Though just 3.5% of Ford’s revenue came from manufacturing electric vehicles in 2022, it poured more than US$2.1 billion into EV production last year and says it plans to invest US$50 billion by the end of 2026, with hopes of producing two million EVs a year. The Detroit automaker isn’t alone in the auto industry’s race to build BEVs (battery electric vehicles). Teasing out corporate pledges from their ledger books is key. Corporate Knights has been collecting data on major corporations’ green progress for two decades. Our Sustainable Economy Intelligence database tracks how much companies are funnelling into green capital expenditures (sustainable investment) and the percentage of revenues they earn from planet-friendly products and services (sustainable revenue). 

So which of the legacy automakers is pulling ahead of the pack? Our EV hero this year is Sweden’s Volvo, which earned 20.2% of its revenue from sustainable products in 2022. That figure should keep ticking upward, now that it has announced it will be selling its last diesel car in early 2024 on the road to going all-in on EVs by 2030. In October, Volvo saw its battery electric vehicles (BEVs) jump 29% over the same period last year.

“Volvo will not sell a single car that is not full-electric after 2030, regardless of market,” the brand’s chief commercial officer, Björn Annwall, said in June. “No ifs, no buts.” 

The companies in second and third place in the EV race (Germany’s Daimler and BMW) are still laps behind the Swedish car maker, with 12.3% and 11.6% in green revenue. Behind the scenes, BMW has been leading opposition to the EU’s 2035 zero-emissions CO2 standard that would phase out the sale of gas-powered cars. 

While they may not be as outspoken as BMW, most car companies are still hiding behind industry groups that lobby against more aggressive emission regulations in both the U.S. and Europe. Meanwhile, Volvo Cars announced that it was leaving the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) by the end of 2022 for that very reason: “We have concluded that Volvo Cars’ sustainability strategy and ambitions are not fully aligned with ACEA’s positioning.”

Angling to catch up is Volkswagen, which InfluenceMap notes is also “supporting more ambitious climate regulation than their competitors.” More than any other major car company in 2022, VW channelled an impressive 38.4% of investments (more than US$8.3 billion) into going green. The race is on. 

The post Hero: Volvo ditches diesel and revs up electric car sales appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When you look at the oil industry’s efforts to decarbonize, the results are lacklustre. By our count in 2022 – seven years after the Paris Agreement – the vast majority of oil companies still earn less than 1% of their revenue from renewable sources. 

The best performer was France’s TotalEnergies, which calls itself “a major player in renewable energy production,” including hydroelectricity, solar, wind power and biofuels. In 2022, Total’s green energy resources accounted for a negligible 1.3% of total revenue. Other underperformers on our list are U.K. giant BP, at 1%; Canada’s Suncor, at 0.29%; Shell, at 0.15%; and Norway’s Equinor, at 0.12%.

A closer look at their capital investments, however, indicates that in 2022 a few key players were earnestly investing in turning that ship around. Total put an impressive 34% of its total investment capital into sustainable projects – up from 26% in 2021. BP, in second place, directed 26% of its investments to green activities in 2022, up from 19%. Shell took third place, with 19%, but quintupled its green investments (in wind, solar, hydrogen and EV charging) over 2021. Suncor invested 10.4% of its capital on green projects in 2022.

But 2023 has been the year of oil industry backpedalling on renewables and doubling down on fossil fuels. 

In February, BP halved its target for cutting emissions by 2030, to between 20% and 30% versus its previous goal of 35% to 40% – despite shareholders having approved the original plan. In April, Total made a similar announcement, with CEO Patrick Pouyanné arguing that the additional production would help keep oil prices low. In May, new Suncor CEO Rich Kruger, an Exxon veteran, announced four priorities – safety, operations, reliability and profitability – with no mention of climate. In June, Shell’s new CEO said the firm was cancelling its planned, orderly cutback in oil production, calling cuts “dangerous and irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, back at the henhouse, COP28 president – and oil industry executive – Sultan al-Jaber said he has convinced more than 20 oil and gas firms to recommit to net-zero at November’s climate summit in oil-rich United Arab Emirates. “For too long, this industry has been viewed as part of the problem,” said al-Jaber. “This is your opportunity to show the world that, in fact, you are central to the solution.”

The post Zero: Oil industry’s plan for climate action? More fossil fuels appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In February 2021, Robert Downey Jr. appeared on The Colbert Report to prove he’s a superhero out of the Iron Man suit too. In the segment, he plugged his green advocacy and venture capital initiative, FootPrint Coalition, which works with start-ups aiming to disrupt dirty industries. In a bit of show and tell, Colbert and Downey Jr. joked about two of FootPrint’s planet-saving ventures, bamboo and bugs. After stroking his cheek with sustainable bamboo toilet paper, Colbert held up a jar of brownish powder and quipped, “You’re not just getting me to eat dirt, are you?”

The powder was a mealworm larvae protein made by French start-up Ÿnsect, which to date has secured US$375 million in funding. According to FootPrint, mealworm larvae and other insect feeds present a big opportunity to clean up the notoriously polluting aquaculture industry. With global fish consumption doubling in the past 50 years, the company says that feeding fish insects, instead of the typical sardines, anchovies and soy, requires 98% less land and cuts overall resource use in half.

“We’re doing something incorrectly,” Downey Jr. told Colbert. “If we make this switch, it’s a huge, huge intervention.”

Beyond aquaculture, the environmental case for humans replacing vertebrate protein, especially greenhouse-gas-intensive beef, with lower-emitting insect protein is compelling. A seminal 2013 report from the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) on eating insects highlighted the myriad benefits of edible insects, which include circular use of waste to rear insects, relatively low greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions, and low water use.

Given that agricultural, forestry and other land-use emissions account for 22% of global emissions, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development figures (nearly half of those are caused by livestock production), cutting food emissions while increasing food security is imperative. Combined with the nutritional case for insect protein (it’s packed with amino acids, fibre and micronutrients), and that it’s considered low risk for spreading zoonotic infections, deploying this supposed panacea seems like a cut-and-dried case to transform global food supplies.

But a potential blind spot hovers over the insect movement. Questions about insect sentience and welfare gather in the background, raising the spectre of a factory farming repeat, just on a miniature scale. Counterintuitive as it may seem to push pause on a potentially promising climate solution, the insect movement demands a deeper reflection on emission reductions that subjugate other life forms to mitigate a crisis caused by humans.

Swarms of investors

The business case for insect farming is strong, too. Conditions are ripe for growth, and investors are ponying up. Aside from venture-capital initiatives like Downey Jr.’s, government-backed insect mega-plants have been swarming agricultural news. In the last few years, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada awarded up to $8.5 million to a London, Ontario, cricket producer and $6 million to a facility in Alberta that breeds black soldier flies. In the U.K., a black-soldier-fly start-up won a £10-million grant from a government industrial-strategy fund to construct a facility outside London, while Ÿnsect snagged €20 million from the European Commission to build a vertical farm in northern France that would increase its production by 50 times. Earlier this year, a Spanish mealworm producer announced that it’s poised to break ground on a new facility that is reported to be the world’s largest at 90,000 square metres.

These facilities primarily produce animal feed and pet food, which is where most industrial insect production goes (for now). Even still, the output figures are staggering for an industry that remains somewhat marginal. A 2020 report from the research group Rethink Priorities estimated that upwards of 1.2 trillion insects are produced annually for feed and food (the majority being black soldier flies, crickets and mealworms), figures that would skyrocket with the mainstreaming of entomophagy – that is, humans eating insects.

Roughly two billion people worldwide already eat insects regularly (largely in Asia, Africa and Latin America). Most of this, however, is locally caught, harvested and consumed as an affordable, traditional source of protein and, often, a means of survival. On North American grocery shelves, they’re being branded as a novelty “superfood”: crickets are turning up in products like protein bars, chips, cookies and whole protein powders. The trend has been getting the full social media influencer treatment, making ripples on TikTok and Instagram with fitness buffs calling insect protein a game-changer in their regimens.

Still, as the industry marches forward and markets more directly to humans, a nagging question keeps coming up: is insect farming cruel?

Couldn’t hurt a fly?

To answer that, scientists are investigating the notion of sentience. Invertebrates have historically been considered insentient, but a growing body of research shows that it’s more complicated than previously thought.

Lars Chittka is a professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University in London and the author of The Mind of a Bee. He has conducted and reviewed hundreds of experiments to observe cognition- and emotion-like states in bees and other insects. “The conventional wisdom about insects has been that they are automatons – unthinking, unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely hardwired. But in the 1990s researchers began making startling discoveries about insect minds,” Chittka writes in Scientific American. He points to ants rescuing nest mates buried under rubble and bumblebees seeming to experience joy, noting that “bees and other insects also form long-term memories about the conditions under which they were hurt.”

While there are no universally accepted criteria to determine invertebrate sentience, Chittka uses a framework developed by the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. Jonathan Birch, associate professor and cognition researcher, recently led a five-year project called Foundations of Animal Sentience that devised eight criteria, which include exhibiting self-protective behaviour and whether an animal values an analgesic when injured. Birch’s work on sentience led to the inclusion of octopuses, crabs and lobsters (all invertebrates) in the U.K.’s Animal Welfare Act in 2022.

