Having an executive team focused on these goals is no guarantee that your company will become a leader in the field, but an absence of leadership makes it almost impossible. A recent study published by the Network for Business Sustainability South Africa interviewed a range of leaders to find out the three main obstacles hampering CEOs from focusing on sustainability. It concluded that a lack of knowledge around environmental and social issues was the biggest factor, combined with an inability to determine why this was relevant to their specific businesses. For those CEOs who understood the link, it was often difficult to emphasize sustainability over competing priorities.

Business schools – and in particular MBA programs – remain the main source of upper and middle management at multinational firms. Almost a third of the world’s 500 largest listed companies are led by MBA graduates. It’s for these reasons that Corporate Knights began sustainability-focused business school rankings in 2003.

In the 13 years since, business education has gone through a remarkable transformation. Part of this is due to demand from students, a generation more interested in purpose-driven businesses than before. A global survey of 3,700 business school students conducted by Yale’s Center for Business and the Environment in 2015 found 44 per cent of students willing to work for less at a company with a strong sustainability record. A further 20 per cent of students stated their refusal to work for an environmental laggard, no matter the financial incentive.

Changes have also been driven by increased demand from the corporate sector, as well as a desire by business schools to be ahead of the curve when it comes to preparing students for tomorrow’s economy.

Corporate Knights’ 2016 Better World MBA Ranking is a testament to this new sustainability-focused educational landscape. Schools from four countries and two continents head the top of the list, beginning with the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. The program continues to be a worldwide leader in sustainability, with a base of relevant research institutes and centres, faculty support and curriculum integration.

This is followed by MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Duquesne University’s Palumbo Donahue School of Business. The Copenhagen Business School and France’s INSEAD rounded out the top five. While all five programs finished in the top 15 of last year’s ranking, INSEAD managed to leap from 14^th to 5^th.

North America continues to lead the way with 53 per cent of schools involved, followed by Europe at 43 per cent. Programs in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom dominated the ranking, followed by a strong showing by Dutch schools. The top-ranked program outside of North America and Europe was Australia’s Macquarie Graduate School of Management.

The vision of the Better World MBA Ranking is to help ensure future business leaders know how to integrate social and environmental factors into their thinking, whether it’s how to do full-cost accounting, build inclusive leadership and governance structures, or engage in ethical marketing. We aim to do this by highlighting which MBA programs are leading the pack through the Top 40 list, as well as demonstrating which programs are lagging.

We’ve also created a complementary document for prospective MBA students (also here) that helps them to identify which schools are on the cutting edge of making the world a better place.

Click here to go back to the ranking landing page.

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The Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE)

Fuqua School of Business

CASE is a research and education centre that promotes the entrepreneurial pursuit of social impact through the adaptation of business expertise. It was founded by the late Prof. J. Gregory Dees, one of the academic pioneers of the study of social entrepreneurship.

World Tourism Education and Resource Centre (WTERC)

Haskayne School of Business

WTERC is a research centre dedicated to creating a greater understanding of tourism and its role in global development and to building greater international goodwill in an ecologically responsible manner.

Ethics, Organisations and Society (EDS) Research Cluster

Durham University Business School

The interdisciplinary EOS research cluster was formed in 2014 to carry out leading research into the societal consequences arising from the neglect of ethics by the institutions of global capitalism.

Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR)

MIT Sloan School of Management

The CEEPR promotes rigorous and objective empirical research at MIT on issues related to energy and environmental policy to support decision-making by government and industry.

Erasmus Centre for Strategic Philanthropy (ECSP)

Rotterdam School of Management

The ECSP is a knowledge and learning centre that contributes to the performance and effectiveness of the philanthropic sector. Its mission is to support non-grant-seeking European foundations in realizing their full potential for societal benefit.

Five notable faculty research papers

“Correlating sustainability and financial performance: what measures matter?”

Sunmin Kima nd Peter Adriaens, Stephen M. Ross School of Business

A meta-analysis of key performance indicators for a wide range of companies across the paper industry value chain was performed to understand whether disclosure- or performance-based sustainability metrics were better indicators for financial performance of the firms.

“A state-stewardship view on executive compensation.”

Luc Renneboog and Hao Liang, TIAS School for Business and Society

The researchers applied a state-stewardship view to the corporate governance model and executive compensation policies in economies with strong political involvement.

“Exploring tourists’ accounts of responsible tourism.”

Adrew Crane et al., Schulich School of Business

This study investigated tourists’ own accounts of responsible tourism experiences, finding that these intersect with but also deviate substantially away from established conceptions of the phenomenon.

“Does ownership matter for employee motivation when occupation is controlled for?”

Lotte Bogh Andersen and Lene Holm Pedersen, Copenhagen Business School

The public service motivation literature argues that public employees are more motivated than private employees to deliver public service for the benefit of society. But is this solely due to the fact that classical welfare services are predominant in the public sector?

“After Rana Plaza: building coalitional power for labour rights and between unions and (consumption-based) social movement organisations.”

Juliane Reinecke and Jimmy Donaghey, Warwick Business School

Using an exploratory case study of the governance response to the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, this article examined how complementary capacities of production- and consumption-based actors generated coalitional power to enact meaningful change.

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“Humanity is coalescing,” argued environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken in his famous 2009 commencement speech. “It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.”

Leading this charge is the Millennial generation, which last year overtook the Baby Boomers as America’s largest cohort. In a similar shift north of the border, Millennials became the largest generation in the Canadian workforce.

The best-educated generation in North American history is eager to change the world in its image, whether it’s by investing through its values, encouraging MBA programs to integrate sustainability into its curriculum or building a more inclusive society.

It’s the belief of this publication that the power of markets can be harnessed to shape and grow an economy that is grounded in a golden rule: Business and society must succeed together. This vision of clean capitalism aims to sustain prosperity where it exists, and achieve it where it doesn’t.

A sustainable society is one that treats all of our sources of wealth – human, financial, natural, social, and produced – with equal importance. On balance, when we enhance our various forms of capital on a net basis, we enhance our overall wealth.

Corporate Knights, with sponsorship support from insurance co-operative The Co-operators, decided to apply this holistic definition when choosing our 2016 30 Under 30 in sustainability. A celebration of young leaders across Canada pushing for systemic change, this diverse group spans the spectrum from social entrepreneurs to inventors and researchers (listed in no particular order).

The selection process began in May, when we opened up nominations to anyone under 30 currently residing in Canada as well as Canadians working abroad. An internal team cut this number to a shortlist of 50, at which point a panel of judges each submitted their top 15 picks and the votes were tallied up. The judges were:

• Ed Whittingham, executive director of the Pembina Institute
• Tom Ewart, senior manager, sustainability, at The Co-operators
• Sarah Beamish, human rights activist and lawyer (public interest/social justice litigation)
• Jeremy Runnalls, editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine

We’re also pleased to partner with the Impact! Youth Program for Sustainability Leadership to create opportunities for experienced professionals to mentor young leaders, including our final 2016 30 under 30.

Jon Douglas, 29

Toronto

Jon recently joined architecture and design firm Perkins+Will’s Toronto office as the new sustainability practice leader, managing the sustainability consulting services for the firm. An expert in the realm of environment and sustainability, Jon is a keen advocate for practical business approaches to sustainability, and has dedicated his career to promoting leading edge sustainable designs and initiatives.

Jon started his career eight years ago as a green building consultant for what was then a startup. He provided consulting services to a variety of clients both domestically and across the globe, leading sustainable design facilitations on a number of prominent projects. His portfolio includes the first LEED Platinum building in Toronto, Atlantic Canada’s first LEED Platinum building and Canada’s first triple LEED Platinum building.

At a young age Jon was recognized by Natural Resources Canada and presented the Energy Ambassador Award for his early work in sustainable design. He also achieved his LEED AP designation at the age of 18.

“Sustainability is about shifting the way we think, changing our habits and practices. As leaders, we need to start thinking about how we will facilitate and support the necessary cultural change to meet the needs of the climate change effort.”

Emily Hicks, 26

Calgary

A group of University of Calgary biomedical students knew they were onto something when their project won Best Environmental Project at the International Genetically Engineered Machines World Finals at MIT. After graduation, Emily teamed up with a few friends to turn this idea into a cleantech startup named FREDsense Technologies.

A Calgary-based biosensor company, FREDsense combines genetic engineering and electrochemistry to create portable devices that measure contaminants in water directly in the field. The company aims to make water quality monitoring more accessible and eliminate the long wait times to get results back from analytical labs. Its first product is an arsenic sensor, which uses a handheld device to detect arsenic in water down to parts per billion levels.

Emily has been recognized with several awards for her work at FREDsense. She was the winner of the National Nicol Entrepreneurial award, Innovate Calgary’s 2013 Tech Showcase, the Queen’s Entrepreneurs’ competition and EVOK Innovations’ Cleantech Pitch Session at GLOBE 2016 and has been chosen as a Kairos Fellow. This past fall, FREDsense was chosen as the only Canadian company to attend Singularity University’s SU LABS accelerator cohort and was recognized by the Kairos society as one of the top 50 tech companies led by people under 25.

