Fortunately, coal is on the way out. Germany is even managing to shutter its coal industry without sacking a single miner.

Here are just a few recent highlights from the ongoing saga of the “Great Coal-lapse.”

Switzerland: The Swiss don’t have a single coal mine, but they’ve certainly financed their share of them. The Swiss bank UBS Group said it will no longer provide project-level finance to new coal-fired power plants. UBS said it will only finance existing coal operators that have a transition strategy that supports the Paris climate agreement, or transactions that are related to renewable energy.

United Kingdom: Electricity produced from coal declined from 42% of total electricity generation in 2012 to 7% in 2017. According to U.K. National Grid data, in late May/early June the country went 18 days without any electricity generated from coal for the first time since the 1880s. In January 2018, the U.K. government laid out an implementation plan to shut down all coal-fired electricity generation plants by 2025 that do not have carbon capture and storage technology.

U.S.: Since the Trump administration came to office two years ago, 50 coal-powered plants have been shuttered, and 51 have announced plans to close, according to the Sierra Club. A total of 290 have closed since 2010 (that’s 40% of the U.S.’s coal power capacity). For the first time since the industrial revolution, the U.S. was expected to generate more renewable power than coal power this April, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While such a milestone highlights the shift away from coal, some of it is also because of seasonal issues. For instance, some coal plants shut down for maintenance during the spring when demand for electricity is low. The spring also tends to be a strong period for hydro and wind power. Renewable power isn’t expected to surpass coal on an annual basis for at least several years.

Minneapolis, Minn.: Coal is still king in Minnesota, where it produces 40% of the state’s electricity. But Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy has announced an ambitious plan to deliver zero-carbon electricity by 2050. The US$30 billion utility has already closed a quarter of its coal-power plants and has approvals to shut down another 25%.

Xcel has slashed its carbon emissions by 38% from 2005 levels and it has pledged to get to 80% by 2030, mainly by growing its renewable energy portfolio. Natural gas and nuclear power will also be part of the transition away from coal. Xcel admits that becoming totally carbon-free will require technology that’s “not yet commercially available.” This may include hydrogen, geothermal or next-generation nuclear, as well as advanced batteries to store excess electricity.

Wise County, Va.: In the heart of Appalachia in southern Virginia, a US$4.6 million project will transform a coal mine into a solar-energy farm supplying a local data centre. The site of the proposed 3.5-megawatt project was last mined in 1957.
Denver, Colo.: What happens to coal miners when coal production ends? The state’s new Democratic administration wants to support workers through this transition. It has just introduced a set of environmental bills that aim to:

• cut state-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, and to add a “social cost of carbon” in evaluating future energy projects,
• require utilities to file workforce transition plans when closing coal plants, and
• create a “Just Transition Office” to help workers at coal-fired power plants find new employment through benefits, education and training.

It’s the kind of blueprint that we hope to see replicated as states and countries around the world transition to a post-coal world.

A version of this story first appeared in the Summer Issue of Corporate Knights.

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The seventh annual World Happiness Report was released in March by the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Yes, there’s a science of happiness, and the data is robust enough that researchers can measure people’s well-being in 156 countries.

The calculations are more complicated than you might think, but here’s the bottom line.

According to the report, the happiest country on earth is Finland, followed closely by Denmark, Norway, Iceland and the Netherlands. The next five are generally cold, mountainous nations: Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand (not that cold), Canada and Austria.

The rankings are based on a deceptively simple question:  How would you rate your life today based on a 0 to 10 scale, where the worst possible life rates zero and the best possible rates 10?

The minor difference between Finland’s score of 7.769 and Austria’s score of 7.246 suggests there’s not much to distinguish any of the Top 10 nations, although the report notes that the final numbers are not as close as they were in previous years. Finland, for example, has been enjoying a modest but steady upward trend since 2014.

After the Top 10, the warm nations strike back, with Australia, Costa Rica and Israel ranking 11th, 12th and 13th, respectively.

Other rankings of note include: the U.K. in 15th place, Germany in 17th, the United States in 19th, Mexico in 23rd and France in 24th. China ranks 93rd and India 140th. The three lowest-ranked nations are Afghanistan, Central African Republic and South Sudan.

What often matters most is direction and not position. Ranking these countries based on how happiness levels have changed in the past decade produces a very different list. The countries with the biggest gains are Benin, Nicaragua, Bulgaria, Latvia and Togo.

According to the survey, Canadians’ happiness level has declined over the decade, and the U.S. has become grumpier as well.

Ranking countries based on happiness has a serious purpose. Researchers are digging deeper to figure out what factors contribute most to human happiness and how meaningful a happiness score can be.

An analysis of the recent ups and downs in Mexico, for instance, found a correlation between happiness and regime change, with last year’s election of the progressive populist government led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador. When happiness levels fall, voters are likely to call for a change in government. There is often a spike in good feelings after an election; the phenomenon is usually temporary.

Researchers are also learning more about what makes people happy. They’ve identified six variables that contribute the most to overall well-being: GDP per capita, social support, life expectancy, freedom, generosity and the absence of corruption. On these scores Canada ranked 19th, 20th, 8th, 9th, 14th and 11th respectively.

Analysts are focusing not just on societal happiness scores but on happiness inequality. It’s generally been assumed that varying levels of happiness are related to unequal distribution of income, but we’re learning that money is not the only measure. The presence of health and social trust are more telling factors than the distribution of wealth.

The report notes that since 2012, happiness inequality has fallen somewhat in Europe. But it has increased significantly in most other regions, especially South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Russia, the Middle East and North Africa. Clearly, global happiness is a work in progress.

