. Everyone is on a first name basis,” she says, casting about the exhibition of start-ups outside the conference, which is taking place in Israel’s national theatre on Habima Square in central Tel Aviv. “You should talk to our senior staff.”

Senior is relative. At 46, Dror Cohen is SoftWheel’s oldest employee. Cohen was an F-16 combat pilot in the Israeli air force when he was in a car accident during a routine base transfer. He was 24, paralysed from the waist down. Some would be bitter. But Cohen, who has gone on to be a Paralympic champion in sailing, has only good things to say about the military.

“We live in a country where you need to find solutions,” he says, swiveling his SoftWheel wheelchair. “The military is like an incubator. You learn fast, you’re focused. It’s education in the real world.”

But Israel’s real world is complex. One major obstacle to the green transition is a political cycle that spins so quickly that politicians, defaulting to populism, don’t want to rock the boat by pushing renewable energy, which is widely perceived as being more expensive.

“In Israel we call our neighbours unstable, but in fact most of them are autocrats who remain in power for 40 years while we have trouble holding onto a government for one,” muses Yossi Preminger.

Tousled and slightly pot-bellied, Preminger describes himself as a freelance problem-solver. He’s attending the conference as a consultant to two young entrepreneurs who have developed an application that will load Israel’s electronic bus and train tickets onto passengers’ smart phones. Young is truly young: the 14- and 15-year-old founders of Rav Kav Plus are so busy giving interviews to the Israeli media that Preminger finds himself manning their exhibition stand alone.

“Democracy doesn’t work,” says Preminger with a wry grin. “It’s private initiatives that actually get stuff done.”

His cynicism is widespread. The alternative energy sector in Israel is despairing of a government that talks the talk but refuses to remove hidden subsidies from conventional fuel sources and allow alternative energies to compete on a level playing field. Adding to the challenge is the recent discovery of vast natural gas fields in the Mediterranean that provide Israel with an enticing alternative to renewables.

Since that discovery, the natural gas portion of Israel’s energy mix has soared, reaching 42 per cent in 2013. The largest slice of the energy pie is coal, at 54 per cent. Oil sits at 3 per cent and renewables wallow at less than one per cent.

Although this figure is steadily growing, critics call it pathetic. Nor are they impressed with the targets that the government has set: to reduce growth in greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 compared to “business as usual,” and to boost the renewable portion of Israel’s energy mix to 10 per cent over the same timeframe.

“This is all a bunch of excuse-making and bureaucratic gobbledygook,” Yosef Abramowitz tells journalists on the sidelines of the green energy conference in southern Eilat. “If the EU sets itself a goal of 20 per cent renewable by 2020 and Israel has twice as much sun, we can get there easily. ”

Abramowitz, named by CNN as one of the world’s top green pioneers, has a vested interest in having that happen. The 51-year-old entrepreneur and activist, who recently ran for the Israeli presidency, is co-founder of Arava Power. In the last four years, the company has developed several mid-sized solar fields on the Arava and Negev deserts of southern Israel. Last summer for the first time, the Arava region powered itself exclusively off solar. Arava Power’s goal is to supply 10 per cent of the Israeli grid.

“Israel holds the seeds of salvation,” says Abramowitz, outlining what sounds like a straight-forward action plan: swapping coal for natural gas, improving grid-level storage, committing to electric vehicles. But the government is “killing” the opportunity, he adds. To make his point, he pulls out a plastic water bottle filled with black sludge, then pours himself what looks like a cup of diesel and smiles as cell-phone cameras flash.

It’s this kind of talk – and success – that motivates Israeli youth. It also sets them apart from their peers in the Middle East. With a median age of 30, Israel is a young country, but not as young as its neighbours. In many countries of the Arab Middle East, 60 per cent of the population is under 30, which may seem enviable from a North American or European perspective, but becomes very problematic in combination with youth unemployment rates of around 40 per cent.

It was the lack of prospects for young people, combined with spiking food prices and frustration with despotic leaders, that tipped the balance towards revolution in the countries of the Arab Spring.

No such foment is evident in Israel, and although the rising cost of living has dominated the agenda in the most recent election, the country’s prospects are generally bright with unemployment at 6 per cent (youth unemployment around 11 per cent) and the OECD projecting 3.5 per cent growth in the coming year, well above member average.

Not that life for Israeli youth is a bowl of cherries. The World Health Organization’s Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) survey has found consistently over the past two decades that Israeli teenagers have higher levels of anger, risky behaviour, recreational drinking and negative feelings about school than youth in most European countries.

In 2002, a national poll of Israeli teens – all young adults today – found high rates of pessimism about the future, including the fear that terror attacks will destroy the State of Israel. Memories of terror during the intifidas were found to have a lasting impact on the psyches of Israeli youth of the day.

But for the likes of Michael Harel and Sagi Giat, the future’s looking really good. Proudly donning their Sustainergy t-shirts, the boys talk about their military service, which will begin later this year.

“The military invests in us. It’s not about fighting, it’s about pride,” says Giat, who wants to be a pilot, requiring at least four years of training beyond the mandatory three. Asked why, he quotes his grandfather, who was a marine. “He always said: ‘Shoot for the moon because even if you miss, you land on the stars’.”

As for their innovative motor, which won second place in this year’s competition, they’re planning to register a patent and wait for nibbles from investors.

“Renewables will save the world,” says Harel confidently, “but we’re going to have to work very hard.”

First they have to finish high school.

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