“I am incredibly optimistic about a more sustainable future. I think the technologies we are developing today will enable us to make great strides. I am particularly excited for how synthetic biology and nanotechnology are going to change how we eat, live and produce energy.”

Benjamin Collins, 26

Vancouver

Ben has taken conventional mine closure planning practices and given them a major jolt. He worked collaboratively for over a year with the New Gold Mine, the Stk’emlupsemc te Secwepemc Nation and the University of British Columbia to develop a holistic mine closure plan, which took into account past, present and future use of the land. He’s now at KPMG attempting to shift infrastructure advisory planning to embark on a similar path of incorporating knowledge from aboriginal communities on a much larger, diverse scale.

Ben’s diverse technical background in the mining industry has helped him to bridge gaps between companies and communities for decisions on complex problems in resource development. He continues to push for better practices in the mining industry to ensure communities are properly considered in all aspects of the project life cycle, from environmental assessments and permitting through to operations, closure and post-closure land use planning.

“Sustainability is complex; it’s different for every person, place and situation. What sustainability means to you may not be what sustainability means for someone else. It’s extremely important to learn to listen, share and collaborate, and do so with an open mind.”

Charles David Mathieu-Poulin, 29

Montreal

As the corporate environmental coordinator for TC Transcontinental, Charles David is working to implement a stricter paper-purchasing policy across the company – one which strongly encourages third-party forest certification. In the past three years, the proportion of FSC, SFI or PEFC paper bought by the company has increased from 67 to 95 per cent. Moreover, as an active member of the company’s CSR steering committee, he leads the environmental section and, with the collaboration of his colleagues, sets up ambitious targets for waste, sustainable purchasing, energy efficiency and carbon reduction.

To increase the awareness of environmental issues in the industry, Charles David represents TC Transcontinental in the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, as well as on the SAPPI North America Sustainability Customer Council. Finally, he teaches at the Ecole de technologie supérieure in Montreal, where he is passionate about developing the next generation of problem-solving environmental engineers.

“Sustainability isn’t just about values, but also about value. While the idea of doing something for the greater good is a good enough reason for many people, it’s often necessary to look at sustainability from a business perspective in order to sell the idea to the decision makers.”

Dana Decent, 26

Waterloo, Ontario

An emerging leader in corporate and organizational sustainability with an outstanding record of contribution across the private and not-for-profit sectors, Dana is currently the manager of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation. She leads the operations of a multimillion-dollar national research centre that focuses on mobilizing solutions to address climate change and extreme weather events.

Dana has identified that the life insurance industry is “missing in action” in identifying how climate change and extreme weather will impact the sector. She is coordinating efforts between Health Canada and the major life insurers in Canada (notably Sun Life and Manulife) to assess the potential implications of extreme weather to the life insurance sector.

Dana is also presenting leading edge work on climate change and extreme weather to the senior most levels of industry and government in Canada.

“Start small and dream big. Remember that every journey starts with a first step. You can begin with small successes in your personal life, your work and your community and build from there. Remember that you’re never alone – there are engaged and inspiring people doing incredible work all around the world.”

Danielle Da Silva, 29

Toronto/London, England

Danielle has managed to pick up five languages while travelling the world as a photographer and director, and is learning three more. Focused on visually communicating the extraordinary efforts of people to solve the most challenging problems, she is most passionate about protecting the environment and the rights of indigenous and marginalized peoples.

She is the founder of Photographers Without Borders, a non-profit that shares the positive narratives of grassroots organizations and NGOs to empower humanity and inspire social change. From organizations protecting wildlife to groups empowering women, she has shared the incredible stories of the opportunities and bright futures that come from the dedicated work of the organizations by talking at conferences, TEDx Talks and outreach with students. She teaches photo documentary workshops around the world, and is also the co-founder of the Sumatran Wildlife Sanctuary.

Danielle’s images have been published by National Geographic, the United Nations, Vogue, Elle, Cream and The Economist, among others. She has been nominated for the 2015 Women in Biz Network’s Social for Good Award, the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 Entrepreneurs and also the 2016 RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Awards.

“We have much more power than we know. From a grassroots level, individual changes really do make a difference. Consuming less water, fuel, meat, etc., are helpful behaviours that allow us to do our part, set an example for others and help us become more aligned with our aspirations, thereby reducing anxiety.”

Jennifer Sutter, 28

Toronto

Busy as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, Jen began to see the potential to address social issues and create sustainable shared value at the intersection of the private and social sectors. She took a four-month leave to work with Yunus Social Business in Haiti to set up an ecosystem to reinforce business in the agriculture space and to help entrepreneurs launch social businesses.

Departing for the Kellogg School of Management, she specialized in social enterprise, finance and strategy. She was part of the winning team in the MBA Impact Investing Network and Training competition, securing $50,000 in seed financing for a social enterprise they sourced, completed diligence on and pitched to the investment committee. The business seeks to reduce recidivism by providing access to educational materials via technology to inmates in jails.

Back at BCG, Jen is now part of the global social impact immersion program. Recent projects include tackling chronic hunger with the World Food Program and governments in sub-Saharan Africa to formulating a business model and validating the economics for a social business to sustainably address youth unemployment in the region.

“The intersection of the private and social sectors to create a more sustainable society is only beginning to be explored. The innovation and possibilities being uncovered at this seam have me optimistic and excited about the future of sustainability.”

Ishita Aggarwal, 24

Vaughan, Ontario

After her first-ever job interview, Ishita was informed the role would be fulfilled by a better suited applicant because the co-manager was “more comfortable dealing with men.” The incident triggered her interest in gender equality and social sustainability, an often neglected pillar of sustainable development.

She quickly carved out a space serving as the first access and equity blogger @ U of T Student Life Blog, while helping to found the Women in Science and Engineering National Conference. Later, she founded and coordinated WISE’s National Student Research Poster Competition, promoting work of aspiring women scientists and reducing gender bias.

Currently, she works as an on-air reporter at VIBE 105.5 FM at York University, as well as a research associate at the International Women’s Rights Project. This fall she launched Behind-The-Scenes magazine (B-T-S), an E-zine that aims to shed light on often unseen and under-reported gender-based macro- and micro-aggressions in society. B-T-S accepts and anonymously publishes prose, poetry, art and photography that detail an individual’s lived experiences with gender prejudice and discrimination.

“If you’re passionate about an issue and interested in making a difference, it’s often better to just take the plunge and throw yourself into a meaningful project, even if you’re not completely certain how to accomplish what you wish to.”

Howard Swartz, 29

Toronto

Armed with a master’s degree in engineering and sustainability from Queen’s University, Howard is determined to find practical solutions to solve climate change and other sustainability challenges. He built experience in the sustainability field by co-founding the Queen’s University chapter of Students Offering Support, working as the environmental manager for an eco-friendly coffee shop and founding a sustainability consultancy startup called Carbon Savings.

In 2014, Howard joined Home Depot Canada as an embedded energy manager. He oversaw the energy team’s annual budget, established its 2020 vision and helped the company realize significant annual energy savings (8 per cent) through retrofit projects.

Howard now works for Toronto Hydro as a key account consultant, where he is leveraging his energy expertise to help organizations find ways to save money and reduce their environmental footprint. His portfolio includes hotels, museums, community centres and large entertainment facilities such as the CN Tower and Ripley’s Aquarium.

“The sustainability movement has established a place in the boardroom, responsible investing continues to grow and electric vehicles are at the forefront of innovation. While the world may be a large ship that takes a long time to turn around, I am confident we are steering in a new direction.”

Erin Flanagan, 27

Calgary

Whenever a hot-button energy debate is in the news, Erin can be found providing expert analysis on BNN and Power and Politics, as well as other news and current affairs television programs.

A sharp and strategic advocate with a depth of knowledge on climate change issues that matches that of environmental veterans, she is by far the youngest program director at Pembina. She’s stepped up to take on leadership and coordination roles at critical moments for the institute, including leading the organization’s delegation to the United Nations climate talks in Paris and spearheading their engagement with the federal government as it develops a new climate strategy for Canada.

All of this requires her to be knowledgeable across a broad range of energy and climate issues. And she’s not just comfortable with them at the policy level. Erin puts her engineering toolkit to good use by digging into the numbers and specifics of potential climate and economic impacts.

“Building a sustainable, low-carbon economy is Canada’s opportunity to create a more equitable society – one oriented toward reconciling with First Nations and protecting our long-term public interest. And domestic plans to fight climate change support our global objectives too, since action at home helps Canada demonstrate leadership in international forums.”

Tahnee Prior, 27

Waterloo, Ontario

Tahnee is a leading young Arctic scholar whose passion for environmental and gender rights in Canada’s North informs her academic work and her extensive community engagement.