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The German carmaker’s profits and share price have languished, and the sales numbers have been overshadowed by one of the most damaging scandals in corporate history: accusations that it installed illegal software in its diesel models to circumvent tightening emission rules. VW, whose brands also include Audi and Porsche, has paid billions of dollars in fines and compensation.

That’s not all. This past April, the European Commission accused the company of colluding from 2006 to 2014 with Germany’s two other big carmakers, Daimler and BMW, to restrict the development of clean emissions technology in Europe. Each faces fines of up to 10% of its annual worldwide sales.

To VW’s credit, however, it is now trying to turn over a new leaf. Instead of growth at all costs, a policy often blamed for encouraging “diesel-gate,” a new chief executive, Herbert Diess, is putting the emphasis on improved financial performance.

And a centrepiece of that shift is a focus on green technology.

VW’s “electric offensive,” unveiled on March 12, is the most ambitious commitment of any carmaker to electric vehicles. It aims to launch almost 70 new electric models over the next decade, up from the 50 previously on the drawing board.

The company has pledged to spend €30 billion on the electrification drive by 2023, including a possible investment in battery cell plants in Europe and 400 fast-charging stations along European roads. It expects to deliver 22 million electric vehicles by 2028, almost 50% more than its previous target.

A new subsidiary known as Elli – short for electric life – will sell wall boxes, powered by renewable electricity, for recharging electric car batteries at home. It plans to install 3,500 charging points at employee car parks attached to VW plants.

If all goes to plan, electric vehicles will make up more than 40% of VW’s fleet by 2030. It aims to achieve carbon neutrality in all its operations by 2050. “The targets of the Paris agreement (on climate change) are our yardstick,” Diess says.

The transformation will not be easy for a company of VW’s size. In particular, it could unleash a battle royal with German trade unions, which backed the growth-first strategy as a way of ensuring job security for workers. Even so, Diess promised as he outlined the new plan that “the supertanker is picking up speed.”

Brazilian investigators have yet to nail down what caused a mining-waste dam to burst on January 25 near the town of Brumadinho in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais. The resulting avalanche of toxic mud killed about 300 people as it raced towards the town, burying a cafeteria, an inn and other buildings.

What is certain, however, is that the disaster has sullied the reputation of Vale, the global mining giant which owns the iron ore mine outside Brumadinho that feeds the dam. Among its many other interests, Vale is a prominent player in Canada’s mining industry through its 2006 purchase of Inco, at the time the western world’s biggest nickel producer.

Vale now faces a torrent of criticism, starting with the question of whether it learned anything at all from the 2015 collapse of a similar mine dam in Brazil, jointly owned with BHP. That tragedy cost 19 lives.

Along with other investigations, the mines and energy ministry has launched a probe under Brazil’s anti-corruption law into allegations that Vale colluded with auditors to misrepresent the safety of the Brumadinho dam.

Much of the concern stems from the fact that dams like the one outside Brumadinho are among the simplest and cheapest ways to dispose of toxic mine waste. Known as upstream tailings dams, they start as raised embankments made of compacted earth to contain the muddy waste pumped out of a nearby mine. As the bottom layer of mud dries, the dam is raised and enlarged by building more embankments upstream of the original one.

One risk is that the mud foundation becomes unstable as waterlogged soil starts to flow like a liquid, a process known as liquefaction. Experts are confident that liquefaction played a role in the Brumadinho dam’s collapse; they are less sure what caused it.

Pending the outcome of the investigations, the Brazilian authorities have imposed tight restrictions on upstream mine-waste dams, including requiring improved monitoring devices and detailed emergency plans.

The accident has taken a toll on Vale. Chief executive Fabio Schvartsman and three other senior managers stepped down in early March after prosecutors recommended they be “temporarily” relieved of their duties.

Vale shares lost almost a quarter of their value in the days after the accident and, as of mid-April, had yet to recover all their losses.

The company has denied any interference in the oversight of its mine dams, and Schvartsman has insisted that his handling of the accident was “absolutely appropriate.” Still, he acknowledged that his presence had become an “inconvenience” for the company.

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“We’re in survival mode,” declares Joy Cramer, a member of Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, a long-time aboriginal advocate and, as of last January, the director of Indigenous programs at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. According to Cramer, Canada’s dark history of residential school abuse has meant that Indigenous people “are trying to survive after decades and decades of what we’re now saying is attempted genocide and genocidal activities towards us as people.”

Some business schools, candid about failing to attract Indigenous students, have responded with new credentials, culturally relevant course content and flexible delivery options for a fast-growing population on- and off-reserve. Beedie introduced an executive Master of Business Administration in Indigenous Business and Leadership in 2012 for senior administrators of band council governments, mid-career managers with non-Indigenous corporate or government employers and other professionals. The program, offered every two years for 25 to 30 students, accepts only non-Indigenous managers with demonstrated cultural competency.

With topics covering Indigenous business, economic development and government, the specialty executive degree is the only one of its kind in North America. The impetus for the new credential, says program founder and Beedie professor Mark Selman, was two-fold: the “alarming” absence of aboriginal students from existing EMBA programs and the realization, in discussions with band leaders, of their skills mismatch when dealing with resource companies.

“Indigenous leaders had a lot of experience with negotiation but they didn’t have a lot of the basic business skills that you would expect for somebody making decisions at that scale,” says Selman.

Designed to help mid-career professionals hone their management skills, the program includes face-to-face classroom sessions in Vancouver over 30 to 35 days a year as well as online learning.