Chittka, with other researchers, mapped hundreds of studies against Birch’s eight criteria and found, for example, that adult flies and mosquitos satisfied six, which indicates strong evidence of sentience according to Birch’s grading scheme.

Of course, establishing cows and pigs as sentient hasn’t prevented cruelty in factory farming, but Chittka notes it has led to legislation that pain and distress should be minimized.

“Science tells us,” Chittka writes, “that the methods used to kill farmed insects – including baking, boiling and microwaving – have the potential to cause intense suffering.” Other academics call for applying the animal sentience “precautionary principle,” also devised by Birch, which states that “where there are threats of serious, negative animal welfare outcomes, lack of full scientific certainty as to the sentience of the animals in question shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent those outcomes.”

Even if insect sentience becomes accepted by the industry, implementing rigorous welfare standards and metrics is complex and species-specific, researchers note, and likely to lag behind industry growth.

At this point, the industry is a wild west, and welfare measures are mostly voluntary. (Where regulations do exist, they mostly address food safety, not welfare.) Of 20 insect producers and brands randomly selected by Corporate Knights, only four had public welfare statements.

Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe, the author of Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects, calls flies the entrepreneurs of the insect world, with a “fantastic diversity of expressions and behaviour.” On the notion of welfare, Balcombe tells Corporate Knights, a move toward insect consumption may be the lesser of two evils and preferable to the factory farming we have now.

“If they can make major dents in conventional factory farming of vertebrates, that is a good outcome.” However, “it’s a grim scenario,” he notes, “if insects turn out to be highly sentient or sentient at any level.”

It’s a grim scenario, if insects turn out to be highly sentient or sentient at any level.

 

—Jonathan Balcombe, author, Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects

It may be a trap we’re setting for ourselves. Balcombe says the insect industry “assumes a growth economy, which is a dead end we ultimately need to move away from.” In Downey Jr.’s video for FootPrint Coalition flagging insects as climate-friendly fish feed, he does not suggest that humans eat less fish. Asking consumers to cut back has always been a delicate issue in the climate movement; instead, the movement often looks for solutions that can support current consumption levels.

In the end, we just seem to get more factory farming, bringing up a question larger than how to make insect farming more humane: is now the time to ditch factory farming altogether?

Cold, hard climate math

With the Paris Agreement’s target of net-zero by 2050 fast approaching, economies are scrambling to transition to, and cement, the practices that will make up the next green industrial age. Coal mining and internal combustion engines will be a thing of the past. Does factory farming trillions of insects have a place among EVs, solar-powered homes and plant burgers? If the answer is no, supplanting entrenched industries is no small feat, and we have a small window to course correct.

“If we realize insects are sentient,” Balcombe says, “it’s more difficult to upend or end an industry that already has a foothold.”

Human–insect relations have historically been fraught with ambivalence, ranging from reverence to disgust. For ancient Egyptians, scarab beetles represented the eternal cycle of life. Jain ascetics, to avoid harming insects, gently sweep the ground in front of them as they walk. In some homes, centipedes are treated to glue traps and ants are poisoned. Cochineals give us “carmine” red pigment for food colouring and cosmetics. And, of course, bees are vociferously defended by environmentalists for the indispensable pollination they provide, which gets to the heart of how we came to farming more than a trillion insects a year: their status is determined by what they can do for us.

This approach corresponds to a mindset of solving climate change that is absent a wider appreciation for why life on Earth is worth saving in the first place. Creatures that can provide utility in cutting emissions are folded into the industrial machine and heralded, in the case of powderized crickets, as a cleantech innovation, even if the process entails suffering and the deprivation of a life in a natural habitat. It’s still factory farming, only this time it’s low carbon. Call it a kind of cold, hard climate math.

If the climate movement takes an intrinsic-value approach to insects, it may steer away from industrial-scale insect farming and embrace less morally grave alternatives that still lower greenhouse gases and boost food security. No, not certified free-range organic insects, but other innovations racing to solve agriculture’s climate problem, such as plant protein and cell-based meat.

Ultimately, it will be consumers who decide. If the insect craze amounts to crickets, it would be one time Iron Man didn’t save the world.

Christopher St. Prince is a Toronto-based journalist and fiction writer.

The post What the climate buzz around insect farming gets wrong appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The recent onslaught of scary climate news triggered concern in the Washington Post about “climate doomers” – “a group of people [who] believe that the climate problem cannot, or will not, be solved in time to prevent all-out societal collapse.” Anticipating bad warming doesn’t imply climate doom-ism. Far from it. In being clear-eyed about what’s ahead we might decouple societal collapse from warming itself. Just because the climate horse left the barn doesn’t mean it will run us over.

Nothing of this view alleviates responsibility to massively reduce emissions. The opposite holds: every incremental tonne of reduction is more important, not less. Its marginal benefit isn’t couched in carbon budgets and missed targets, but in reduced probabilities of passed tipping points, nasty feedback loops and catastrophic outcomes. The benefits of mitigation are higher now.

When my son Henri was born six years ago, we moved to a farm in the Quebec countryside, driven by vague ideas of resilience. Seems like a good place to weather the storm. We benefit from a self-supportive society in a wealthy well-endowed country. But this lifestyle choice in the guise of climate sensitivity, while personally defensible and natural to a climate-savvy dad, is a dead end. Much as we may want to use our resources to retreat and build walls around our kids, we can’t. Real independence isn’t possible, save some self-imposed primitivism.

No place is immune, but geography works in Canada’s favour. There’s no other place I’d want to raise Henri. We have a lot of what others will want: food, water and good governance. Our agricultural lot may marginally improve relative to others. We won’t turn to desert nearly as fast as the United States. We need be wary of our neighbour and anticipate thirst for water. As theirs disappears, they’ll come looking for ours. Best to negotiate that transaction in advance.

But global food insecurity looms. Food exporters will cut exports to protect domestic supply in extreme drought. Russia cut wheat exports in 2016, as did India for rice this year. Food importers will use what military force they possess before seeing their population starve. Canada might set a precedent whereby a portion of essential crops are put aside each year in anticipation of multiple, simultaneous crop failures. Food as diplomatic tool, not military threat, feels very Canadian. The next generation will be more open to rethinking how, and why, crops are diverted to feed animals – a wasteful method of protein production. But we, like others, will feed ourselves first.

A renewed commitment to protect and enhance natural systems is our best bet for resilience.

 

The insurance industry is an early canary in our climate coal mine. Costs spiked with modest climate effects. In some areas, insurance providers are now pulling out or denying coverage altogether. The insurance industry will adjust, as will we. First, insurance will be more targeted. Already artificial intelligence can better distinguish flood and fire risk across multiple properties in the same neighbourhood. Then, it’s the public purse that will be insurer of last resort – as it is today in places like Florida and California. As we support each other to recover from crises, we’ll find limits to burden sharing and rationalize what assets can be rebuilt or hardened. That means we’ll abandon (or self-insure) areas prone to repeated catastrophes like flood zones.

We normally invest in infrastructure to be wealthier, healthier, more productive. Highways increase intercity traffic. Rail makes it efficient. Transmission lines bring more power. The same narrative held for centuries. That will change. Returns on investment will flatten to zero or go negative as we constantly rebuild damaged infrastructure, harden existing systems and abandon assets we can’t adequately protect, like coastlines, flood zones, dried-out cities and parched agricultural land. Productivity will plummet. Like Alice in Wonderland’s Red Queen, we’ll run to stay in the same place. 

And yet there’s a better way.

We don’t think of natural systems as infrastructure, but we soon might. Bad warming disrupts all ecosystem services we now effectively get for free: rainfall, erosion and flood control, pollination, air and water filtration, oceanic food chains. Once broken, they’re effectively unfixable. You can’t replace Ontario’s Greenbelt with urban greenhouses. Nature’s services fall outside economic frameworks, but they’ve been valued between US$125 and $145 trillion annually. Losing a portion of these services is worse than running in place.

A renewed commitment to protect and enhance natural systems is our best bet for resilience. Not only to protect these ecosystem services but to lower pressure on global temperatures. We need to suck carbon back out of the air. Direct air capture (DAC) is no silver bullet. Industrial infrastructure to recapture excess carbon needs a nuclear fleet five times existing global capacity, running full tilt for a century, at a cost of $1.5 to $6 trillion per year. 

That relative difference is the basis of an intuitively elegant geo-engineering solution. There’s a better way to remove atmospheric carbon. If DAC is brute force, akin to karate or boxing, nature-based solutions are subtle, more like tai chi or jiu-jitsu. Nature itself is a massive solar-powered carbon-sucking system, tweaked for efficiency over billions of years. 

The earth breathes. As the biosystem inhales – forests and fields, oceans and plankton – carbon dioxide breaks into the carbon that’s the backbone of all biomass. As it exhales – leaves fall, trees rot and cellular life dies – that same carbon recombines with oxygen and returns to the atmosphere. Compared with our annual emissions, these earthly lungs are like a beachball next to tennis balls. The earth breathes a volume of CO2 more than 10 times current emissions. 

If we can tweak those giant lungs – trigger forests, fields or oceans to retain a small percentage of their carbon – we’d alter the carbon cycle on a scale relevant to the problem. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that we need to remove about 10 gigatonnes of CO2 annually by 2050. That’s just 3% of the natural cycle. 