A PhD candidate at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Tahnee holds both a Trudeau Foundation doctoral scholarship and a Vanier Canada graduate scholarship. She has published and presented her research on Arctic pollution, environmental governance and on indigenous rights and gender in the Arctic. She is a contributor to the Arctic Council’s forthcoming Arctic Resilience Report and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ 2017 Alternative Federal Budget as well as Open Canada. Currently, she is a visiting researcher with the Arctic Futures Initiative at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. Prior to her doctoral work, Tahnee was the lead researcher of a project on climate change and human rights, commissioned by the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and undertaken at the University of Lapland in Finland.

In addition to her academic work, Tahnee recently co-founded Plan A, a platform for women to share stories and research on the North, and has served on the board of the Thousand Network, an organization of young change-makers on five continents.

“My advice for making a difference: be passionate about your work, surround yourself with people who both question and support you, and take some time for yourself.”

Kevin Vuong, 27

Toronto

Kevin is a social entrepreneur who is dedicated to building more livable and resilient communities. Most recently, he co-founded an initiative that is animating public spaces across Toronto. Using a collaborative human approach to urban design, the Public Accessory Commission has brought together various groups to provide 12 youth through their Cycle Home program with pre-apprenticeships, paid work and a shared sense of neighbourhood pride as they co-design and build signature bike racks by and for the community.

He also serves as the co-chair of the Toronto Youth Equity Strategy, where he helped secure $958,000 for youth social infrastructure and fought to give youth a meaningful role in police governance.

Kevin has a second career as a military officer in the Canadian Armed Forces where he serves part-time in the Royal Canadian Navy as a naval reservist and intelligence officer. He was named Canada’s Top Under 30 Pan-Asian Leader in 2014, a Next Gen Leader in 2016 with Canada’s Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and appointed a Public Fellow as a leading Canadian thinker under 35 for the 2016 Spur Festival.

“It’s imperative that we begin to look more closely at social outcomes and examine how we can design processes, products and businesses where everyone has equal access to opportunity and prosperity is for all.”

Morgan M. Book, 25

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Morgan heads up the Youth Conservation Corps of the Clean Foundation, which was founded in 1988 as an act of the Nova Scotia legislature and has become one of the leading environmental charities in the Maritimes. Beginning as an intern herself in 2012, she has become the steady backbone of the training and mentorship program.

Morgan’s natural leadership abilities were amplified when she spearheaded the innovative Aboriginal Leadership Program, focused on training and internships for youth at risk of underemployment. She also integrated Mi’kmaw traditions such as Two-Eyed Seeing into the development of the program and promotes these teachings into the wider Youth Corps. The Aboriginal Leadership Program was piloted in 2014 with five students. With her determination it continues to grow, from nine placements in 2015 to 15 this year. She has also been critical in the export and delivery of the program into new countries.

Morgan also volunteers for GOT Parks, sits on various provincial environmental caucuses, supports local food projects and is the chair of personnel for Sherbrooke Lake Camp.

“It’s easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed but in this noise, find what inspires you. Pursue what drives you and encourages you to ignite change; you’ll find others by your side. Always remember to celebrate successes no matter their size. Beautiful things are happening all around us.”

Marianne Falardeau-Côté, 27

Montreal

In her master’s research at Laval University, Marianne showed that climate-related invasions of boreal fish species in Arctic waters could lead to rapid changes in marine food webs. Now pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD at McGill University, she is investigating how climate change is affecting Arctic marine food webs, ecosystem services and the well-being of Inuit communities. Through her research, Marianne hopes to provide knowledge that will help governments sustainably manage ecosystems. Her research was featured in the June 2016 issue of Canadian Geographic.

Marianne is determined to make a positive impact beyond academia through public outreach and education. She pursues this goal through numerous venues, from writing articles in newspapers and magazines, organizing conferences, giving lectures in schools, participating in TV and web shows and writing her own blogs. She is also involved in the Montreal Climate Coalition, which is working to gain support to decarbonize Montreal.

“I truly believe that we have the capacity to build a more sustainable society, otherwise I would not be doing what I do every day. We already have a wealth of knowledge, green initiatives, alternative technologies and dedicated people. The ingredients are in our hands.”

Tikvah Mindorff, 25

St. Catharines, Ontario

When a company in Niagara wants to reduce its environmental footprint, who does it call? Tikvah Mindorff.

Tikvah is the executive director at Niagara Sustainability Initiative (NSI), a not-for-profit that helps public and private organizations measure and reduce their environmental footprint in Niagara Region. Her enthusiasm and carefree workplace environment has drawn together a dedicated team of over 50 staff and volunteers that has led to strong growth in program sponsorship, membership and event attendance at NSI.

Tikvah also volunteers as an active member of the St. Catharines Green Party riding, sits on the Engaging Communities Committee for the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre at Brock University and is a board member for TD Friends of the Environment Fund.

“It is easy to become disheartened in the sustainability sector because the scientific evidence is very bleak. I encourage my generation to not disengage from the issue of climate change in the face of crisis but rather accept the challenge and recognize that substantive impact is the sum of our cumulative actions.”

Anastasia Ostapchuk, 24

Toronto

Since earning a degree from Western University’s Ivey School of Business, Anastasia has developed a promising career in the Canadian sustainability industry. Having cut her teeth in the non-profit sector at Ashoka Canada and the UN Global Compact Network Canada, she joined TD Bank Group. Her aptitude for learning and her ability to make an impact within the organization has allowed her to quickly advance to the manager of corporate environmental affairs.

Anastasia shows strong commitment and integrity in her work and plays key roles in supporting environmentally responsible business practices, including her leadership in TD’s CSR report, carbon neutral program and the TD Green Bond. She is also passionate about social finance and volunteers for Toronto+Acumen, the local chapter of a global impact investment venture fund.

“For me, sustainability is about integrated, long-term thinking. This means breaking out of silos and measuring performance beyond conventional financial metrics. I strive to help organizations achieve this by understanding and measuring the environmental and social factors that affect them.”

Alan Chen, 22

Montreal

There are few students who took such advantage of university as Alan, a recent graduate of McGill University. An energetic and enthusiastic change-maker, he has been working to advance sustainability initiatives related to place-making. He helped to disburse an $840,000 Sustainability Projects Fund to student/staff-led sustainability initiatives on campus.

As a live-in facilitator of the ECOLE Project, Alan was a key part of the development of a community-oriented sustainability living and learning collective which has become a flourishing hub for environmental and social justice work at McGill and in the broader community. His research for and leadership of the McGill Spaces Project resulted in the creation of a strong core team to drive a cross-collaborative, multi-stakeholder process that developed a vision for sustainable campus spaces.

In the summer of 2015, Alan took the time to explore his cultural heritage in order to better understand his intersectionalities. To this end, he joined the Hua Foundation in Vancouver as its Chinatown food security summer coordinator. He worked to engage with intercultural youth around conversations involving cultural identity and the social sustainability of Chinatown’s cultural food assets through intergenerational cooking workshops, municipal policy analysis and Mandarin translations for local historical tours.

“Conversations around climate change often portray the issue as urgent and yet fatalistic; a paralysing challenge for many. But sustainability’s distinctive language of health, hope and happiness inspires me to do my part in being a positive force for my friends and family and the world around me.”

Kimiko Foster, 26

Victoria, British Colombia

As an environmental science major, Kimiko wanted to bring more sustainable and healthy products to the consumer market. In 2013, she launched her first business, Seeds of Change Workshops, which provides workshops on do-it-yourself household products.

Kimiko’s second business, Miiko Skin Co is a local natural skincare business that blossomed from the requests of Seeds of Change Workshop participants. Kimiko launched Miiko Skin Co in November 2015 after eight months of focus group testing and planning. The focus was to provide effective non-toxic skincare products using the highest quality local ingredients and suppliers. Her two businesses have seen enormous growth in their first years, and continue to attract customers who want to live a life with fewer toxins and chemicals.

Aside from business, Kimiko’s greatest passion is to bring like-minded individuals together at her workshops and build a sense of community.

“Sustainability means never compromise the environment for your convenience. Treat others as you want to be treated, and take care of yourself. If you are happy, healthy and proud of who you are, you will inherently be kinder and more conscious to your true needs and how you want to impact the world.”

Bethany Downer, 22

St. John`s, Newfoundland/Strasbourg, France

In 2014, Bethany founded the non-profit organization One Step Shoe Recycling to share her passion for sustainability. Since incorporating with the federal government, One Step has organized shoe collections of unwanted footwear across Canada to redistribute to those in need. More than 15,000 shoes have been redistributed to 16 countries worldwide, and the program has diverted over 16,000 pounds of waste from Canadian landfills.

She has now spoken to over 4,000 youth in Newfoundland to educate communities about sustainability, what it means to be a youth leader and how One Step has sought to address consumerism culture. Since launching the program, she has been awarded the 2015 Newfoundland and Labrador Environmental Leadership Award.