Since its inception, the program has added Indigenous content and faculty, says Cramer, but acknowledges the $55,000 tuition fee is a barrier for some candidates despite corporate and donor scholarship support.

She aims to boost the program’s national profile so that, by 2021, classes would be held in Vancouver and Toronto every other year, and notes other plans to expand research, add Indigenous-focused case studies and introduce a PhD program.

Like Beedie, the University of Lethbridge’s Dhillon School of Business has taken an evolutionary approach to program development since introducing a certificate for mature Indigenous students 35 years ago.

In 2002, the school offered a degree program that was developed by Indigenous scholars to address on-reserve governance issues. After an academic review and consultations with elders and others, the program was refreshed late last year with separate streams for governance and businesses including start-ups.

“We broadened and changed the curriculum so if students are more interested in entrepreneurship on- and off-reserve they can choose that as well,” says Andrea Amelinckx, Dhillon director of international programs and First Nation governance.

The Indigenous Governance and Business Management program, which currently has 20 students, provides an Indigenous perspective on project management, leadership, taxation, entrepreneurship and self-governance. The school’s certificate and post-graduate diploma programs, as well as six minor degrees, deliver the material in other formats.

Dhillon assistant professor Don McIntyre, an Anishinaabe Ojibway from Timiskiming First Nation, was instrumental in redesigning the program to incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing. Students learn industry standards of time, resources and scope for project management but also the “wise practices” of Indigenous communities such as respect for culture.

“If you are up in the Nass Valley [of British Columbia], there is a time during the fall when all work stops because everyone is going fishing,” says McIntyre. “That is a cultural imperative; they have it for ceremony, for food, for sustainability and all of these pieces. Everyone from the territory knows that you can’t tell the salmon to wait.”

With an elders program, an advisory council and mentoring in place, Dhillon is looking to broaden recruitment by showing middle school Indigenous students that business management is a culturally relevant career.

Over the next three or four years, Amelinckx hopes to double enrolment in the bachelor program to about 50 students while also adding students in the course minors.

Meanwhile, a new undergraduate business degree with an Indigenous perspective is under development by an affiliated college of the University of Waterloo, in spite of the fact that it has no business school.

St. Paul’s University College plans to offer a Bachelor of Indigenous Entrepreneurship in 2021, and will partner with the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business (whose president, Jean Paul Gladu, is the current college chancellor) to offer student co-op learning opportunities and mentorships.

“Indigenous students oftentimes view business and business programs as something for mainstream Canadians and not something that is for them,” says Lori Campbell, director of the Waterloo Indigenous Student Centre at St. Paul’s and a Cree-Métis from Saskatchewan.

“For Indigenous students, the uptake on mainstream business school isn’t very high,” she says. “That’s a concern for us in Indigenous communities and a concern for us nationally and for the economy.”

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I remember being in a panic working against a tight deadline for my first feature-length article for Investment.com’s flagship magazine, the Mutual Fund Review. The magazine had been founded at Peter’s urging by his long-time colleagues Levi Folk and Richard Webb, and then sold to Investment.com. (Aside: A few years prior, Levi and Richard had met Peter at Krishna Copy, where he was working. They’d gone there to spiff up the design of their investment newsletter – child’s play for Peter, but he did wonder out loud critically why they were so bullish on gold.

Richard and Levi decided they had to hire this guy, and their newsletter company flourished into a personal finance media empire.)

So, I asked Peter sheepishly if he could help me with my article. He shepherded me across the street to a coffee shop – his real office – and asked me what the article was about. After a couple minutes of blathering, he stopped me and said: “Sit down, shut up and write that.” And then stayed with me over the next few hours to coax out the story.

When we finished, he suggested we get dinner. En route, we stopped at the bank machine. As he was punching in his code, he paused and said “If my mortgage went through, I am not going to have any money. If it didn’t, dinner is on me,” which I thought an odd remark coming from one of Canada’s pre-eminent personal finance columnists at the time. That was Peter. Dinner ended up being his treat.

Investment.com was a junior mining company that discovered it owned a valuable domain name and reinvented itself accordingly, raising several million dollars from the frothy markets of the dotcom era. A few months after I arrived, the dotcom bubble burst.

By then, I was getting bored with mutual funds and knew I wanted to write about broader themes like how investments and businesses were impacting the world.
Peter and I took a stroll down the racks at Indigo looking for a magazine on this theme, with an eye to finding future employment. No such rags were on the shelf, so Peter looked at me and said:

“Why don’t you just start one then?” Never mind that I didn’t have any money or clue how. I had something better: Peter. He helped me write the Corporate Knights business plan, designed the media kit to get advertisers, made a website and acted as art director for the magazine. He even let me store the furniture we had rescued from Investment.com liquidators in his garage until we could find office space. After many nights of burning the midnight biofuels, which we would usually cap with a big breakfast at Dooney’s, Corporate Knights launched as an insert in the Globe and Mail, and is now one of the world’s most relied upon sources for corporate sustainability information.

Later when we brought our corporate rankings in house, Peter also took over database duties.

Once, over the course of a chain-smoking fuelled weekend (a nasty habit he eventually gave up), he built a database to map Environment Canada’s entire National Pollutant Release Inventory with the Environmental Protection Agency’s toxicity data intensities to pump out the first-ever ranking of Canada’s 50 most toxic polluters. A couple of years after publishing, we got a call from one of the biggest offenders (Abitibi, now Resolute), who let us know the ranking had provoked its board of directors to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to retrofit some of its most toxic mills that

Peter’s analysis had shined a spotlight on.