 In theory, we could plant tens of billions of trees and be done with it. But we don’t have enough land to grow trees in sufficient quantity since we use most of it for farming. Permanence is also an issue since those trees can burn, or die. But it’s a start.

Biochar is my favourite intervention in natural carbon flows. Intercept a small amount of annual biomass production – crop residue, forestry waste or just fallen trees that would rot on forest floors – chop it up, and expose the residue to high temperatures with no oxygen (pyrolysis). This transforms biomass, which rots, to mineralized carbon, which doesn’t. Done right, that carbon is stable for decades or centuries.

To be clear: this is no substitute for reducing emissions – it’s a Hail Mary insurance play to lower atmospheric carbon.

Our reaction to climate constraints and conflict will define global security. The love for our kids has to be built on a foundation of empathy for others. Henri won’t grow to adulthood sitting happily under an apple tree in isolation but will face risks we can barely imagine. He and his peers will form a new social contract for their age. The suggestions above are just a start. They’ll define resilience, not us. 

The best we can do – while mitigating emissions – is give them tools to negotiate their own futures. And prepare them for what’s coming. 

Tom Rand is an author, investor and co-founding partner at ArcTern Ventures. 

The post Damned if you’re doomed appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Would it be to lead by example – show a measured and steady path to net-zero by 2050 with meaningful interim targets, something the rest of the industry could relate to – or a more radical all-in approach that might be difficult for other peers to identify with?

This slow and steady approach is the usual path taken by immense corporations, but with signs of climate breakdown in the acrid smoke-filled air, this path leads directly to the “gates of hell,” as the UN Secretary-General told world leaders in New York this September.

We have a need for speed on climate action.

This is about human and planetary needs, but heeding this call for climate action no longer requires corporations to renounce greed – which was always going to be a tough sell at scale.

The reason for this is the previous decade’s hyper-growth in clean technology is being driven by historic and in some cases unprecedented cost reductions. Whether we are talking electric cars, green power, energy storage, heat pumps or plant protein, the solutions to climate change are doubling every three to four years everywhere you look. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world will add a record 440 gigawatts of new renewable capacity this year. That is more than double what we added in 2019, double what the IEA predicted in 2020.

When the world is changing this quickly, it is hard for the naked eye to pick it up. Imagine a pond that has lily pads covering 2% of it (roughly the percentage of cars on the road today that are electric). If the lily pads double every day, in seven days the entire pond is festooned with lily pads (note: as any rhizome specialist will know, lily pads take a little longer to multiply, about 15 years for one pad to cover 15 square feet).

We need more leaders to go all-in on climate action to clear the path so others can step up the pace. This means investing as much as possible as fast as possible to gear up your business to be at the heart of climate solutions.

Take Tesla as an example. The company went all-in on electric cars and became more valuable than most of the world’s carmakers combined before it had captured 1% of the market share. This happened because the company was surfing an exponential growth curve of decarbonization that now pervades every industry from power to food to buildings and industrials. Now the rest of the automakers, from Detroit to Wolfsburg, have been stirred from the internal combustion stupor and are hitting their electric stride so that Elon Musk does not eat their lunch.

We need more leaders to go all-in on climate action to clear the path so others can step up the pace. This means investing as much as possible as fast as possible to gear up your business to be at the heart of climate solutions.

At Corporate Knights, we have been keeping tabs on what 3,000 of the world’s largest companies are doing (and not doing) with their investments today, investments that define what kind of company they will be tomorrow.

Two staggering results pop out.

One: investments in climate solutions are in the trillion-dollar space and have doubled in just the past three years.

Two: the top fifth of companies are setting the pace. They account for the vast majority of this investment in solutions, and it turns out that, as a group and across most industries, their total share price performance has profoundly outperformed the market at large, earning triple the returns over the past three years.

The head of the IEA, Fatih Birol, recently said that “we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” He said he was filled with hope by the exponential growth in climate solutions, which he described as “staggering” and “spectacular.”

“I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago,” Birol said.

The name of the game on climate action is speed. We need to go faster and we can.

The good news, thanks to human ingenuity, is that it can be both profitable and popular.

The post Publisher’s Note: Slow and steady will not win the climate race appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Goodstein and Schleimer are both directors of a kind of MBA program that didn’t exist when they were students. The programs they direct – at Bard College, in New York State, and the Griffith Business School, in Queensland, Australia – landed in fourth and first places respectively on this year’s Better World MBA ranking. Members of Goodstein and Schleimer’s generation have witnessed a shift in their discipline that, as the Corporate Knights ranking suggests, more and more business schools are competing to embrace.

This year’s Better World MBA ranking considered 209 business schools across the world – 50 more than last year – and focused on one metric: what proportion of the core (mandatory) curriculum addresses concepts of sustainable development. While the ranking, first conducted in 2010, has historically considered the diversity of faculty and the proportion of its research devoted to sustainability issues, this year’s methodology goes back to basics, asking a simple question: what is being taught? It credits all core content relating to environmental, social and governance performance, with topics ranging from biodiversity to carbon pricing, Indigenous consultation, child labour, corruption reduction and employment equity.

Secondary consideration (for a bonus of up to 10%) was given to the percentage of recent graduates who have landed in impact organizations – defined as non-profits, Corporate Knights Global 100 or Clean 200 companies, and any company deriving the majority of its revenues from sustainable activities.

The results demonstrated consistency among the high achievers. Half of the top 10 schools on this year’s list appeared in last year’s top 10, and the top school, for the fourth year in a row, is Griffith Business School. At the same time, seven entirely new schools joined the top 40 list.

One of these was Bard College, a private liberal arts college located on the Hudson River north of New York City. Goodstein established the MBA in 2012, having joined the Bard faculty three years earlier. He’s proud to say that Bard’s MBA in Sustainability is the only one on offer at Bard; in his view, the “conventional” MBA – that either ignores sustainability or treats it as a nice-to-have elective – belongs in the history books. Ranked fourth in the Corporate Knights list, the Bard program placed first in the Princeton Review’s ranking of Green MBAs in the United States.

Goodstein considers Bard’s approach quite unusual in a country where Milton Friedman’s economic logic – of profits and shareholders first and at all costs – has held sway for so long. “Business for good is a new concept here,” he says. Many still resist the idea that the exploitation of natural and human capital on which capitalism has historically depended is actually a design flaw that needs to be corrected.

Goodstein is proud to say that Bard’s MBA in Sustainability is the only one on offer at Bard; in his view, the “conventional” MBA – that either ignores sustainability or treats it as a nice-to-have elective – belongs in the history books.

The Bard program also wants to upend demographic trends. Some 65% of its students are female, and 35% identify as non-white; scholarships are offered to first-generation Americans. Among its most impressive alumni are Chelsea Mozen, chief sustainability officer at Etsy, who implemented a carbon-neutral delivery program at the e-commerce company, and Emma Jenkins-Long, who entered the program as a public-school teacher in Vermont and is now vice-president of ESG strategy for Deutsche Bank in New York.

The inertia that Goodstein says characterizes mainstream corporate culture in the U.S. stands in contrast to the context described by Tamim Elbasha, director of the MBA program at Audencia Business School in Nantes, in western France. Elbasha, originally an optician from Syria who did his MBA in England and later a PhD in strategic management, considers the Audencia program part of a sweeping transformation. The French Ministry of Education has issued a new competency framework for business schools that emphasizes corporate social responsibility and orientation to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Elbasha says most business schools are following suit.

Audencia’s program rose nine spots on the Corporate Knights ranking, landing in 28th place this year thanks to a nearly quadrupling of its core sustainability courses. These represent a radical rethink of what business really is. One of them is called Gaia, referring to the hypothesis put forward in the 1970s positing that Earth’s living and non-living elements interact to form a balanced whole; it’s the kind of material that, until recently, would have been hard to find outside a faculty of environmental studies.

Elbasha says that one of the biggest challenges facing today’s business students is to accept that – in contrast to the traditional curriculum – “we don’t have all the answers” to many sustainability issues. Students have to learn to accept uncertainty.

For many, reckoning with overwhelming challenges turns into what Schleimer describes as a personal and emotional journey. At Griffith, Schleimer has seen several cohorts of students realize, through the program, that their personal and professional values can be aligned – a revelation that has precipitated many career changes.

Schleimer’s own awakening came when she entered academia to teach innovation strategy and realized, even in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, that textbooks on the subject were still promoting the “red ocean thinking” of cutthroat competition, compromised value and low cost. Schleimer opted to teach without textbooks. Now, as director of the MBA in Sustainability – the only MBA on offer at Griffith – she insists that all of its core courses be “values-led.” She ropes in experts from across the university to ensure that students learn to think “outside business.” She has no problem referring applicants who are looking for an “executive, corporate-style” MBA to other programs.

Of course, that breed of student – primarily motivated to do an MBA to boost their salary – still exists. Mike Valente meets them at the Schulich School of Business at York University, where he directs the MBA program and oversees the sustainability courses that make up half the total core courses. But gradually, he sees Schulich’s graduates realizing that the salary raise they’re after may not be at odds with, but rather contingent upon, their understanding of sustainability issues – or that the jobs they find post-graduation are much more rewarding than what they were doing prior.