Bethany left for France in August 2016 to pursue her intentions of integrating sustainability into the space industry. She was accepted as one of 40 individuals worldwide to complete her master’s degree from the International Space University. This dream began at the Impact! Youth Conference for Sustainability Leadership in 2014, when she met with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, and told him about her astronaut aspirations. The commander of Expedition 35 encouraged her to make a change in her community by engaging with something she cares about to not only reflect her integrity but also her leadership abilities.

“While doing the work for One Step when others realized my age and the accomplishments the organization had made, I found not only were they impressed that our program was run exclusively by our community’s youth, but this also allowed our initiative to gain credibility and to prove the power that  motivated sustainability leaders in Canada can have.”

Alana Krug-MacLeod, 19

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Still a teenager, Alana is fast becoming a leader in the protection of the environment through activism and scientific research. A participant in the Students on Ice (SOI) expedition to Antarctica at age 14 and the SOI Arctic Expedition by age 15, she has been involved in environmental education efforts through Project Penguin and Polar Protectors, among others.

Alana won funding for and implemented three innovative projects through Saskatchewan Caring For Our Watersheds: Project Penguin (environmental education), Kickstart Change (sustainable transportation) and Insect Hotels (biodiversity). She has also received national and regional awards for sustainability awareness videos in Earth Science Canada’s WHERE Challenge.

Alana was selected as the Saskatchewan Junior Citizen of the Year and Diamond Jubilee Medal recipient, and was awarded a 2016 Schulich Leader Scholarship for $60,000 and the $40,000 President’s First and Best Scholarship at University of Saskatchewan to pursue a bachelor’s degree in science.

“One thing ecosystems teach us is that everything is connected and every bit – of matter and of change – makes a difference. Each person can, and must, choose how to influence this world. No action affects only oneself. Learn this and sustainability becomes our common self-interest.”

David Harary, 23

Washington, D.C./Toronto

Through a wide range of work experiences, David has built the skills needed to tackle complex sustainability challenges. He has experience working in the U.S. House of Representatives, in the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab at the University of Buffalo and for NASA developing products to increase education and awareness of human spaceflight, just to name a few.

David is also the founder and executive director of the non-profit think tank Center for Development and Strategy. Most recently, he completed a co-op placement at U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration where he developed a business strategy to help balance environmental and economic goals across the National Marine Sanctuary System.

David is expanding his sustainability expertise by working towards a master’s of science in sustainability management at the University of Toronto.

“Sustainability doesn’t mean compromise. It means innovating and being better. It means cutting costs and impacts. Sustainability is good business practice.”

Tessa Terbasket, 25

Vancouver

Tessa is a talented young Syilx woman who has been instrumental in empowering, challenging and encouraging Syilx youth to become more involved in water. She has a background in environmental studies and work experience from one of Canada’s First Nations-led fisheries, Kt cp’elk’ stim’ with the Okanagan Nation Alliance Fisheries Department. Passionate about water, she has helped create two youth groups: the Syilx Youth Water Leaders and the Columbia Basin Transboundary Youth Network.

Tessa’s work is shaped by countless millennia of traditional knowledge, close-knit community and her determination to keep educating herself. She surrounds herself with like-minded people willing to help change, be change and create change for the betterment of future generations, for the land, and for the plants and animals. Tessa is a catalyst for many young Aboriginal people willing to be activists, movers of change and dreamers alike.

“I strongly believe that when young indigenous and non-indigenous youth come together, share knowledge and histories they will be able to work together to find new creative solutions for a more equal and sustainable Canada”

Graham May, 24

Victoria

From Greenlandic icefields to law offices of Washington, D.C., Graham has demonstrated true passion for the Arctic and forests. As a student he co-founded the Youth Arctic Coalition, a circumpolar youth voice to influence Arctic governance. He also founded and ran GrassRoutes Biking, a group which has biked across Canada, Turkey and the Canadian Arctic, fundraising and hosting climate change workshops. During these journeys, GrassRoutes has engaged more than 1,800 young leaders and raised more than $11,000 for youth-led environmental projects. Graham worked for a summer aboard the research sloop Arctic Tern I, sailing between Greenland and Nunavut to conduct research on Inuit sustainable resource management.

He has advocated for the same cause at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, for which he co-founded a youth delegation in 2012.

Graham spent last year in southwestern China, studying Mandarin and evaluating China’s role in the upcoming transition to sustainable development. He now serves as board member of Sierra Club Canada while studying law at the University of Victoria.

“Anyone who has spent time up north will fear our sustainability crisis, because the impacts shake the foundations of our world. But anyone familiar with the Arctic will also be hopeful, because they have seen how humans can come together to adapt and mitigate.”

David Gingera, 24

Winnipeg

From Winnipeg, David founded CitiGrow, an innovative business that uses underused urban spaces to grow food sustainably for the local population. CitiGrow builds, operates and maintains micro-farms as close as possible to the final destination for the food, which includes residents, restaurants and retailers in Winnipeg. David boasts that none of CitiGrow’s products travel farther than 25 km, with most sold within 15 km of the small-scale farms. In addition to cutting the need for pesticides and other chemicals, this proximity gets the food “from farm to table” often within a matter of minutes, delivering the freshest possible ingredients for customers.

With a commitment to improving local food systems, David wants to exemplify the possibilities of local, sustainable food production for communities across North America. He also acts on the board of Food Matters Manitoba, an organization that partners with communities to address food security by making food more available, sustainable and affordable.

“I believe the most critical factor in building a more sustainable society is the amount of top talent we can attract into the field of sustainability.”

Kelcie Miller-Anderson, 22

Calgary

When she was only 15 years old, Kelcie began her research into developing novel remediation methods for the Alberta oil sands. She has been recognized as one of Canada’s Top 20 under 20, Next 36, a Great Canadian Game Changer and one of Canada’s Top Energy Innovators. At age 21, she capitalized on her natural remediation methods to found her first company, MycoRemedy. She has also committed a portion of MycoRemedy’s profits to fund the remediation of ecologically sensitive areas around the world.

At the time Kelcie started her work into environmental remediation, she also partook in a research expedition through the Northwest Passage. Since then she has also been part of a research program monitoring coral reefs in Cuba.

Apart from being committed to discovering and creating natural solutions to some of our most pressing environmental problems, Kelcie is equally as passionate about nurturing a love for science, innovation and the environment in the younger generation and in society as a whole. Through mentorship, public speaking and sharing her story she hopes to show that citizen scientists and young people can be a driving force in environmental innovation.

“Young people often face skepticism when they have big ambitions and ideas, but just because people may doubt doesn’t mean you won’t be able to achieve your goals.”

Alice Cheng, 15

Toronto

At just 15, Alice is already a leader. As the current events coordinator of the Toronto Youth Environmental Council, she has organized numerous conferences, workshops and charity fundraisers. Her work has ranged from working alongside Nobel Peace Prize winner Brad Bass to educate nearly 120 peers on green roofs to partnering with national organizations such as Evergreen and HSBC as part of an annual Youth Action Series across Canada to plan the Eco-Hack Your Life conference.

On the advocacy frontier, Alice serves municipally as the deputy director of environment on the City Youth Council of Toronto, where she also works as a youth councillor for Ward 40 to organize town halls. When she’s not also discussing policy changes to the TDSB Eco-Schools program at monthly consultations as the secretary-treasurer of the Toronto District School Board Student Senate, Alice is involved in her school Environmental Council, having educated her student body on the importance of waste diversion, decreased meat consumption and tree planting for the past three years.

In the summer of 2016, Alice was chosen for the 2016 Cohort at Ryerson Basecamp, a selective summer incubation program for young entrepreneurs, where she developed her social enterprise Global Figure, a one-stop multimedia online hub of information and connection for eco-conscious youth.

“Patience is a virtue – especially when advocating for sustainability. Often times, my efforts are met with apathy or reluctance, but I have learned to stay optimistic by taking pride in every small step I make.”

Jordi Jacko, 23

Birch Island, Ontario

Following multiple suicides in the community of Whitefish River First Nation, Jordi became a community mentor for Right to Play’s Promoting Life-skills in Aboriginal Youth program. As a community mentor, Jordi works one on one and in groups with young people to teach resilience, and life, leadership and communication skills. The purpose of the program is to provide young people with an outlet for self-expression and activity, and reduce isolation while working toward more inclusive and engaged communities.

Jordi has seen positive impacts from the program, including individual development of self-esteem and community engagement, and a collective decline in suicide risk. He had the opportunity to help a youth through their suicide thoughts and work out a safe plan for when they needed help.

Jordi is certified in Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST), as well as Mental Health First Aid Canada. He is also currently training to be a Wilderness First Responder.

“To make a difference does not mean changing the mindset of a group. All you need to do is change one person’s life and let the ripple effect take hold of the society we live in, as that person will inspire and make a difference.”