Over the years, I made few big decisions without calling on Peter. He would invariably tell me where I was wrong, and what to do. The “Dip” in Diplaros did not stand for diplomat.
Peter often proved to be right, of course, and helped a lot of people like me with a spark but lacking in kindling. They ranged from serious Bay Street players like Transmission Media to more exotic pursuits like “Sexy New You™ – The World’s First 24-Hour Weight Loss Channel and Walking Club Network.”

Peter and his beautiful wife Maria lived a classic Greek love story. Their conversations didn’t lack for volume, whether they were singing together while he played his keyboard or shouting at each other as a matter of regular discourse, but he always supported her dreams. These ran the gamut from hosting couples’ love therapy sessions at the Fern Resort to a feature-length movie (Red Door and Lemon Tree, which is under development), in which Peter acted as writer, director, producer and even script lawyer, never mind his lack of legal training.

Out of their earshot, he often marvelled at his three boys – Costaki, George and Stefanos.

While he initially threatened to kill me when I adopted a black cat named Raymond on his behalf without his knowledge, the two grew close over the years.

Peter also had a fascination for all things Japanese, becoming a haiku master and teaching himself the language while sipping fine sakes.

During the past few years, as the cancer took hold, he became reconciled to his fate and his gruffness was replaced with a tenderness.

On May 9, not yet 50 years old, Peter said goodbye. We will miss this noble man, a modern-day Merlin whose magic brought so many creative ideas to life.

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Canadians, however, were mostly relegated to reading about the latest plant burgers – until A&W got in on the action. Yes, the chain best known for its baby boomer-pleasing root beer decided to get a piece of the much-hyped pea-based Beyond Meat burger before any other national burger franchise in the country.

“Normally, product development of that nature takes quite a long time,” says A&W CEO Susan Senecal. “But we were focused on trying to make it happen as quickly as we could, and we were able to launch the burger six months after we first tasted it.”

It proved to be a shrewd move.

Over 90,000 split pea-based patties were sold in the first three days of its launch in July 2018. Many locations sold out on day one and Beyond burgers sold out nationwide within weeks. The plant burger shortage only fuelled the growing hype.

Suddenly the stodgy old chain was filling up with millennials and new clients that had never visited before. Some locations even reported higher sales of the vegan burger than beef ones.

Although A&W has promoted the heck out of the fact that it carries Beyond Meat, the Silicon Valley burger upstart comes with its own multi-million-dollar promotion machine. Beyond Meat has a small army of celebrities lining up to endorse or invest in it, including over a dozen pro athletes, rapper-investors Snoop Dogg and Common, and founding celebrity-investor Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s the kind of publicity that really can’t be bought on a Canadian budget.

Yes, analysts have slagged Beyond Meat for failing to break even a decade after its founding, but capitalist forces seem to be aligning behind plant burgers. When Beyond Meat was listed on the NASDAQ in early May, it had the best IPO of 2019 with its share price more than doubling on the first day of trading.

There’s no denying that carrying Beyond has helped fuel A&W’s sector-shirking growth.

“In 2013, the quick-service industry was flat at best. A&W knew they needed to disrupt the market and differentiate in order to succeed,” notes Rethink Canada, the chain’s advertising agency. The root beer pusher was saddled with an aging boomer demographic (and its waning interest in fast food), while new premium burger joints were popping up across the country like portobello mushrooms. If A&W was going to attract coveted 25- to 44-year-olds, it would need to tap into their growing concern about how their food was made.

A&W CEO Susan Senecal

That early market research into the “fast foodie” movement spawned a switch over to largely grass-fed, steroid- and antibiotic-free beef back in 2013, followed by a steady stream of boldly-promoted “ingredient guarantees” on antibiotic-free chicken and pork, as well as eggs from vegetarian hens. “The home of the burger family” started serving organic, fair trade coffee, brought in ceramic plates and cutlery at breakfast and started brewing its famous root beer with natural flavours.

By 2017, A&W was the fastest growing quick-service burger chain in Canada. That year, it opened its 900th restaurant and shifted away from suburban drive-throughs to more urban locations.

In 2018, sales really took off. And while Senecal won’t say how many Beyond burgers the chain has sold, she did tell Corporate Knights that sales have remained “steady from the get go” and that it’s now one of A&W’s “top-selling burgers.”

No matter how you slice it, same-store sales were up 10% in 2018, from 3.4% in 2017 and 7.6% the year prior. The Vancouver-headquartered chain is betting big on continued growth with dozens of new stores under construction.

Millennials have been credited with driving much of that growth. The debt-conscious generation may not spend quite as much on restaurants as boomers and Generation Xers yet (depending on who you ask), but, according to new research from CBRE, they’re “driving up demand for low-priced food options such as fast casual and fast food.” And A&W knows it. (It even has a low-equity millennial franchisee program.)

“We’ve really started to build a much stronger bond and connection with our millennial guests,” says Senecal, the chain’s first female CEO. She has spent four decades pushing beef burgers for A&W, first as a manager, then as a marketer, and now as chief executive officer (who’s clearly still a natural marketer at heart). “We’ve seen rapid growth in terms of the number of millennials choosing us when they want a great tasting burger.”

It just so happens that a lot of millennials are looking for a great tasting burger made of plants. Mintel found that 80% eat meat alternatives compared to roughly half of non-millennials. And much to the plant burger advantage, according to Forbes, “a full 70% of the world population is reportedly either reducing meat consumption or leaving meat off the table altogether.”

Although A&W already had a veggie burger on its menu, Senecal told Corporate Knights in a phone conversation from her office in Vancouver that they “kept searching for a veggie burger that people would choose, not one they’d settle for.” When the team first tasted the Beyond Meat burger in 2017, “it was love at first bite.”