Schulich’s Valente feels that business schools have a responsibility to shape a new kind of leader and is frustrated by foot-dragging. He sees many approaching sustainability much as large corporations have: first by greenwashing, then by isolating the subject as an elective, then by gradually introducing it into core courses.

Poulomi Sengupta, who graduated from Schulich’s International MBA program in 2021, grew up in Kolkata and studied geology before joining British Gas. There, she realized that she would be better positioned to “do the least harm to the environment” if she understood the financial underpinnings of the industry. Her employer recommended the Schulich program, with its specialization in global mining management.

Now 38 and based in Toronto, Sengupta describes the degree as the perfect bridge to a career that interests her much more. Conducting ESG research for Morningstar Sustainalytics, she is learning how to quantify non-financial factors across multiple industries. She feels the position offers a “bird’s eye perspective” of the economy that had been a black box to her as a geologist.

At 13th place, Schulich’s program landed first among Canadian schools in the Corporate Knights ranking, as it did in the inaugural 2010 ranking. Valente feels that business schools have a responsibility to shape a new kind of leader and is frustrated by foot-dragging. He sees many approaching sustainability much as large corporations have: first by greenwashing, then by isolating the subject as an elective, then by gradually introducing it into core courses.

In the sustainability course he teaches, Valente asks students to simulate the most “egregious” corporate behaviour imaginable – practising the kind of greed evident in the opioid crisis, grocery chain collusion and Volkswagen’s “Emissionsgate.” It’s an exercise in reflection. He encourages students to apply a critical lens to all facets of the degree.

There is no question that business schools are reorienting themselves. But there’s still a ways to go. This year, for the first time, Corporate Knights applied a social-purpose lens to the programs under consideration (see ‘Are MBA programs teaching social purpose?’). Going beyond the traditional pillars of sustainable performance, social purpose cuts to the heart of a company, to its raison d’être. The somewhat radical proposition puts purpose, rather than profit, at the centre of all decision-making. Not surprisingly, the notion has not yet entered the curricula of most business schools. But given the ambition of the top runners, it is just a matter of time.

Methodology

The 2023 Corporate Knights Better World MBA top-40 ranking examines the performances of 209 business schools, drawn from the most recent Financial Times list of the top-100 global MBA programs; the Princeton Review Best Green MBA list; the schools that made the 2022 Corporate Knights Better World top-40 roster; and business schools accredited by the Association of MBAs, AACSB (the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) or the EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development) Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) and also signatories to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education that opt in for evaluation. Based on publicly disclosed information on their websites, schools are evaluated on the sustainability content of their core courses and can review and request revisions to the analysis. Additionally, schools may voluntarily provide the number of recent alumni employed with impact organizations for up to a 10% bonus to their overall score. For the complete methodology, visit our resources page.

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In 2022, Corporate Knights published The Social Purpose Transition Pathway, a report that graded companies on how well they were implementing their social purpose. This year, we have carried the social purpose theme to the educational realm.

A social purpose business model goes beyond focusing on profit and considers the value that is being generated for society. In a classroom, it translates into curriculum that teaches future business leaders how to use assets, resources, competencies, products, services and influence to create solutions to society’s social, environmental, socio-economic or socio-ecological challenges. A crucial order of the day.

In partnership with Coast Capital and the Canadian Purpose Economy Project, we asked and analyzed the responses to two optional questions in this year’s Better World MBA: do you teach the social purpose business model in your core curriculum, and does your business school itself have a social purpose statement?

What we found

1. The social purpose business model is not yet widely represented in the mission statements or curricula of business schools. Most business schools do have mission statements, but clearly defined social purpose statements are rare.

Of the 209 schools in this year’s universe, 19.6% had mission statements that were weakly aligned with social purpose, and 45 schools had unequivocal social purpose mission statements.

Among the leaders receiving an A grade in our assessment is the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University, which incorporates social purpose into its mission, “Business for a Better World,” aimed at creating shared prosperity and propelling equity and justice. “This isn’t just a forward-looking statement; it’s a dedication to cultivating business leaders who can effect meaningful change.”

For the question about curriculum content, of the 44 MBA curricula we reviewed, almost half had some social-purpose-related material, but only two schools contained sufficient evidence of social purpose content in their course descriptions to merit an A grade in our assessment. Those leaders included Griffith in Australia (also our top-ranked program in the Better World MBA this year) and Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.

2. The social purpose business model is widely misunderstood by business schools and is often conflated with an emphasis on sustainability performance, triple-bottom-line accounting, adherence to ethical standards and other non-financial metrics of company performance that do not by themselves make a purpose-driven company.

Social purpose course integration scoring and results

Social purpose statement scoring and results

Read the full Better World MBA methodology, including social purpose criteria.

Ralph Torrie is director of research at Corporate Knights. Sanna Uppal is a research analyst at Corporate Knights.

The post Are MBA programs teaching social purpose? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Kayah George

25, Vancouver

Tulalip and Tsleil-Waututh Nation water protector and filmmaker

Kayah George used to play in a creek behind her grandmother’s house, but the water has become so contaminated by upstream construction that people started developing rashes. “Many of the places where our family traditionally held ceremonies are now too polluted to be able to use,” George says. Carrying the teachings of her Tulalip and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, George has been on the front lines fighting against the Trans Mountain Pipeline for more than half her life, defending her people’s sacred inlet and the southern resident orca whales from a sevenfold increase in tanker traffic. She recently cowrote, directed and produced a short film entitled Our Grandmother the Inlet on the intrinsic connection the Tsleil-Waututh people have to the “Burrard” Inlet; it premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival this falll. “It’s the artist’s job to make the revolution irresistible,” George says, referring to a quote from Toni Cade Bambara that “changed everything” for her. “I set out to create art that did just that.”

Alex Lidstone

29, Calgary
executive director,
Climate Caucus

When climate emergency strikes, it’s not the federal government that shows up first. Local governments are the ones on the front lines of wildfires, floods and droughts; they’re also proving to be the fastest to act when it comes to taking bolder climate action. “That’s critical during this decade of transformation,” Alex Lidstone says. As someone who grew up in a province ravaged by smoke and fire, she joined Climate Caucus, a non-partisan network of elected officials, with the hope of driving system change. “We began experiencing intense fire seasons unlike those I had seen before, and I decided to dedicate my life to this work.” Since she took the reins at Climate Caucus, Lidstone has proudly helped grow the network from roughly 300 to more than 650 elected leaders, helping them work together in times of crisis and make building back better easier. As for the fires, they may be growing stronger, but so is Lidstone’s resolve to find solutions. Making partnerships, she says, is critical: “Don’t leave yourself to tackle this challenge alone!”

Julien Beaulieu

29, Gatineau, QC
law lecturer, Université de Sherbrooke

Almost half the world’s largest corporations have pledged to go net-zero, but far too many of them are “climate-washing,” Julien Beaulieu says. In 2021, the competition lawyer worked with the Québec Environmental Law Center to file one of the first-ever climate-washing cases in Canada, aiming to reform Canada’s consumer protection laws to better regulate net-zero pledges and carbon-neutrality claims. He’s also teaching one of Canada’s first graduate law courses on responsible investment, shareholder activism and environmental disclosures to help “shift the way a new generation of legal practitioners thinks about the role of corporations.” Impressive for a person who readily admits that “sustainability was never really my thing” until friends convinced him of the urgency of the environmental crisis. “Their engagement made me realize how much sustainability is a foundational issue that is intertwined with every other social issue that we’re facing right now.”

Kristen Perry

26, Toronto
managing director, Spring Investing Collective

Kristen Perry is blazing a trail for under-represented Canadians to participate in impact investing. “I work to help our growing portfolio of predominantly women-led and BIPOC-led sustainable businesses to grow and thrive,” says Perry, who happens to be the youngest leader of an angel network in Canada – Spring Investing, the largest early-stage impact investing network in the country. “I’ve been drawn to entrepreneurship and sustainability from a young age,” she says. “Studying business, I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied in my career if I wasn’t leveraging my skills, resources and time to work towards something beyond myself.” Over the course of her career, she has supported hundreds of entrepreneurs through incubation, acceleration, investment readiness, fundraising support and founder coaching. Spring has been able to catalyze more than $22 million into early-stage impact ventures. “There is a $4-trillion annual gap in addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. I believe that private markets have a big role to play in making the world a better place.”

Sabrina Kon

29, Vancouver
head of community and impact, ChopValue

Making a difference, one chopstick at a time. That is the ethos at ChopValue, a Vancouver-based company that repurposes used chopsticks into furniture and design products. As head of community and impact, Sabrina Kon has built and oversees the company’s chopstick-recycling program, working with more than 1,500 partners across more than a dozen cities on three continents. The company has so far given 120 million chopsticks a new life. “By repurposing used chopsticks into furniture, this is just one example of giving a new life to a disposable item that is typically ordered from Asia, travels to the rest of the world and is used for only 20 to 30 minutes before being discarded,” says Kon, who started her career managing a portfolio of philanthropic funds to enable the execution of climate projects at ClientEarth, an environmental law firm. “There’s a lot of work to be done to advance the circular economy and ensure that we are moving away from a linear ‘take-make-waste’ system.”