Aaron Leung, 19

Vancouver

Aaron started getting involved in the environmental movement in grade 7 when he kickstarted a battery recycling program at Captain James Cook Elementary. Since then he has continued to grow as a leader and increase his impact.

In grade 10, Aaron co-organized the inaugural sustainability conference for the Vancouver School Board, while also running his school’s Environmental Club. Now, he is in his second year at Simon Fraser University studying global environmental systems and is currently co-founding City Hub Initiative, a non-profit organization in Vancouver aimed at providing young change-makers with the resources and infrastructure they need to see their projects through.

Aaron also serves as vice-chair of the City of Vancouver Children, Youth and Families Advisory Committee.

“Driving sustainable change can be rewarding and exhausting. The team that you build around you is just as important to your cause as the cause itself. Create a group that you treat like family. Celebrate your successes together and support each other through times of trouble. Mix work and play as your colleagues are also your friends.”

Samanta Jovanovic, 29

Calgary

Since graduating from the Haskayne School of Business in 2011, Samanta has worked with executives from a range of industries, identifying ways to continue their core business while incorporating environmentally leading solutions – without sacrificing one for the other.

Rooted in her passion for identifying new market opportunities and for the resource sector and environmental stewardship, Sam joined the strategy and operations practice of Deloitte Consulting. She worked with oil sands operators, precious metal miners and pipeline companies to identify ways to decrease their use of water and carbon-intensive fuels and to increase executive teams’ visibility into their field-based operations.

Keen on becoming better acquainted with innovative clean technologies sprouting in the startup world, Sam landed a role with the Cleantech Group headquartered in San Francisco. Now with Stack’d Consulting in Calgary, she works with executive teams to integrate sustainability into business plans. Most recently, Sam and her colleagues at Stack’d partnered with a local waste hauler to pursue their desired future state, by aligning with select customers who prioritize responsible waste diversion practices over pricing, thereby becoming a niche provider who focuses on customer service and environmental outcomes.

“Since my days as a new grad, I have witnessed a change in my local client base’s perception of the term sustainability. I have met and worked with international leaders from diverse industries who no longer have to be convinced of the merits of a sustainable society but who are actively searching for and investing in sustainable innovation.”

Tesicca Truong, 22

Vancouver

Tesicca is an inspiring youth leader in the Vancouver community and beyond. She founded a project called Youth4Tap in 2012, designed to eliminate bottled water in school vending machines through policy, supporting tap water use with the installation of new water bottle refill stations and educating the student population through campaigns.

In 2013, Tesicca co-founded the Vancouver School Board Sustainability Conference. More recently, she worked on a project with the David Suzuki Elders that encouraged children to play without using plastic toys. She has also worked as board chair of Sustainable SFU, a student organization leading sustainability initiatives at Simon Fraser University.

In 2015, the City of Vancouver recognized her efforts by presenting her with the award of excellence for Greenest City Leadership and Simon Fraser University awarded her the President’s Award for Leadership in Sustainability.

“Sustainability is a way of life and, more importantly, a mindset. In order to create the just, equitable and sustainable societies that we wish to live in, we must reimagine and rebuild everything from the building blocks to entire systems. It’s an immense challenge, but also an incredible opportunity.”

The post Meet the Canadian Top 30 Under 30 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

McLuhan founded a school of thought, media ecology, which seeks to understand culture through technological change. He foresaw the birth of the internet and the decline of print, projecting that increased connectivity would usher in social responsibility that we see today in millennial investors. From the media ecology point of view, millennials do not approach investing differently because of the content they were raised on; their different approach reflects the uniquely global, integrated and collaborative techno-environment in which they were raised.

Growing interest in impact

Research showing millennial alignment with responsible investing is of no small importance: in 2015 Morgan Stanley noted that over the coming decades $30 trillion will be inherited by North American millennials who are itching to transform the world; a year later the financial services giant released research indicating wealthy American millennials “in particular are enthusiastic about [sustainable, responsible and impact investing] by wide margins.”

Canada is witnessing the same trend. Royal Bank of Canada recently published a study showing, among wealthy investors, millennials had the most appetite for impact investing, defined as the investment strategy that intentionally seeks to create measurable environmental and social benefits beyond financial return. An Ipsos-Reid poll in April found two-thirds of millennials weighed environmental, social and governance factors when investing compared to just 40 per cent of baby boomers.

Young investors who are less well-off are also part of this resilient trend. Assaf Weisz, managing director of Purpose Capital, a North American impact investment and advisory firm, provides evidence from a Toronto community bond issuance that millennials of modest means are interested in impact investing when minimum investment amounts are within reach. To him, “millennial support for responsible investing is not hype, but rather a coherent expression of their values.”

Make change 2.0

In a certain light, the worldview of millennials is a reboot of the worldview of the beatniks McLuhan taught back in the ’60s. According to Weisz, the new paradigm “still seeks to address big inequities, but by working from the inside of the system instead of protesting against it. A ’60s protester is today’s social entrepreneur.” Unlike the hippies, digital natives have been interconnected since birth; they are at home with Web 2.0, the form of the internet that allows change makers to collaborate.

For Ryan Coelho, a millennial consultant for the private sector, technology is disrupting the very meaning of work. When workweeks were planned to the minute and weekends rarely heard the boss calling the home landline, work-life balance was a simple equation. Coelho suggests that as flextime and remote working replace fixed work schedules, and as mobile devices and social media transform workers into full-time brand ambassadors, “the concepts of work and life are becoming increasingly integrated.”

Coelho adds, “It doesn’t make sense for millennials to pursue profit during the week and purpose during the weekend.” The same logic holds for investing, says Weisz. “The dichotomy of private wealth versus charity has given way to a complex, multivariate form of systems thinking. Millennials want to know how the whole is impacted by its parts.”

The market is beginning to use language that better resonates with the largest generation of North Americans. Goldman Sachs offers impact investment products that produce “innovative commercial solutions that address social and civic challenges.” RBC has the Generator Fund, “a pool of capital [that invests] in for-profit businesses tackling social or environmental challenges.” David Borcsok, the manager of the fund and a self-described optimistic millennial, believes that “companies that combine impact and profit are the types of companies that really speak to millennials. There doesn’t have to be a trade-off between impact and financial return: It’s a competitive advantage.”

Universal owners of the Global Village

If you define responsibility as the ownership of consequences, the connection between digital natives and responsible investing is clear. Digital natives were born into a “Global Village,” a term McLuhan used to describe the global awareness made possible through advanced communications technology. Through the same technology, long-term institutional investors have become globally diversified. These “universal owners” have stakes in the entire market, however small a slice.

To take this a bit further, an investor who invests only in the handicraft of a single villager will only care about the profit produced by that villager, not the harm; a second investor who invests in the handicraft of all villagers will also want to know who is poisoning the well. The second investor is the universal owner, and the poison in the well is a negative externality that can devastate the entire market.

A report by UN PRI and UNEP FI urges universal owners such as large pension funds to “reduce externalities and minimize their overall exposure to these costs” on the market. Weisz considers the millennial mindset to run in parallel with universal ownership. “The relevant economic context for prior generations was national,” he notes, “now it’s global. Prior generations couldn’t see the negative social and environmental impacts of their investments – negative externalities were invisible.”

There are no invisible externalities in the Global Village. Millennials have seen a global financial contagion made possible through integrated banking, self-radicalized extremists through a viral online presence and an Ebola epidemic through international travel. In a world without borders it’s little wonder millennials want to see all investing consequences – including social and environmental – to be tallied together in an integrated report.

Born to do the right thing

Research from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group suggests companies that outperform on sustainability issues material to their industrial sector also tend to financially outperform. Environmental, social and governance metrics are going mainstream, even entering debt capital markets. The market for harm reduction is growing.

Although they lead the carbon divestment movement, screening out polluters isn’t enough for millennials. It has never been easier for them to start up their own social enterprise to tackle challenges. Reflecting true millennial aspiration, Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto was upgraded to “Do the right thing.” Perhaps this shift isn’t surprising given that millennials will take a pay cut for a purposeful job, or accept lower returns to invest in purposeful companies. Call it blended value or shared value: they believe this approach will pay off.

Unlike previous generations, when millennials first researched the term “investment,” what they read was likely surrounded by little hypertext “[edit]” buttons.

The message in those little brackets is that when it comes to investing, millennials – skeptical of finance and born to make a difference – are looking to make some big changes.

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When it comes to post-secondary education, colleges in particular are poised to provide the job-training skills required for everything from water and soil testing to home energy retrofits and stakeholder engagement.

Colleges across Canada are making changes to their curriculum and adding instructors with sustainability and cleantech industry expertise to help educate the next generation of workers. Still, experts say more can and needs to be done to embed sustainability across the entire educational system to help meet both growing skills demand in the workforce and society’s expectation of more environmentally friendly organizations.

“All trades and professions will be affected by sustainability in the medium to long term,” says Coro Strandberg, a sustainability strategist and president of Vancouver-based Strandberg Consulting. “It speaks to the need to make sure that we are equipping future employees and future leaders with core competencies in this area.”