Stir into the mix a ban on plastic straws that kicked off in 2018 and A&W is now officially the wokest of the large national burger chains. On point with the plastic-purging trend, says Senecal, A&W has also eliminated over 90% of disposable items in its restaurants.

That’s not to say that A&W is beyond reproach. The majority of its eggs are still not cage-free (though hens live in “enriched colony housing”) and while it says it’s committed to phasing out gestation crates for sows, its pork is still not crate-free.

Nonetheless, to a growing number of Canadians, A&W is the best of the big boys. Sure, Beyond Meat’s highly publicized rollout into Canadian grocery stores this summer could cut into some of A&W’s restaurant sales. Thankfully for Canada’s second biggest burger chain, the generation reviving A&W’s fortunes isn’t a big fan of cooking.

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The world, at least on paper, is getting better. Never have so many people on this planet had better access to food, education, health care and human rights. All the same, we seem no closer to a just society. Solve one problem and two more take its place. Nagging concerns about social justice, inequality, nationalism, racism, corruption and human dignity, not to mention the environment, remind us that the closer we get to better, the farther we are from good enough.

This question of “Can we really, actually change the world?” haunted the 15th annual Skoll World Forum, which took place in April in Oxford. Founded by Canadian entrepreneur Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of eBay, every year Skoll World brings together business leaders, activists, not-for-profits, impact investors and philanthropists who identify with the label “social entrepreneur.” Placing purpose over profit, social entrepreneurs use business tools and innovative approaches to disrupt broken systems and catalyze social change, everywhere from a suicidal teenager’s bedroom in Toronto to impoverished villages in East Africa.

But in a world marked by political extremism, nationalism, intolerance and the climate crisis, the 1,200 attendees from 81 countries couldn’t help but wonder: Are social entrepreneurs and other progressives winning the battles and losing the war?

Success stories from the frontlines of social change boosted the spirit at this year’s Skoll World. As a sample, meet five game-changing organizations recognized with the 2019 Skoll Award for outstanding achievement:

• Located in Accra, Ghana, mPharma is reforming Africa’s fragmented medical-supply chain by providing innovative financing to more than 400,000 patients and supplying 200 pharmacies and 50 hospitals in five countries. Says CEO Gregory Rockson, “We achieve lower prices by aggregating and predicting demand.”

• The New York-based not-for-profit Crisis Text Line provides a free, 24/7, confidential support service to people in crisis, mainly youth, in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. The service has exchanged 102 million texts since 2013. Plus, Crisis Text shares trends data from these cases to build smarter, more cohesive mental-health systems.

• In Africa, counterfeit seeds and medical drugs can cost farmers their livelihoods and endanger innocent patients. mPedigree fights counterfeits with a mobile-based product identification system that allows customers to verify products before they buy. More than 100 million people in Africa and Asia have used mPedigree’s Goldkeys system to authenticate two billion products.

• Thorn, a Los Angeles-based technology company, battles the rising tide of child pornography and human trafficking with intelligent tools that comb the dark web to find exploitative material and then identify the material’s source. Cofounded in 2012 by actors Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, Thorn helps authorities in 30 countries identify, on average, eight child sex-trafficking victims a day.

• Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator is tackling South Africa’s 55% youth unemployment rate. It uses data analysis to help urban youth identify their true skills, which transcend education or experience. Through innovative partnerships and job training, Harambee has connected youth to 100,000 jobs.

These success stories reflect what’s special about social entrepreneurs. While conventional charities ease the suffering caused by longstanding social problems, social entrepreneurs have bolder goals. They don’t treat symptoms, they target systems.

Here are some lessons gleaned from the forum and why hope still flickers in the struggle for economic and social justice. You may even find some ideas on how to change your world, too.

“The universe is made of stories”

At the opening ceremony of the four-day conference, officials recalled the first Skoll conference in 2004. The foundation had invited 250 social entrepreneurs to Oxford to compare notes but was surprised when almost all of them showed up. Those attendees had two things in common: passion for their work, and the feeling that they were alone in what they did.

At Skoll, storytelling has become the medium through which social entrepreneurs share their hopes, problems, successes and failures. In response to the current political climate, one speaker quoted from “The Speed of Darkness,” a poem by 20th-century activist Muriel Rukeyser: “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” The message: we can all create the world we want.

Upbeat stories attract interest, create common purpose and encourage empathy. Proof of the need for inspiring stories was supplied, inadvertently, by Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan, who performed at the final award ceremony.

Burdened by social conscience, McLachlan wrote a 2003 ballad called “World on Fire” (“The world’s on fire and it’s more than I can handle”). Rather than spend big bucks on a promotional video, she sang the song, barefoot, in a one-take video that cost all of $15 to produce. Noting, for example, that the $5,000 cost of makeup and hair design could finance a year of school for 145 girls in Afghanistan, McLachlan donated the $150,000 production budget to impactful causes such as War Child, CARE USA, and Engineers Without Borders (Canada). Between songs, she declared that she was “humbled and inspired” by the Skoll award winners. “In these divisive times I can barely watch the news,” she said. “You’ve re-energized me.”

Share the power

There’s always an imbalance when wealth meets need. Throughout the conference, many participants remarked on the blind spots of global do-gooders. Those who would fix recurring social ills have to park their assumptions and seek the perspectives of those who experience those ills every day. “Our challenge is to keep falling in love with the problem and to not stay in love with our solutions,” said one speaker. Added another: “It’s smart to be closer to your investees than your investors. That’s how you create impact.”