Michael Mousa

29, Toronto
sustainability consultant, DIALOG; chair, Carbon Leadership Forum Toronto

As a second-generation Egyptian-Canadian, there was a lot of pressure on Michael Mousa to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer. “I chose engineering school,” Mousa says. “That’s where I started to understand the complex issues facing our built environment, environmental justice and the connection between health, equity and sustainability.” Clearly, he chose wisely. Today he’s the Canada chair of the Carbon Leadership Forum, where he leads a team in empowering the building industry to address an issue it long ignored: the embodied carbon lurking in building materials. Through his work as a sustainability consultant at the architectural, engineering, interior design and planning firm DIALOG, Mousa says he tries “to centre equity in all my efforts by addressing the impacts of the built environment on humans.” But recent climate events have given his work a greater sense of urgency. “Our built environment was designed for a climate that no longer exists.”

Sophia Mathur

16, Sudbury, ON
activist and lead plaintiff in climate lawsuit

Sophia Mathur can’t vote yet, but she has spent more than half her life making her voice heard on the defining issue of our time. The high-profile climate activist was the first Canadian student to join Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future climate strike in 2018, has lobbied politicians on a host of environmental matters, and helped convince her hometown of Sudbury to declare a climate emergency in 2019. Perhaps most notably, she is the lead plaintiff in a legal case (Mathur v. Ontario) in which seven Ontario youths are suing the Ontario government for weakening the province’s 2030 climate target, arguing that it violates the fundamental rights of youth and future generations. No climate lawsuit like it has advanced as far in the courts in Canada. Although a judge dismissed their case this year, the group is appealing. “If you are young, it is important that we share our voices about the climate crisis and talk to parents and people that can make those decisions,” Mathur says. “Spread the word about how important it is to vote for climate-concerned politicians and empower people to vote.”

Tyler De Sousa

25, Waterloo Region, ON
co-founder and COO, Circulr

Tyler De Sousa’s first brush with the ethos of circular living came through his grandparents, Portuguese immigrants who understood that nothing is truly “waste.” His grandfather made things out of scrap metal, and his grandmother sewed frayed clothing back to life. “That’s the mentality that brought me to Circulr and that influences our approach,” he says of the start-up he co-founded that works with grocery-store brands to return glass jars dropped off by customers so they can be reused. “We know that everything we call waste could be a valuable resource.” Circulr has worked with 22 brands and facilitated the reuse of 25,000 jars, which helped eliminate 3,932 kilograms of carbon dioxide that would have been expelled in creating new glass. “A lot of measures today are band-aid-style solutions for problems that have been ingrained in our existing systems,” De Sousa says. “What we do at Circulr is try to reimagine our relationship with packaging to change the system itself.”

Zaffia Laplante

26, Toronto
chief strategy officer, SkyAcres Agrotechnologies

As an Indigenous woman from Northern Ontario, Zaffia Laplante grew up spending her summers by the lake or in her grandmother’s garden. “It is something I cherish deeply and has had a large impact on who I am today,” she says. A member of the Métis Nation of Ontario, Laplantefounded Hempergy, an award-winning hemp-waste insulation start-up, in 2019. Now she is the chief strategy officer of SkyAcres, which is bringing vertical farming technology to rural and First Nations communities to increase food security. SkyAcres has grown more than 40 different types of fruits, vegetables and herbs using 90% less water than conventional farming. It’s also helped drive down the cost of food in pilot locations. “If you have an idea, no matter how big or small, find like-minded people and work together,” she says. “It’s better to create a community of impact than try to do it yourself.”

Lena Courcol

28, Montreal
acquisitions manager, New Market Funds

Growing up in Shanghai, Lena Courcol witnessed a city transform under the forces of globalization. “It drove my curiosity for sustainability in the built environment, our sense of place, social justice and how our neighbourhoods can shape the way we live,” she says. Developing partnerships to establish hybrid solutions to complex problems, like the affordable housing crisis, is her specialty. “This takes a lot of work, but getting everyone in the same room to collaborate on a project is extremely rewarding.” As the acquisitions manager at New Market Funds, she led the fund’s largest transaction to purchase more than 500 units of affordable housing from the private sector through non-profit ownership. More than 800 additional units are in the pipeline to be acquired by the end of the year. Next on her to-do list: reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% or more for all of New Market’s building acquisitions. “This work is only just beginning . . . and it’s my role to figure out how to get us there.”

Rita Steele

28, Vancouver
sustainable operations manager and climate action instructor, Simon Fraser University; founder, BIPOC Sustainability Collective

Rita Steele spent much of her childhood and teen years as an avid West Coast backcountry explorer. “My love for the environment was a hobby for a long time,” she says – until she went to Ghana for a three-month trip studying fair trade cocoa. “The producers shared with me how climate change affected their crops and lives. I realized climate change exacerbated the social issues I cared about, and these impacts would continue to worsen.” She pivoted, dedicating herself to climate action. Today, she’s the youngest instructor in Simon Fraser University’s Climate Action Certificate program, and, as SFU’s sustainable operations manager, she’s transforming the school top to bottom. Steele is also the founder of the BIPOC Sustainability Collective, where she’s fostering a capacity-building community for racialized professionals in the sustainability sector. As she notes, “Climate change and environmental degradation disproportionately impact people of colour, yet we are underrepresented in the organizations tackling these issues.”​​​​

Marley Alles

27, Toronto
founder, Rax

Once Marley Alles understood the scope of the problem, she set out to fix it. The problem was fast fashion and the crushing amount of waste and pollution created by a culture of insatiable consumption. The fashion industry produces up to 10% of the world’s emissions, and those emissions are expected to surge 50% by 2030. One way to attack that number is through sharing. So Alles created Rax, a peer-to-peer wardrobe rental app that connects people who want to make money off their wardrobes with people who rent the clothes for up to 90% off. In less than a year of operation, Rax has attracted thousands of users. The goal is to chip away at the tonnes of textile waste that end up in Canadian landfills every year. “Anyone can become a sustainability leader,” Alles says. “It’s not about being 100% sustainable. It’s about doing your research and figuring out how to embed eco-friendly swaps in our daily routines.”

Serena Mendizábal

25, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, ON
just-transition lead, Sacred Earth Solar; co-chair, SevenGen Energy

As a Cayuga Panamanian Wolf Clan woman from the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Serena Mendizábal thinks about how to centreIndigenous-led climate solutions in her work every day. She co-founded SevenGen Energy, a not-for-profit focused on empowering Indigenous youth in the clean energy sector, bringing together more than 500 youth from across Turtle Island for community building and funding youth-led clean energy projects. Now at Sacred Earth Solar – led and operated by Indigenous women – she shepherds efforts to implement a just transition by bringing solar power to Indigenous communities. “Not only do I advocate towards a just transition through being critical of mainstream climate discourse, but I also implement one by centring Indigenous-led climate solutions through education, research, project development, policy and land-based teachings,” she says. “You need community now more than ever – find your people and start working!”

Rodrigue Turgeon

29, Val-d’Or, QC
national program co-lead, MiningWatch Canada

Growing up in Amos, Quebec, Rodrigue Turgeon saw firsthand the “vicious cycle of destruction” his region was trapped in, depending on an economy almost exclusively based on forestry and mining. He studied science and law to equip himself to defend nature. Since 2017, Turgeon has provided legal advice to First Nations and has helped hundreds of individuals and organizations with environmental mobilizations. He obtained an environmental assessment for a proposed open-pit lithium mine in Quebec, and he led a pro bono team that won a case against Glencore’s Horne Smelter for access to data on its contaminant emissions. “Everyone we support in Canada and around the world is affected by the consequences of the climate crisis. It’s fascinating to see the mining industry trying to capitalize on these disasters to justify even more greenwashed destructive projects,” he says. He urges young people to “doubt the possibility of changing things ‘from within’ polluting industries and their accomplice firms.”

Anna Harman

28, Ottawa
senior advisor for decarbonization strategy, JLL Canada

As a young mechanical engineering grad from Queen’s University, Anna Harman got the chance to help the Government of Canada strategize on making its buildings carbon neutral. “I was immediately hooked by the breadth of impact I could have.” Buildings make up nearly 40% of global emissions, Harman says, “which is why I have dedicated my career to reducing emissions in this industry.” The former vice-president of the Association of Energy Engineers Canada East now leads a team of 10 building engineers and strategic thinkers at JLL to decarbonize commercial real estate portfolios across Canada and around the globe. In her short career, she’s contributed to plans to avoid 18 million tonnes of emissions in more than 2,500 buildings in Canada and another 350 buildings across 80 countries. Harman knows that a mountain of work remains to meet our climate goals, but as a mentor of women in the energy sector, she says staying positive and punching above your weight class are essential: “Push past the boundaries of what people believe is possible for you.”

Jonathan Serravalle

26, Markham, ON
program manager, Competent Boards

In the face of intense scrutiny around corporate sustainability efforts, it’s vital to be well-informed, Jonathan Serravalle says. “Let your stand be the result of your own informed perspective, not just popular sentiment.” Serravalle is laser-focused on driving ethical behaviour in the private sector. After he completed the University of Waterloo’s Master of Climate Change program, he hit the ground running at Competent Boards, where he oversees the climate- and biodiversity-education programs for senior executives and business leaders in 17 countries. “Incorporating ESG considerations into board decisions, I help drive change that doesn’t just boost financial outcomes but also looks out for the planet’s health.” Serravalle had originally planned to study medieval history but changed the course of his own history to dedicate himself to creating a better future. “He is a huge asset to the sustainability movement,” says Competent Boards COO Nancy Wright. “His impact can be felt in boardrooms around the world.”