Job growth has been explosive in the cleantech sector alone: More than 50,000 people are employed in cleantech jobs in Canada, according to the latest industry report from Analytica Advisors – exceeding industries such as forestry and logging, aerospace, pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

It says that if job creation in the sector continues at its rate of about 8 per cent annually, 100,000 people could be directly employed in the cleantech sector before 2022. “This is an innovation-driven industry, which will continue to protect the environment and drive well-paid jobs at home for some time to come,” says the report.

What’s notable for colleges, and the education sector overall, is that Canadians aged 30 and under make up about 20 per cent of all employees in the sector. “That means that 10,000 young people already view this as an industry in which young people are welcome and needed and they are investing their time and talent in building strong careers,” the report states.

While many colleges are preparing to pump out more qualified cleantech employees, Strandberg says sustainability needs to be part of all courses, from hairdressing and hospitality through to trucking and office administration.

For example, accounting classes should include teachings on natural capital, while hair styling and hospitality courses should cover topics such as recycling and the use of more eco-friendly products.

“The college sector is responding to these issues,” says Strandberg. “All colleges are somewhere on the continuum … They aren’t lagging, but are they leading? Do they have a vision?”

Anticipating industry needs

Colleges exist to respond to the needs of the workplace, says Christine Trauttmansdorff, vice president of government relations and Canadian partnerships at Ottawa-based Colleges and Institutes Canada, which represents public colleges, institutes, cegeps and polytechnics. “They’re designed to keep up with industry and to be ahead,” she says.

As publicly funded institutions, colleges must also set an example in how they run their operations, says Trauttmansdorff. That includes being energy efficient as well as reducing their own environmental footprints.

Many colleges are walking the talk. For example, Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology recently installed a high-efficiency co-generation power plant, which will generate two megawatts of power – enough to cover the baseline power needs of its Ottawa campus.

Another example at the other end of the country is at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), which has joined forces with BC Hydro to design and construct Canada’s first Smart Power Microgrid at its Burnaby campus.

Colleges try to anticipate the future needs of industry by setting up programs and initiatives to not just help them teach, but also conduct research and development. It can also become a core part of the curriculum.

“Our programs are starting even before governments set targets, based on where sustainability needs to go,” says Jennie Moore, associate dean at BCIT’s School of Construction and the Environment.

Her school’s focus in particular is around managing energy demand, which includes energy efficiency as well as integrating renewable energy technology in buildings. BCIT offers various credentials for students such as sustainable energy management, building controls and energy management and renewable energy electrical systems installation, to name a few.

“If we are building programs that are enabling industry to move forward, then that enables government to set targets and vice versa,” says Moore. “It’s about seeing what’s needed and then anticipating that … pushing just a little bit ahead of where the curve is.”

Beyond practical skills

Colleges are known for providing practical skills for tomorrow’s workforce, but there is also a focus on understanding and shaping policy and responses to it – including with sustainability studies.

At Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario, students in the environmental technology program learn about stakeholder engagement and environmental law and policy, as well as fundamentals of environmental sampling, monitoring, testing and data analysis.

“Someone in an environmental career will likely cross multiple paths. That’s what we try to focus on,” says Nicole Barbato, a faculty member at Georgian’s Environmental Technology program. “We try to get them to think about the issues and concerns business may have because, in their career, they may need to manage some of the transition [to a low-carbon economy] – whether it’s from the monitoring side of the business, regulatory or other aspects.

“It’s about bringing together diverse careers and working collectively to bring the greenhouse gas threshold down.”

Barbato says students are becoming more in tune with the latest policy and climate issues, especially after Ottawa’s new Liberal government and provinces such as Ontario and Alberta have set stricter emission targets. They want their education to be aligned with what’s happening in the real world.

“Making those connections with what we’re teaching in class and how they’ll be used in their careers is big,” she says.

Charting the sustainability course

Trauttmansdorff of Colleges and Institutes Canada says its members have a growing number of programs focused on clean energy and sustainability, with interest in areas such as wind, solar, geothermal, electric vehicles and other energy efficiency technologies and applications.

“[They] are certainly leading the way towards a transition, both in their own operations, and by training Canadians with the skills required to use and develop sustainable new technologies,” she says.

Colleges and Institutes Canada has also launched an internship program specifically geared towards matching college students with employers working in the field of clean technologies.

Meanwhile, Strandberg says colleges are working in the right direction, but they need to set more of a “strategic course” to ready themselves and the next generation of workers for the demands of a low-carbon economy.

“You don’t wait for employers to ask for this,” she says. “You want to be more proactive, rather than reactive … they need to shift to build it into their core mandate of education.”

The post Training tomorrow’s workforce appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Klapwyk is careful to ensure that everything on this farm is done sustainably, not just to keep the soil in balance but so she and her farm team can keep humming along healthily, too. She’s the co-owner here at Zocalo Organics, an 83-acre property dotted with greenhouses, veggie gardens, hayfields, cedar forests and wetlands in Hillsburgh, an hour and a half north west of Toronto. And at 27, she’s one of the nation’s youngest farm operators, part of a burgeoning movement of female agriculturists in their 20s and 30s seeking to work the land differently, sustainably, ecologically.

Like 68 per cent of farmers recently surveyed by the National New Farmer Coalition, neither Klapwyk nor her husband had grown up milking cows or driving tractors. Klapwyk’s father has an aluminum siding business near Guelph. It took some online crowd-funding, a half a million dollar Young Farmer Loan from Farm Credit Canada and some parental help, but in 2014, Klapwyk and her husband scraped enough funds together to purchase the land off a retiring organic farmer – for about the price that other young couples are spending on a semi-detached home in the city.

Now, only two seasons in and Zocalo is already bringing in more money than the farmer that owned the property for 25 years prior. Like many in this growing crop of new and young female farmers, she learned how to work the land for high-value direct-to-consumer food by volunteering, interning and cooping on farms throughout Canada and the Americas after university. Zocalo is now selling certified organic veggies to over a dozen area restaurants (including Five Diamond-rated Langdon Hall) and a Rowe Farms butcher shop, as well as 100 some-odd “shareholders” (households that pay up front for a season of weekly produce boxes).

It’s no secret that the farming industry needs this fresh blood. StatsCan says the sector’s seen a staggering decline of farmers under 40, plummeting 75 per cent from 1991 to 2011. The average Canadian farmer now looks something like this: male, 54 (and counting), and running ever larger consolidated farms. Though last checked, there were 80,605 female farm operators in Canada in 2011, when the last national farm census was published. That’s still just 27.4 per cent of all farm operators – up one per cent from the previous decade. But there is one notable sunny patch: organic farming. Nearly a third of organic operators were female (in British Columbia that number jumped to 40 per cent) and, proportionally, there are more farm operators under 40 in organics, too.

Factor in the surge of women dominating organic farm apprenticeships and post-secondary agriculture programs nationwide and you can almost feel the bell curve bending. At University of Guelph’s Agricultural College, there were nearly 1,400 female students to just under 640 men enrolled in 2013. At the University of Alberta, at least six in 10 of those in ag sciences are women, according to faculty dean Stan Blade.

“Clearly there’s going to be a transition to the next generation,” says Blade. “Anecdotally, we see that it might have been exclusively males a generation ago. That’s not going to be the case.”

Sara Dent, the B.C. coordinator for Young Agrarians, a network of new and young ecological and organic farmers, says, “There’s this demographic going through university and coming out wondering what they can do to make a difference in the world and how they can actively do something that mitigates climate change.” Klapwyk had her “organic farming is the answer” epiphany while studying international development. Many come to it after environmental studies programs.

This new wave of farmers may fall under census radars since many aren’t yet in Klapwyk’s position and don’t have a fixed address. Says Dent, “They’re working in a more temporary environment to get the training and experience that they need to potentially become owner-operators down the road.

Christie Young founded FarmStart in 2005 to help that new generation of ecological farmers get the experience and training they need. At least half the people coming through the organization’s programs are women. But without farm families and a whack of capital backing them, getting into supply-managed commodity farming can be a challenge, particularly when you may have to shell out millions for quota. So they start small, often working in cooperatives or on incubator farms that rent out plots of up to a couple acres, sharing tractors, tools and mentors for up to five-year leases before those businesses find more permanent homes.

“They don’t necessarily want to buy into or be part of a big corporate farm business, which is where most commodity and conventional agriculture is going,” says Young. “Doing it differently, they tend to adopt more sustainable practices … more direct-marketed and shorter supply chains. You can get a better price for those kinds of products that would then allow you to farm differently.”

Genevieve Grossenbacher, a Montreal-raised vegan baker-turned nonprofit food security advocate and organic grower herself says she’s a prime example. “I fit the profile of the new face of new farmers.” Grossenbacher and her partner, however, had extra geographical luck. They started running their community-supported agriculture (CSA) food box from an incubator farm in a province that supports CSAs and young farmers perhaps more than any other. If you’re under 39, Quebec’s FIRA (fonds d’investissement pour la relève agricole) will buy the land of your choice and rent it out to you until you can buy it back, within 15 years.