Acknowledging this problem can be tough for the privileged well-intended. Edgar Villanueva, a native American specialist in social justice philanthropy and the author of Decolonizing Wealth, noted that “colonial dynamics” still determine how wealth gets distributed. “Colonization is atrocity,” he insisted. “We still see a very small percentage of philanthropic dollars being invested in communities of colour.” Villanueva called on decision makers to “lean in” to discomfort and diversity.

“Change is happening in the margins. A lot of solutions, good ideas and brave thinking are coming from people who haven’t been part of the circle, and we need to tap into that in order to see change.”

To its credit, Skoll World addressed these issues head on. One major session explored “Driving Change at the Local Level” through community-based organizations that often understand local issues better than governments or large organizations.

Another session on impact ecosystems in Latin America was conducted in Spanish—a first for the Skoll conference and a huge source of pride for two Peruvian delegates I met.

Another session asked the question “Is Philanthropy the Solution or Part of the Problem?” (The conclusion seems to be yes to both.) On that panel, Rodney Foxworth, the executive director of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), urged philanthropists, investors and entrepreneurs to get comfortable not just redistributing money but also power.

Humility can be a power tool. When Julie Cordua joined Thorn as CEO in 2011, she had ideas about how to fight child sex trafficking. But she started by going into the field to meet the experts – ranging from police to victims to tech companies – and just listen. “Incredible power sits in not knowing,” she said in her Skoll Award acceptance speech. “A bit of being naïve can open up incredible possibilities for innovation…It forced us to partner deeply with those on the front lines who did know.”

Every cause starts with education

Movie night at Skoll is special. Jeff Skoll founded his own production company, Participant Media, to produce socially relevant content and its latest film, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, was screened at Skoll World. Writer, director and star Chiwetel Ejiofor introduced the film, a love letter to the transformative power of education. He plays Trywell Kamkwamba, a farmer in Malawi whose family suffers through flood, drought and political corruption. As the family’s resources shrivel, his son William has to leave school. When neighbours start to leave, William offers to build a windmill to irrigate during the dry season. But first he needs to use parts from the family bicycle, which is also Trywell’s proudest possession. Now showing on Netflix, the film explores themes such as independence, community, trust, indulging curiosity and the paramount importance of learning. Where governments and institutions fail, knowledge can make the difference.

The real William Kamkwamba, now 31, is developing a machine that villagers can use to drill their own wells. He’s also working to start an innovation centre that will connect young Malawians with mentors and resources to build the next generation of innovations.

Double down on local solutions that work

Inspired by The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, I met with Molly Burke, an American living in northern Uganda who runs CycleConnect, a firm that helps rural residents finance bicycles. As the film suggests, a bicycle is a source of wealth in villages with no electricity and few motor vehicles. It gives people essential, low-cost mobility to fields, markets, schools and health care. “It’s their future, and their children’s future,” says Burke.

CycleConnect (originally called Bicycles against Poverty) distributes rugged, single-gear bikes along with a basic toolkit and insurance. The cost is $90, payable in ten monthly installments. In recent years, the company has added other products including motorcycles, an ox and plow, and a grinding machine. Grinding maize into cornmeal porridge, a basic food in East Africa, earns farmers more money than selling the unprocessed grain. Burke says every product is geared towards helping customers increase their incomes. With a bike, they can buy products at the regional market and resell them in their villages. They can rent out their bicycle, ox, or grinder or start a taxi service with their motorcycle.

CycleConnect seems to be a poster child for the kinder, gentler values that Skoll advocates for social ventures. Burke says the company screens for humility in hiring staff. When researching new products, staff don’t just survey customers, they ask prospects about their ambitions and dreams. They use visual aids to probe product preferences, and play dice games to understand how people feel about money and risk.

That extra effort has helped the company avoid mistakes, such as offering tractors and solar lamps, which customers said they didn’t want. “It also helped us build a better project,” says Burke. “We learned how to market and how to train our customers better.”

Burke says CycleConnect will sell to 3,000 clients this year, up from 2,000 in 2018. But what’s more important is that 75% of its customers start businesses and are seeing their incomes grow by up to 65%. And many customers, two-thirds of whom are women, come back to upgrade from a bicycle to an ox or even a motorcycle. The company aims to make a profit in order to end its dependence on grants, and is looking to expand to other countries by teaching other organizations to replicate its distribution model.

It’s not about the bike. CycleConnect is aiming to break the cycle of poverty in East Africa and beyond.

To change the system, you may have to play hardball

The best social entrepreneurs create impact by leveraging business tools such as big data, mobile technologies, agile development and product-market fit. But sometimes you just need a bazooka. That’s the strategy of Alyssa Ely and Sandra Fisher-Martins, cofounders of Oxford-based Asymmetry Research. Their new startup hopes to encourage big public companies to adopt more sustainable values and practices by using the black art of short-selling.

“Selling short” means making money by selling shares you don’t own (they’re borrowed) in troubled companies with the intention of buying the shares back later at a lower price. “Shorts” are the black sheep of the investment world, but they also provide liquidity to markets and help expose investment risks. Asymmetry is building a network of investigative researchers and values-driven investors to co-ordinate “short” assaults on companies that put themselves at risk by covering up environmental problems and unsustainable business practices.

“Public companies,” says Ely, “are not financially incentivized to meaningfully embrace sustainability. Markets are rewarded for looking the other way.” Asymmetry hopes to launch its first campaign this fall. It would likely involve identifying a target company that’s not playing by the rules and commissioning rigorous research to assess the risk. That information is then circulated to potential investors and the sustainability community.