Emily Kroft

26, Winnipeg
youth engagement and water policy officer, International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)

There’s a proverb that Emily Kroft grew up hearing: it is not your responsibility to solve the world’s problems, but neither are you free to avoid them. Now it’s become her mantra. “Sustainable policy can be a very daunting field to work in,” Kroft says, especially if you’re trying to change things through individual action. “But if we each do our part, we can get somewhere.” Connecting youth who want to make a difference and empowering them to have a meaningful impact on climate policy is her specialty. Kroft is the creator, coordinator and facilitator of IISD-Next, which has trained more than 500 students and youth in 61 countries on effective engagement in sustainable policy, including advancing a sustainable economy. “Being able to facilitate those connections brings me so much joy,” she says. “I’m one drop in the ocean, but what is the ocean if not a bunch of little drops?”

Carl Botha

28, Toronto
senior manager of sustainability and packaging, Tim Hortons

More than a coffee shop, Tim Hortons is a Canadian institution, serving millions of double-doubles and doughnuts every day. “My work makes each of those visits more sustainable,” Carl Botha says. In his four years with the company, Botha has led changes that helped eliminate 1.3 billion single-use plastics from Tims restaurants annually, as well as 2,600 tonnes of virgin paper packaging. He also led the company in banning persistent PFAS chemicals in food packaging and is currently working on developing a lid that’s recyclable, compostable and 100% plastic-free. The key, he says, is to “always ask ‘Why.’ If you don’t get a good response, keep asking, and you’ll be surprised how many times the answer is ‘Because we’ve always done it this way.’ Whenever I hear that, I know I’ve found a great opportunity to make a change for the better.”

Shakti Ramkumar

27, Surrey, B.C.
senior director of policy and communications, Student Energy

For Shakti Ramkumar, the trick in this time of “frustration, despair and rage” around the climate crisis is to channel that energy. “Youth can take action now, by building our own community energy projects, by galvanizing our peers or fighting for policy change,” says Ramkumar, a skilled climate-science communicator. She leads the communication strategy for Student Energy, a youth-led organization with more than 100,000 followers, and has grown the reach of its open source energy education tool, the Energy System Map, to 17-million users. Since joining Student Energy in 2018, she has helped grow the network to 50,000 youth from more than 120 countries, and launched a Research and Youth Engagement Portfolio that included over 43,000 young voices. She recruited and managed a volunteer team of more than 50 young leaders in energy from around the world to research, write and update energy education pages so that the content is rigorously researched but still written by young people for young people. “We hope that working with young people to get a few of those transformational learning-by-doing experiences under their belts early in their lives will set them up for a lifetime of confident, values-driven service,” she says.

Robert Raynor

27, Toronto
net-zero coordinator, TAS

Toronto, like many Canadian cities, is in a housing crisis. It has to build housing for millions of new residents while simultaneously hitting net-zero targets. That won’t happen without the work of people like Robert Raynor, who is net-zero coordinator for TAS, a real estate developer that aims to have a net-zero carbon portfolio by 2045. He has been working to ensure that project teams are salvaging, sorting and adaptively reusing deconstructed materials from old buildings in new projects. “One of the greatest challenges of our generation is the need to build more while polluting less, and meaningfully achieving anywhere close to ‘net-zero’ requires a pointed and coordinated collective effort,” he says. Raynor’s work calculating the greenhouse gas emissions from new materials and transportation led TAS to divert 21,000 tonnes of concrete, brick and wood from an old building into a new condo project in Toronto. “Your vision of how the world should be will evolve as you grow and learn, but don’t let yourself compromise it,” he says.

Zein Hindawi

29, Toronto
manager of youth engagement, Plan International Canada

Zein Hindawi’s first step toward advocacy came through reflections on her childhood, as a new immigrant to Canada, confronting other children who made fun of her Arabic accent or joked about not being able to hang out with her because she was Muslim. She wished she knew then about where she could turn for support in the face of discrimination. For the last 10 years, her work has been about filling that gap, empowering young people by providing them with the tools, resources and confidence to take action in a meaningful way. She’s created Plan International Youth Councils to support young leaders to start their own initiatives and has travelled to places like China, Senegal, Jordan and Kenya to understand the range of challenges facing youth today. “Achieving one’s advocacy goals requires a collective effort: asking for support from mentors, questioning the status quo, connecting with like-minded changemakers and more,” she says.

Mihskakwan James Harper

28, Winnipeg
business development manager, NRStor Inc.; co-chair, SevenGen Energy

Every project Mihskakwan James Harper works on has a single goal: designing renewable energy sources that benefit Indigenous communities. As a member of the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, Harper knows his responsibilities as a future ancestor. And as co-chair of SevenGen Energy’s Indigenous youth council, he helped set up a new program called ImaGENation, which mentors Indigenous youth on implementing their own clean energy projects. “My work tries to advocate from a young person’s lens and make it very clear that we have to do more, faster.” To do that, the business development manager for NRStor energy-storage developer says, “We need warriors. That doesn’t only mean people out on the front lines, defending their territories. We also need warriors in boardrooms. We need lawyers. We need engineers to design the energy systems of tomorrow.”

Jessica LeBlanc

28, Vancouver
program director, Foundation for Environmental Stewardship

It’s frustrating to come up against the persistent tokenization of young people as “learners now” and “leaders later,” especially when the “later” is under threat, Jessica LeBlanc says. So her work at the Foundation for Environmental Stewardship (FES) has centred on equipping those young changemakers with the education, resources and support they need to act on climate, never mind the naysayers. “Youth leadership and influence are crucial for our ability to achieve the climate-resilient Canada we all desperately need,” she says. Her team at FES has delivered more than 80 sustainability training workshops to more than 5,500 students and educators across Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. “The most significant impacts I’ve witnessed are when students learn and demonstrate empathy for a cause or a group of people that they hadn’t considered before. This culture of kindness is what will bring us a healthier and more sustainable planet.”

Xia (Alice) Zhu

28, Toronto
PhD candidate, University of Toronto

“If you have a vision for your planet, don’t be afraid to make it a reality.” That’s Alice Zhu’s message to young sustainability leaders today, and one she has embodied. She recalls the first time she heard about the North Pacific garbage patch as a high school student. It was such a startling image, a mass of plastic in the ocean, that it drove her to action. She founded Climate Impact Network, her first of three environmental organizations, which has delivered climate-science workshops to more than 300 middle- and high-school students across Ontario. Her doctoral research has shed light on how plastic pollution moves through the environment and identified which ecosystems are affected the most. Her peer-reviewed research has been cited hundreds of times, and she has spoken about it at dozens of conferences, workshops, panels and speaker series. “One person is not going to solve climate change or end plastic pollution,” she notes. “We need everyone working together to overhaul our broken system.”

Emily McIntosh

28, Paris, France
student, Sciences Po Paris; former climate action coordinator, New Glasgow, N.S.

As a kid growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, almost all of Emily McIntosh’s free time was spent playing and learning in nature. Once she turned 18, she spent her summers in the forests and rivers around Ontario’s Temagami Island, where she worked as a backcountry canoe trip guide. These were formative explorations that forged a connection with the natural world that guides her today, as she pursues a master’s in environmental policy at Sciences Po Paris. Before relocating to Europe, Emily was the climate action coordinator in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, where she worked to embed climate and sustainability goals into all aspects of the municipality’s operations. She led two community-wide consultations, steered the Climate Action Volunteer program, and co-led the region’s inaugural Pictou County Climate Summit. “The more people involved, perspectives included and needs considered, the more likely we are to develop policies and projects that are meaningful, impactful and grounded in equity and reconciliation,” she says.

Miranda Wang & Jeanny Yao

29, Menlo Park, California
cofounders & CEO/COO, Novoloop

Vancouver high school students Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao were inspired to take action after visiting a municipal waste station and seeing the staggering amount of plastic trash. “We were shocked to see how much plastic was in the garbage,” Wang says. They had an idea: what if you could use bacteria to break down all that plastic? Yao went on to pursue biochemistry and environmental science at the University of Toronto, while Wang studied molecular biology and engineering entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania. The duo, both daughters of entrepreneurs, reunited to found Novoloop (formerly BioCellection), a start-up that breaks down polyethylene waste to create high-performance materials. Their newest product, Lifecycled, is a thermoplastic made from up to 50% post-consumer waste, and it’s being used in shoemaker On’sCloudprime running shoes. Novoloop’s innovative approach has earned them a spot in the World Economic Forum’s 100 most promising Technology Pioneers of 2022 and raised US$21 million in funding.