It’s no coincidence that Quebec has more farm operators under 40 than any other province, despite massive drops in that demographic over the past few decades. It’s getting creative about fostering the next generation of new farmers, especially since so few farm kids have been coming home to roost.

Lydia Ryall had no interest in taking over her parents’ large conventional greenhouse tomato operation in B.C. At 31, she now runs Cropthorne Farm, 17 acres of certified organic mixed vegetables, selling such heirloom varieties as watermelon radishes and lemon cucumbers to half a dozen trendy farm-to-table Vancouver restaurants, 180 CSAs and four Vancouver farmers’ markets. When she won B.C.’s Outstanding Young Farmer award two years ago, she was the first solo farmer awarded in 25 years and the first female to win who wasn’t jointly nominated with her husband, even though B.C. has more exclusively women-run farms than anywhere else in the country.

“It still has its challenges. There’s been times where I’ve been at a tractor dealership and … they think I’m buying a tractor for my dad. Sales guys are a little bit surprised at first.”

That being said, the paradigm is shifting and Cropthorne clearly isn’t bound by gender constraints of farms past. Her husband (a wildlife coordinator at Vancouver International Airport) is currently on parental leave looking after their infant daughter while she manages the fields. “It’s really interesting because we totally switched gender roles in one sense from the traditional way. Right now, anyway.”

Still, while more young women may rule the roost on many smaller ecological farms, a study by the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC) found that women continue to face a “grass ceiling” throughout Canada’s broader agricultural sector. Says CAHRC project manager Debra Hauer, “We are finding that, yes, there is that final step that is a barrier to achieving senior management or executive roles in all aspects of agriculture.”

Orgs like the CAHRC, the National New Farmer Coalition, Young Agrarians, Women in Ag and FarmStart are working on knocking down those barriers, be it lack of affordable farmland or access to capital for new female farmers, or helping them break into the old boys club in farm and ag-related businesses.

Even with so many farm fences in the way, adds FarmStart’s Young, “I do believe women are going to lead that renewal.”

The post A taste of country: the rise of young, female farmers appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Since revealed last November, Alberta’s climate plan has received widespread praise, including kudos from U.S. President Barack Obama during an historic speech this June in the House of Commons. It has also been embraced by some of the province’s biggest oil sands producers. Cenovus Energy, Canadian Natural Resources (CNR), Shell Canada and Suncor Energy all endorsed the plan, with Suncor CEO Steve Williams even calling it a “game changer.”

But why do they endorse it? What convinced the top executives of these particular companies to stand up on stage with Notley, as they did last November, and publicly disclose their support for a plan that takes aim at the heart of their business – of their very existence?

In a word, it comes down to efficiency. Notley’s plan, if structured and implemented as proposed, would for the first time reward companies in a sector that emit the least emissions per unit of output (i.e., per barrel of oil) relative to their peers. Simply put, Cenovus, Suncor, Shell and CNR likely stood behind Notley because they believe they are – or can be – the most efficient operators in the oil sands.

“As a general rule, this is a smart thing to do, especially when you have an emissions-intensive and trade-exposed sector that is going to incur a lot of carbon costs,” says Chris Ragan, chair of Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission, which has been closely tracking Alberta’s progress. “I would say Alberta is going about this the right way.”

Decade of ineffectiveness

Context is important to fully appreciate why Alberta’s proposed approach is so “smart.”

Currently, Alberta prices GHGs from oil sands producers and other large emitters using its Specified Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER), which came into force in 2007. (Large emitters, under the rules, are defined as industrial facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2 or equivalent annually.)

SGER was designed around the concept of carbon intensity, which, when talking about the oil sands, equates to the amount of emissions that result from the production of a barrel of oil. Government officials use historical data to establish a carbon intensity benchmark for each oil sands facility, and under the regulation producers are required to reduce annual emissions intensity to 12 per cent (15 per cent in 2016 and rising to 20 per cent in 2017) below their respective per-barrel benchmarks.

If a company didn’t hit its target in a given year and needed to make up the difference, it had the option of using emissions reductions banked from previous years or purchasing credits from other firms that beat their targets. It could also purchase offsets elsewhere in Alberta. Alternatively, it could pay $15 (pre-2016) into a government fund for every tonne of emissions in excess of its target.

The approach, while obviously better than nothing, has its problems. Sure, carbon until recently carried a price at $15 a tonne, but since that price only applied to emissions over-and-above established intensity targets at 100 or so industrial facilities (oil sands, power plants, chemical plants, etc.), it didn’t capture a whole lot. The Pembina Institute calculated that only 4 per cent of Alberta’s total emissions were affected.

In fact, divide the total revenue collected through the carbon levy by total emissions from big emitters and you’ve effectively got a carbon tax of less than $2 a tonne, not nearly enough to drive down industry emissions. “After more than six years in operation, the regulation has not resulted in a reduction of Alberta’s total emissions,” Pembina analyst Andrew Read concluded in a July 2014 report.

At the same time, without an absolute cap on GHGs there has been nothing discouraging industry emissions from rising. For example, a facility that met its compliance target of 12 per cent reduction in carbon intensity could still see overall emissions rise 76 per cent by doubling its oil output.

Rewarding the most efficient

Last November, the Alberta government’s climate change advisory panel recommended a new approach. Led by University of Alberta economics professor Andrew Leach, the panel urged Notley to ditch the SGER and replace it with a new Carbon Competitiveness Regulation.

Assuming Notley’s government implements the recommendations, and there’s every indication it will, here’s what we expect will happen: Come 2018 all industrial facilities with more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions will, like the rest of the economy, be required to pay a carbon price of $30 per tonne. This economy-wide carbon tax is expected to generate roughly $5 billion a year for Alberta, according to the Ecofiscal Commission.

For obvious reasons, Alberta is concerned about placing too much of a burden on the industrial geese that lay the province’s golden eggs. Piss off the geese and many will fly to a place with less stringent carbon policies. And good luck attracting new geese.

“By pricing carbon it’s going to increase the cost of production, and that will make investors less willing to locate their operations in the province,” explains Trevor Tombe, a professor of economics at the University of Calgary. Economists refer to this effect as carbon leakage, and it’s a serious concern in a province highly dependent on emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries like the oil sands.

To address this threat to competitiveness, the Leach panel recommended that some of the revenues collected through the carbon tax – at least $2.5 billion, by some estimates – be returned to big emitters by way of a subsidy tied to how much they produce, whether it’s barrels of oil or kilowatts of electricity or some other sector-specific output. The plan refers to these as “output-based allocations” of emissions credits.

This is where things get interesting. As Leach explained to Corporate Knights, the idea would be to take all oil sands operations in the province and sort them by emissions per barrel, with steam-assisted gravity drainage and mining projects evaluated separately. “Every facility would get an output-based allocation of credits per barrel equal to the 75^th percentile,” said Leach. (In the electricity sector, the comparable benchmark for determining allocations would be “good as best gas” performance.)

Winners and losers

Tombe says such a design means 75 per cent of oil sands firms can be expected to pay more in carbon taxes than what they receive back in subsidies – i.e., emissions credits. A snapshot of emissions intensity at 19 oil sands operations suggests that projects majority owned by Shell, Cenovus and Suncor are likely to make the top quartile of performers. In other words, they run the most efficient and least GHG-intensive operations in the industry.

“What this policy does is eliminate preferential treatment to higher emitting firms,” Tombe says. “It absolutely will benefit those that are more efficient, and does so in a way that’s market-based. That is, creating a level playing field where the same output subsidy is provided to everyone.”

Looking at Cenovus and Nexen, for example, Tombe calculates that emissions from Nexen’s Long Lake operation are four to five times more intensive than Cenovus Energy’s Christina Lake and Foster Creek projects. “Cenovus is going to make money. It will receive more in effective subsidies than it will pay in carbon taxes, whereas Nexen will pay a lot,” he says. “I suspect that’s the business motivation for Cenovus getting behind the plan.” It could also explain why Nexen was noticeably absent from Notley’s November announcement.

Ragan says the proposed plan will do a better job of pushing emissions-intensive industries in Alberta to become more efficient. “There’s now an incentive for them to get better,” he says. “If you can get yourself into that (top quartile) club, then you’re better off.”

To make sure this club continues to up its game, output-based allocations would decrease at about 1 to 2 per cent annually “to reflect expected energy efficiency improvements,” according to the Leach panel’s report. This approach, combined with the intention of capping total annual oil sands emissions in the province at 100 megatonnes, could set the industry on a more sustainable path.

There’s already evidence it has. In July, Suncor’s Williams told analysts on a conference call that the company has asked the Alberta government if it could “strand” reserves that cost more to extract and carry relatively high emissions intensities. He cited the potential of saving 10 to 20 per cent on project operating costs.