If the company’s stock falls, that should attract management’s attention and hopefully stimulate a broader conversation about the risks of not practising sustainability. Ely hopes it won’t take too many campaigns to change attitudes on financial markets. “We just have to increase the cost of doing the wrong things.”

Inclusion wins

One of the most ambitious entrepreneurs at Skoll World was Safeena Husain, founder of Educate Girls, a not-for-profit based in Mumbai. A graduate of the London School of Economics, Husain champions education for women. India’s patriarchal culture has discouraged millions of girls from attending school; their lack of education often means they become child brides or unskilled workers. Educate Girls has sent 380,000 girls aged six to 14 to school in the past 12 years in 13,000 rural villages in the states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Its goal is 20 million girls staying in school.

In a country of 1.3 billion people, systemic change seems impossible. But understanding the data makes a difference. Husain discovered that just 5% of villages in India account for 40% of the country’s “out-of-school” girls. This makes the problem easier to address: volunteers can go door-to-door to find girls who’ve left school and then try to bring them back.

Husain, a 2015 Skoll Award winner, said that investing in girls’ education accelerates impact. “It is the key to solving so many social issues, including climate.” Nine of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals can be directly addressed by educating girls. Education plus empowerment makes economic change possible.

The opposition may be a sign

Following Husain’s presentation, I asked her what kind of resistance she’d faced. Just when Educate Girls starts getting traction, she said, the opposition grows. “After we have some success in a village and the girls are back in school and feeling good about it, that’s when the community starts pushing back.” As hard as starting is, it’s essential to reserve resources for the big fights yet to come.

So if you’re serious about social change, know that it gets harder before it gets easier. And when the opposition fights hardest, maybe that means you’re starting to win.

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth.

The post 7 lessons in saving the world appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Pilot examples include Sweden’s Hybrit, which aims to replace coking coal with hydrogen and electricity; Quebec’s Elysis, described as the world’s first carbon-free aluminum smelting process; and Carbicrete, also from Quebec, which is developing cement-free, carbon-negative concrete.

While still years away from commercialization, projects like these are offering hope that carbon-intensive industries are taking action to reduce their environmental footprint, despite the high price tags involved.

There was little progress on such initiatives until a few years ago, says Chris Bataille, an energy policy consultant and researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), a non-profit research centre headquartered in Paris. “A lot of the technology has been floating around for years, but little attention was paid to it, until now,” says Bataille, who is also a lead author for the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The shift came after the 2015 Paris Agreement’s long-term goal to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit warming to less than 1.5 C.

Bataille believes it’s critical for industries to develop zero or nearly-zero carbon projects today so that they become a standard by the early 2030s, given their 20- to 30-year lifespans. “We have to do that to stay on track of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius,” says Bataille. “The whole economy has to go to zero somewhere between 2055 and 2075 for those targets to be achievable.”

Here is a look at some innovative pilots across the aluminum, steel and cement industries:

Aluminum

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the energy intensity of aluminum production declined by 1.7% in 2016, compared to a 1.9% annual reduction from 2010 to 2016. The IEA is calling for an annual decline of 1.2% to reach Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS) objectives by 2030. It also says aluminum production from recycled new and old scrap needs to increase “considerably” to 46% globally.

A pilot in Quebec promises to be part of the industry’s intensity-reduction solution. In May 2018, Alcoa and Rio Tinto unveiled what they describe as “the world’s first carbon-free aluminum smelting process,” through a partnership called Elysis, which refers to the electrolysis of alumina, a process at the centre of aluminum smelting.

Apple, which helped to facilitate the collaboration between the two aluminum giants, is also investing in Elysis, based on its own efforts to decarbonize its operations and supply chain. Alcoa, Rio Tinto, Apple and the federal and Quebec provincial governments are providing a combined investment of $188 million.

The partnership “signals the most significant innovation in the aluminum industry in more than a century,” the companies state, through an aluminum-making process that produces oxygen and eliminates all direct greenhouse gas emissions from the traditional smelting process.

Alcoa, Rio Tinto and Apple are developing the “world’s first carbon-free aluminum smelting process,” which, if fully implemented, could eliminate 6.5 million tonnes of GHGs.

The technology, which is expected to be commercialized by 2024, could eliminate the equivalent of 6.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions if fully implemented at existing aluminum smelters in Canada – roughly equal to taking nearly 1.8 million light-duty vehicles off the road, the companies say.

Elysis, which will be headquartered in Montreal with a research facility in Quebec’s Saguenay-Lac-Saint Jean region, will develop and license the technology so it can be used to retrofit existing smelters or build new facilities. The claim is that the technology will increase productivity by creating more aluminum in the same-size smelting cell as the traditional process.

Executives says the technology is expected to also reduce operating costs by about 15%.

“It hits the mark on the environment, it hits the mark on operating costs and on volume and productivity and it will allow us to license technology to either replace existing operations or build new ones,” says Elysis CEO Vincent Christ. Rather than costing more, Christ says the carbon-free method for making aluminum will actually be cheaper. “From the current work it is realistic to assume that the operational cost will be 15% lower compared to modern Hall-Heroult cell using carbon anodes,” he says. “The work we are doing, out of all of this, is to make this an attractive business case for the aluminum industry.”

Meanwhile, Russian aluminum giant Rusal is targeting 2021 to roll out its own line of carbon-free aluminum, so the race is on.

Public policies will play an important role to incentivize the demand for low carbon products and solutions. Whereas policies are currently focusing on the supply-side (reduction of emissions in production), major opportunities (in terms of emissions reductions) lie on the demand-side. Demand-pull policies (from public procurement to building standards and norms) should therefore be the focus of attention and cooperation with the construction value chain.