Siobhan Finan

26, Whistler, B.C
manager of real estate sustainability, Canada Post

Siobhan Finan is playing a key role in getting one of the biggest and most recognizable Crown corporations to its waste-diversion goal. She led the creation of Canada Post’s first zero-waste baseline, a detailed inventory of all waste generated in operations through durable goods and construction, and she developed the company’s first zero-waste strategy, which serves as a roadmap so it can hit its 90% diversion target by 2030. Canada Post already diverts 67% of its waste from landfill through reduction, recycling and reuse – which represents 27,000 tonnes of material. “It can be challenging working in the field of sustainability, as you often hear fresh news stories about a new environmental disaster,” she says. “I try my best to focus on my slice of the pie where I can make a difference.”

Jordan Lin

23, Toronto
energy and sustainability consultant, Arup; co-founder, ReImagine17

At just 23, Jordan Lin has been busy. His focus? “Empowering the enablers of change with the knowledge, resources, connections and opportunities to achieve scaled impact,” he says. The Beijing-born mechanical engineering grad co-founded University of Waterloo’s Impact Alliance to amplify the UN’s sustainable development solutions before starting the non-profit ReImagine17, raising $150,000 in financing and providing 24 young people paid opportunities to learn about, contribute to and make an impact on sustainability across Canada. Now, through his work as an energy and sustainability consultant at Arup, he’s helped clients slash 8,100 tonnes of annual greenhouse gas emissions in their buildings. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the size of the world’s problem, Lin says. “Cultivate positive energy that builds a sense of purpose in your work and encourages perseverance to overcome challenges in the face of adversity.”

Ashoke Mohanraj

25, Halifax
author; law student, Dalhousie University

There are a few mottos that Ashoke Mohanraj lives by. One of them comes from his parents, Sri Lankan refugees who escaped the civil war and made it to Canada thanks to the kindness of others. Living in Markham, Ontario, they taught their son to work hard and be kind. “Nothing more and nothing less,” Mohanraj recalls. And so for him, “sustainability has never really been about saving the birds and the bees. It was always about kindness, both towards the planet and people.” He wrote Pollinator Man, a children’s book that teaches readers about different environmental issues and how they can be part of the solution. He has reached more than 5,000 youth through live readings and educational workshops, and another 10,000 through sales of the book. Mohanraj, a former environmental advisor for the RCMP, says the book promotes representation in the sustainability space and encourages people of colour to become engaged. His message to other young people: “Your personal and lived experiences are what make you a leader, so make sure you use that as an asset.”

Brighid Fry

20, Toronto
artist; co-founder, Music Declares Emergency Canada

Growing up in a queer, feminist, climate-focused family of activists, Brighid Fry spent a lot of time at marches and sit-ins as a child. But music was her calling. “My first-ever concert was performing at a Greenpeace fundraiser.” People can be moved emotionally and spiritually by music, Fry says, and that’s often missing from a lot of political activism. Today the singer-songwriter will humbly tell you that she’s not a musician with a lot of celebrity status but she is getting the music industry to sit down and listen through the non-profit she co-founded during the pandemic: Music Declares Emergency Canada. She’s since helped organize the inaugural Canadian Music Climate Summit and has worked with a number of festivals to reduce their carbon footprints. “I think we have really moved the needle,” Fry says. Having just turned 20, she adds, “I feel like I am just getting started.”

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They’re among the handful of people that I’ll come to meet over a summer of watching for smoke in the boreal forest: tree planters, responsible for regenerating forests – a vital carbon sink – across Canada.

“You always have a tree in your hand, you’re always ready; that’s one of the secrets of tree planting,” says Caitlin Burge, operations manager for Next Generation Reforestation, a company that’s been working in northern Alberta and British Columbia for 40 years, regenerating harvested and burnt forest plots for timber companies.

While advancements in technology have changed the way her company does business – using digital tools to survey and map sites, for one – the most effective way to plant a tree remains fundamentally the same today as it was 40 years ago. Dig, plant, cover, repeat. “It’s analog,” says Burge, who spent 14 years planting in Alberta and B.C. “It becomes a moving meditation.”

On average, Canada’s 6,500 tree planters sow around 2,300 seedlings a day and up to 184,000 in a season. Tree planting and reforestation can play a vital role in Canada’s effort to balance carbon emissions. And increasingly, it is seen as a global solution to the climate crisis through efforts such as the World Economic Forum’s “one trillion tree” initiative. In Canada, the federal government has pledged to increase the 600 million seedlings it plants every year by 30% – investing more than $3.2 billion to plant two billion trees by 2031.

But in the wake of the worst wildfire season on record in Canada, it isn’t as simple as just planting more trees, climate scientists say. In fact, what we’ve been planting and how we’ve been managing our forestry stock have urgent lessons for us to heed. With wildfires igniting a record-breaking 18.5 million hectares of forest – unleashing unprecedented carbon emissions – experts argue that it’s time to take a closer look at tree planting in Canada, planning for the challenges ahead while also contemplating opportunities for change.

In early May, Krishandra Zimmer and Lawrence Fraser were setting up camp outside the town of High Prairie, Alberta, when a wildfire raged furiously across the highway, threatening to shut down their operations before the first tree seedling was even in the ground.

As project managers with Next Generation Reforestation, they are contracted by logging companies to survey and replant harvested cut blocks. They’re on the front lines of Canada’s $34.8-billion forestry sector, and they’re watching it go up in smoke.

“There were fires burning everywhere,” Fraser says. “We decided the best thing to do was to get everybody here in one place.”

Zimmer and Fraser’s crew of 50 tree planters scrambled to find their way north to the camp, encountering highway and road closures due to other wildfires burning out of control in Alberta. Most of the planters were from eastern Canada, unfamiliar with the network of remote logging roads. Some had come with work visas from as far away as Ireland, Australia and Colombia.

The veteran tree planters have been planting spruce and pine seedlings in cut blocks and old burns scattered across northwestern Alberta since 1994. They’ve seen bolts of lightning strike trees and ignite wildfires, and they routinely report smoke columns to provincial firefighting agencies. “We’ve dealt with fire and smoke before,” Zimmer says. “But this season has been unprecedented. We’ve never been surrounded by so many wildfires.”

“It was an onslaught,” Fraser agrees.

The severity of the wildfires created enormous logistical and environmental challenges for Zimmer and Fraser’s crew to meet their planting targets. They were constantly checking fire status and wind direction to reassess where they could safely plant. One of the biggest challenges was enduring the physical stress of planting trees while inhaling heavy smoke from the nearby wildfires. “Some days we just couldn’t work – it wasn’t safe,” Zimmer says.

Nothing was as devastating as witnessing the scorched aftermath in areas where they’d planted trees over the last three decades. “Millions and millions of replanted trees lost,” Fraser says.

“Last fall we surveyed some of the blocks we planted 12 years ago. There was this one area that was doing so well – we were so happy,” Zimmer says. “Now that area has been burnt to a crisp. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.”

As a result of the burgeoning wildfire crisis, Canada is facing enormous challenges when it comes to reforestation and balancing carbon emissions. According to research from the Canadian Forest Service, the country’s managed forests have transitioned from being a carbon sink in the 1990s to a rapidly expanding source of carbon emissions.

Last fall we surveyed some of the blocks we planted 12 years ago. There was this one area that was doing so well. Now that area has been burnt to a crisp. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.

 

—Krishandra Zimmer, Next Generation Reforestation

“When trees grow, they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it as carbon compounds in the branches and leaves,” explains Werner Kurz, a senior research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. “When a wildfire comes, it directly releases much of that carbon and greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere,” he says. “And it kills a large number of trees.”

The dead trees, often left scorched and standing, gradually decompose and release additional carbon dioxide, which scientists measure as an indirect emission. Kurz’s colleague Benjamin Hudson calls the preliminary volume of direct carbon emissions from the total area burned in the 2023 wildfire season “staggering.”

“We’re getting up in the range of about 1,800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents that we’ve emitted to date from wildfires in 2023 alone,” he says. To put that in context, that’s triple the total emissions from all industrial sectors in Canada combined – including transportation, oil and gas, and manufacturing – as reported in the National Inventory Report in 2021.

Megafires like the Donnie Creek fire in northeastern B.C., which as of early September was over half a million hectares in size and the largest wildfire in the province’s history, are responsible for releasing millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. These large-scale wildfires also have the potential to burn deep into the soil, destroying the organic layer, which provides nutrients to seedlings and acts like a sponge to prevent runoff. “This is another phenomenon of wildfires,” Kurz says. “Basically, the soil surface becomes hydrophobic, which can lead to flooding.”

Megan Babineau, a forester who works for a mill operation in Alberta, witnessed this phenomenon after a megafire swept through the forest surrounding Edson, northwest of Calgary, where she was supposed to plant in the spring. In June, the rains finally came – and didn’t stop. “It was crazy to go from fire to this extreme rain event,” she says. “So much rain fell in one shot, and it didn’t have anywhere to go quickly enough.”

A lake formed in the burned-over area where they were meant to plant and risked completely drowning out the seedlings. “The actual biology of these places is totally changed,” Babineau says.

Compounding matters for Babineau and tree-planting operations across the continent is an ongoing shortage of tree seedlings that was worsening long before this year’s fires. With the sheer scale of charred forests that will need to be replanted next year, in addition to the quota that had already been set, nurseries are struggling to keep up.

“It’s not just one mill; it’s everybody in Canada who needs burnt cut blocks to be replanted,” Fraser says. “The burnt areas just create new volume, and there’s only so much capacity in the nurseries. It’s going to be a challenge.”