The numbers are consistent with a Carbon Tracker report released in May which argued that seven major oil and gas companies could create $100 billion (U.S.) in value by avoiding high-cost development.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but in a carbon-constrained world such an analysis increasingly makes sense.

The post A rewards program for the oil sands appeared first on Corporate Knights.

After using  my girlfriend’s body lotion for a quite a while, I decided one day to stop borrowing and go pick some up for myself at the local drugstore. Without thinking, I gravitated towards the men’s section and was met with a sea of labels, like Every Man Jack, before ultimately settling on Bulldog Skincare for Men. The bottle informed me this was specifically tailored to “man skin,” ensuring that the customer’s fragile masculinity remained intact and well-moisturized. Regular body lotion is for women, but Bulldog is Man’s Best Friend.™

It turns out this sort of masculinity-coddling marketing extends into green consumer products as well. Concerned about prior findings that women are more likely than men to engage in sustainability-related behaviour and make eco-friendly product purchases, researchers from universities in China and the U.S. decided to launch a series of field tests marketing sustainability-minded products in a different manner.

Researchers used two distinct approaches. Some men had their masculinity “affirmed” before evaluating an eco-friendly product, while others were shown products that had been relabelled with a more manly emphasis. Both approaches were found to be effective at changing male opinions of the products at hand.

This series of studies “provides evidence that the concepts of greenness and femininity are cognitively linked and shows that, accordingly, consumers who engage in green behaviors are stereotyped by others as more feminine and even perceive themselves as more feminine,” reads the report.

One experiment showed male subjects marketing materials for two fictional environmental charities, and asked them which one they were more interested in donating to. The Friends of Nature charity, symbolized by a stylized tree, lost out in favour of the howling wolf logo for The Wilderness Rangers. In another study, interest in an eco-friendly car went up dramatically when the name was changed to a “manlier” word.

If these findings are true, it may place environmentalists in the unenviable position of supporting more his and her consumer products, with marketing of sustainability-focused goods emphasizing your “man cred” becoming ubiquitous.

Yet embracing alternative marketing techniques for environmentally friendly products falls into a proud tradition of efforts to “moralize the economy,” as Frank Trentmann explains in his recent book Empire of Things, a history of human consumption. Ideas like fair trade or various eco-logos are not simply post-modern phenomena, but in the same vein of American abolitionists boycotting Caribbean cane sugar or the consumer movements of the late 19th century. The white and black label movement at the time was largely a women’s consumer body which investigated working conditions – especially in textile firms – and provided labels demonstrating whether you were making ethical choices.

So what role do individual consumers play in altering global consumption patterns? Consumer choice is often fingered as the most important factor in addressing the mounting series of ecological challenges the world is facing. But Trentmann (see here) argues that past lifestyle changes have been driven much more by broader social campaigns and actions taken by the state than is typically acknowledged. Although it may not be de rigueur or politically popular to argue, successful attempts to alter entrenched habits will involve interventionist policies.

Trentmann offers one last piece of advice from the past, around the way changes have been sold to the public. Sustainable consumption would be much easier if it were presented as an opportunity, not so much a call for something less comfortable or slightly worse – just different.

A time for new opportunities and different ways of living.

The post Editor’s note: eco bros appeared first on Corporate Knights.

With offshore speculators buying residential properties specifically to knock down the existing home and replace it with something huge, the market – for all its distortions – has essentially disclosed the going market value of residential property. After all, when so many dwellings are considered to be knock-downs, the buyers are in effect zero-rating the buildings they’ve acquired.

The final sale price, in sum, is equal to the price of the land.

The value of land in built-up urban areas is notoriously difficult to calculate, which is why most property tax systems are built around a market value assessment that includes both the structural and locational features of a property to come up with an estimated value that can be used as a basis for taxation. In general, the dearth of unimproved urban land makes it difficult to come up with valuations.

That computational difficulty is one of the reasons why the so-called “land value tax” – an Enlightenment-era idea that has long held out the possibly utopian promise of a more effective and equitable way of taxing land – is one of those intellectually compelling policy ideas that suffers from insufficient take-up.

“Nothing,” Adam Smith mused, “could be more reasonable.” Or, as the famed U.S. economist Milton Friedman opined two centuries later, “the least bad tax.”

The LVT, according to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based think tank, is in use in some form in about 25 countries around the world, including South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. A few jurisdictions in the U.S., mostly in Pennsylvania, also use a blended version that is partly a land value tax and partly a buildings tax.

But in Canada, where municipal property taxes are regulated by provincial legislation, the LVT has had no take-up whatsoever. It’s so far off the policy radar here that even the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, an umbrella lobbying organization which also serves as a kind of clearinghouse for all species of local government policy, has no position on the subject, nor any research.

On paper, the LVT, whose most outspoken advocate was a 19^th century Philadelphia-born economist named Henry George, is simplicity incarnate: the assessed taxes are based on the value of land. Because there’s a finite supply of real estate in a given jurisdiction, the tax won’t create market distortions, as is the case, for example, with sales taxes, which will reduce the overall amount of consumption. Moreover, because property tends to belong to the more affluent individuals in society, the burden of the LVT is borne by those with the greatest ability to pay.

Some economists, explains University of Toronto municipal finance expert Enid Slack, like the LVT because it doesn’t create perverse disincentives in land use. She cites the example of a market-value type property tax: if set too high, such taxes can discourage owners from investing in their homes because doing so increases the market value and thus the tax.

Other experts point out that LVTs can serve to encourage denser development and discourage sprawl, because there’s a financial penalty for inefficient use of land. With an LVT, says Waterloo University associate professor of planning Markus Moos, “you’re not putting in place incentives to keep building on large lots.”

Indeed, there’s considerable evidence that low suburban property taxes plus hidden subsidies, in the form of artificially inexpensive gasoline prices or highway construction expenditures by higher orders of government, have been implicated in the conspicuously inefficient and polluting post-war development patterns that have ringed so many older cities with car-dependent suburbs.

The most notable example of a city that experimented seriously with an LVT is Pittsburgh in the late 1970s. The city had long had a blended property tax consisting of a land portion and a buildings portion. The municipality significantly hiked the land rate in 1979 so it was five times higher than the building portion. According to a study by economists Wallace Oates and Robert Schwab, the change occurred on the eve of a sustained commercial building boom in the downtown of the former Rust Belt city.

While Oates and Schwab are LVT proponents (their research was commissioned by the Lincoln Institute), they acknowledge that the Pittsburgh boom may have been part of a large renaissance narrative that begins decades earlier, when local industrialists and civic leaders persuaded municipal officials to confront the extreme industrial pollution that seemed to be choking the city. By the 1980s, Pittsburgh’s turnaround was well underway, but Oates and Schwab argue that it received an important boost from the LVT. (The tax, however, was later eliminated.)

Other U.S. cities did look at implementing an LVT in later years, and the idea gained traction in New Zealand, which had an extended dalliance with neo-liberal policy-making in the early 1990s. Often, the justification involved tax reforms meant to discourage land owners from sitting on fallow urban property.

But as the Lincoln Institute’s own analysts point out, the complicated transition from a market-value based system to an LVT, with the associated shifts in tax burden, posed a political problem most cities didn’t want to confront.

It’s also true that implementation and computational issues aren’t the only strikes against LVTs, especially in jurisdictions that have ridden the wave of development intensification and downtown population growth that has swept through global metropolitan regions in the past two decades.

Moos points out, for example, that in a place like Toronto, where downtown land is at a premium and speculation is rampant, the LVT could inadvertently discourage the city and private developers from creating new open spaces, parks or plazas because they have a powerful economic incentive to offset the high taxes with more revenue-generating property development.

Slack adds that an LVT also represents a smaller tax base than a property tax, which means that the rate would need to be higher in order for the municipality to recoup the traditional property tax revenue it would stand to lose in a transition. She also adds that building forms that evolved around existing tax systems – for example, high-rise condos – create further problems.

Slack offers the comparison between a $500,000 single family home and a 10-unit condo, with $500,000 apartments, sitting on a similarly sized piece of land close by. The land for both would yield the same amount of revenue under an LVT system, where the condo, under the traditional market value rules, produces 10 times as much tax as the single-family home.

Ultimately, as Moos points out, the debate over the relative effectiveness of one property tax system over another must occur within the broader context of local and regional land use planning as well as infrastructure investment choices. Local or regional governments can spur intensification with small transit, housing or zoning policies that aren’t greatly impacted by property tax regimes. Moreover, demographics also play a determinative role, as was true in the decentralization of the post-war era as well as the re-urbanization of more recent decades.

Indeed, Moos argues that land use reformers and urban environmental activists should focus on weeding out sprawl-inducing policies, such as certain types of development charges. “As a first step,” he says, “we have to tweak the current financial system before we embark on a whole new tax.”

The post Pricing property appeared first on Corporate Knights.