Cement

The carbon dioxide intensity of cement showed little change in recent years, according to the IEA, but still needs to decline by 0.3% annually through to 2030, as production is expected to increase.

According to a report from the Pembina Institute, the cement industry is “one of the most carbon-intensive industrial processes” given that half of its emissions “are directly linked to the chemical reaction at the centre of the process, and because the primary fuel used in the process is coal.”

There are efforts underway to reduce the industry’s emissions by using fuels other than coal in the production process.
LafargeHolcim, the world’s largest cement company, for instance, is now using waste materials like used tires to replace more than 90% of coal fuel in some of its plants, according to company spokesperson Eike Christian Meuter.

A cutting-edge example from Canada is Carbicrete, a Montreal-based company with what it describes as a “cement-free, carbon-negative concrete solution.” Carbicrete’s technology replaces cement in the concrete mix with steel slag, a byproduct of the steelmaking process that is often placed into landfills.

The company says the process is carbon-negative because it avoids the emissions that come with cement production and uses carbon dioxide instead of heat and steam to cure its concrete. It’s the combination of avoidance and sequestration that lead to carbon-negativity, it says.

Carbicrete claims its construction blocks are “stronger, less expensive and [help to] reduce manufacturers’ carbon footprint.” It says each block it produces helps to avoid 2.5 kg of CO2 emissions as compared to traditional concrete, which adds 1.5 kg of CO2 to the atmosphere.

“We are solving three problems; we are replacing cement, we are getting rid of steel slag, which is an industrial waste, and we are permanently sequestering carbon dioxide in concrete,” says Chris Stern, Carbicrete’s co-founder and CEO.

Because the process requires carbon dioxide, it has to be made in the factory. Stern says the pre-cast market is massive, with its products accounting for about a third of global demand for cement.

Last fall, Carbicrete received $2.1 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada to help fund its pilot project. It will go towards building a limited production facility at an existing concrete plant and ratcheting up production from pilot to commercial scale over the course of a 32-month period. Carbicrete said it has so far assembled a consortium of project partners that includes a concrete maker, an industrial gas company and steel slag handler.

The steel and cement sectors are responsible for over 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while accounting for less than 1% of global research and development investments.

Steel

The energy intensity of crude steel fell by 1% in 2016, the IEA says, compared to an average 0.4% annual decline from 2010 to 2016. The IEA says the energy intensity of crude steel needs to decline by 1.2% annually to reach the SDS target by 2030.

The decrease is “especially important” given that global steel production continues to grow, it says.

One green project getting a lot of attention is Hybrit (Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology), a partnership among Swedish firms SSAB, LKAB and Vattenfall described as “the world’s first fossil-free steelmaking technology, with virtually no carbon footprint.” Hybrit aims to replace the coke that is traditionally used in steelmaking with hydrogen produced from renewable electricity. The production process will emit water instead of carbon dioxide, it said. “This can be a reality when the use of coal and coke in steel production is replaced by hydrogen produced using fossil-free energy sources,” the company states.

A World Steel Association article says Hybrit’s production costs will be around 20% to 30% more than the traditional steelmaking processes, but “that gap is expected to shrink over time, with the potential for increasing costs for carbon dioxide emissions through the European Union Emissions Trading System, and an expected decline in the cost of renewable energy.”

Construction of the pilot plant started in 2018, with a goal to have a solution for fossil-free steel by 2035. Hybrit claims that, if successful, it can reduce Sweden’s carbon dioxide emissions by 10% and Finland’s by 7%. The project aligns with Sweden’s goal to be the first fossil-free country by 2045.

The long road to decarbonization

While projects like these hold promise to help reduce industrial emissions in the steel, cement and aluminum sectors, Bataille says more has to be done, now: “I think a lot of really exciting stuff is happening, but it’s not happening fast enough.” Emissions have to come down “really fast,” he says, which means all new industrial facilities have to be zero-emission to stay under the “danger line” in terms of global warming.

One challenge will be taking some of these pilots and turning them into larger-scale projects that can reduce emissions in a more meaningful way. “That takes a really aggressive effort,” Bataille says.

There may be no better bang for the decarbonization buck than investing in cost-effective new carbon-free processes for making cement and steel. The two industries represent 10% of the greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions problem, yet account for less the 1% of the global research and development (R&D) spend. “This is because there are huge concentrated costs and no direct benefits for steel and cement in decarbonization. Most of the benefits are societal,” says Bataille.

Cost is a significant hurdle, confirms Wendy Shen-Juarez, clean revenue and research manager at Corporate Knights. She says low-or-no-carbon steel and cement pilots are promising but are so far too expensive for mainstream use compared to traditional steel and cement. Meanwhile, low-carbon or recycled aluminum products are more viable because new or virgin aluminum from bauxite is energy intensive.

In many cases, change will begin with smaller pilots proving out the new technologies, Shen-Juarez says. “Smaller, more nimble companies are trying these new technologies. Then, once you have enough of those, bigger companies will take note … and implement something on a larger scale.”

Governments will also need to move the needle through policy changes, including R&D support, green procurement and content regulations that require use of zero GHG materials, says Bataille. Private industry also needs to be on board. Carbon taxes and other policy measures are putting on some pressure, but industry needs to develop and scale up projects that will reduce its emissions sooner rather than later.

Said Bataille: “Once someone proves something works, it becomes the new standard – at least, that’s the goal.”

Brenda Bouw is a freelance writer and editor as well as an author and ghostwriter based in Vancouver.

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