In the race to regenerate forests in Canada, seed-spreading drones, wildfire-monitoring satellites and genetically engineered trees are being experimented with. But climate scientists say that it’s critical to hit pause and reassess the legacy of practices in forest management that have made “significant contributions” to the devastating scale of wildfires threatening communities today. “By focusing on timber production, we have inadvertently made choices that have impacts on wildfire behaviour,” Kurz says.

Robert Gray, a wildfire ecologist who has studied wildfire on the boreal landscape for more than 40 years, agrees that we’ve set ourselves up for wildfire disaster. Over the last century, Canada has allowed timber companies to log, or clear-cut, forests and replant monoculture plantations of coniferous softwoods, including lodgepole pine and spruce. These coniferous trees are considered highly flammable: they thrive in wildfires, relying on the heat from the flames to open their cones and release seeds to reproduce.

In a naturally biodiverse forest ecosystem, certain trees will slow down the spread of wildfires, including deciduous species such as poplar and birch. But the timber industry relies heavily on the use of glyphosate, a herbicide, to kill broad-leafed trees, clearing space for more commercially valuable conifers. Despite calls to ban the practice, it’s still commonplace across Canada.

Monocrop conifer plantations have also led to disastrous epidemics in Canada’s boreal forest, including the mountain pine beetle outbreak, which, since the early 1990s, has killed more than 18 million hectares of forest in Western Canada. Gray’s research has found that forests ravaged by the beetles exhibit extreme fire behaviour, which has, in turn, contributed to the acceleration of megafires, including the Donnie Creek fire. “If we don’t step out of that mode of replanting conifers, we aren’t going to solve anything,” Gray says.

Gray and other climate scientists are advocating for policy change in the way forests are regenerated, planting instead more broad-leafed deciduous and hardwood species, which reduce flammability and help to slow the spread of wildfires.

Non-profit organizations such as Community Forests International (CFI), a reforestation organization based in Sackville, New Brunswick, are already ahead of industry in terms of planting more climate-adapted species, including red oak, maple and yellow birch. CFI is partnered with Canada’s 2 Billion Trees program to plant 951,000 trees in Atlantic Canada over the next three years.

In addition to planting with wildfire resilience in mind, CFI and other advocates say that we must protect old-growth forest and primary forest (forests that have never been logged), vital carbon sinks, from being cut down in the first place. In B.C., old-growth forest covers 12% of the province. While companies still harvest 38,000 hectares of old-growth forest every year, the province claims that the rate is sharply declining.

“We have to protect forests that are functioning ecosystems today, as well as work towards the recovery and restoration of those natural processes on degraded sites,” says Craig Tupper, a former wildland firefighter in Nova Scotia who is now a forester with CFI.

His colleague Michelle Evans, also a CFI forester, points out that tree planting is not the only way to regenerate healthy forests in Canada. “Tree planting will never be able to keep up with industrial harvesting – the way it currently is,” she says. In fact, the opposite – thinning and reducing forests – might be more beneficial in the long run. Rather than clear-cutting an area with heavy-duty equipment, Evans is working with small ground crews to harvest more frequently but at a lower rate.

Werner Kurz with the Canadian Forest Service agrees that one of the best things we can do to balance carbon emissions – while mitigating the risk of extreme wildfire – in Canada is to strive to reduce fuels – dead trees that feed fires – from forests. Thinning in the name of fire protection has been criticized by some fire ecologists as simply “logging in disguise.” But thinning doesn’t mean giving the logging industry a free pass to harvest wherever they please, Kurz says; rather, we should have a design approach in mind and target areas where there’s a higher incidence of lightning on the landscape.

A combination approach of planting more broad-leafed and hardwood tree species in some areas and thinning forests in other areas could make Canada’s forests more fire-resistant.

But mechanical thinning is costly, Kurz admits, and that’s why Canadians will need to learn how to live more closely with what he and other fire ecologists call “good fire.”

Cultural burning, or prescribed burning, is a management tool used to reduce the amount of fuel in the landscape. Historically, First Nations people lit fires during the early spring or late fall, when conditions were cool and wet, to burn off fine fuels (leaf litter, sticks, branches and dried needles) to regenerate forest into meadows for berry production and to encourage ungulates, such as moose and elk, back into an area. The practice was outlawed by the B.C. government in 1874, but Joe Gilchrist, an Indigenous fire specialist with the Salish Fire Keepers Society, is working to bring it back. He partners with communities to burn between 500 and 1,000 hectares in B.C.’s interior every spring.

“All of the work done by the ancestors has gone, and now we have forests that are unhealthy and overgrown,” Gilchrist says. “That’s what we’re seeing now with these catastrophic fires, which never should be happening.”

Gray agrees. He works closely with First Nations communities in southeastern B.C. to practise cultural and prescribed burns to mitigate the threat from wildfires. “Prescribed burning is so key,” he says. “It cleans up the fuel particle size, the stuff we can’t get at while harvesting.”

All the work done by the ancestors is gone, and now we have forests that are unhealthy
and overgrown.

 

—Joe Gilchrist, Indigenous fire specialist, Salish Fire Keepers Society

Gray points to research from Oregon State University that recently determined that embers, small bits of burning material that can be carried by the wind to spread wildfires, aren’t from the big logs or huge burning trees, but rather from smaller material like sticks and branches. As a result, prescribed burning can help to reduce the spread of wildfires by cleaning up smaller fuels.

In July, one of the plots on the ?aq’am Reserve in southeastern B.C. where Gray and the Ktunaxa First Nation implemented a prescribed burn was tested when a nearby wildfire broke out. “The wildfire slammed into the area of the prescribed burn,” Gray says. “It stopped because there was no fuel to carry it. Unfortunately, where we hadn’t done the prescribed burn, it got into the village and destroyed seven homes. So it does work to slow down fires.”

Solutions to the current climate crisis in Canada – including burgeoning wildfires, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the failure to keep pace with replanting forests – need to be implemented on a scale that’s “almost overwhelming,” Kurz says.

What’s required is political will, scientists say, to guide the direction of industry, along with public understanding that the way we manage forests has to change.

Trina Moyles is a Yukon-based writer and the author of Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest.

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As an environmental studies student at McGill University at a time when the climate crisis was far from a household name, she knew much more about it than her father, Lorne Trottier. The difference between him and the next skeptical early-aughts dad, though, was that he had the means to do something about it.

Lorne Trottier is a co-founder of Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd., a Montreal-based tech company that in 2022 sold its imaging unit for $875 million. Founded in 1976, Matrox was successful enough by the year 2000 that Trottier and his wife, Louise Rousselle Trottier, created a family foundation to share their wealth. For several years, the foundation focused primarily on big gifts to hospitals and universities.

Fast forward to now, and Sylvie Trottier sits on the board, her husband, Éric St-Pierre, is executive director, and under their leadership, the foundation committed in 2020 to giving $8 million a year to support climate action. Earlier this year, Trottier formed a family office, a type of private-wealth-management firm often established by high-net-worth families, and plans to apply an environmental, social and governance (ESG) lens to her family’s private investments.

But the seed was planted back when Trottier managed to convince her dad to take the climate crisis seriously. She’s humble about it – “The science was there; it wasn’t just me,” she says with a laugh – but it’s an example of the ways in which scions of the wealthiest families in North America are reshaping the corporate philanthropic landscape. And it comes at a critical juncture, where the passing of the guard intersects with a major existential planetary crisis.

Toronto-based research firm Strategic Insight estimates that a trillion Canadian dollars will have been passed from Canadian baby boomers to their descendants by 2026, and Boston-based research firm Cerulli estimates that by 2045, a whopping US$72.6 trillion will transfer between American generations. Unlike the existential dread that plays out in the hit HBO show Succession, experts say this great transfer represents an opportunity for family wealth to be stewarded and redistributed in ways that make a dent in the most daunting threat the world faces: climate change.

And many heirs are seizing that opportunity – from William Peterffy successfully pitching his American billionaire father to become Interactive Brokers Group’s first director of ESG affairs, to textiles heiress Veronica Chou using her portion of her family’s US$2.7 billion to build an environmentally friendly clothing label. Even fossil fuel heirs are joining the fight: Aileen Getty, the granddaughter of a major American oil-marketing company, has channelled her wealth into climate philanthropy and supporting climate protests. North of the border, major oil executive Kevin Krausert left his family’s Alberta-based Beaver Drilling Ltd. to co-found a venture capital fund that backs technologies transitioning the energy industry away from oil and gas.

“We need more giving and less hoarding,” says Carolynn Beaty, another successor of a family foundation, the Sitka Foundation. She left her job as a teacher in 2018 to work full-time as its executive director. Beaty’s father, Ross Beaty, founded and ran Pan American Silver Corp., the second-largest silver-mining company in the world, before pivoting to launch renewable-energy company Alterra Power Corp. in 2008. That year, Beaty and his wife, Trisha Beaty, launched the Sitka Foundation, which has focused from its inception on funding projects that protect biodiversity.

We sometimes save money for rainy days, but it’s raining. We need to address our problems because it’s pouring outside.

 

—Carolynn Beaty, Sitka Foundation

On giving and hoarding, Carolynn Beaty is speaking specifically to the world of philanthropy, where many charitable foundations dole out grant money at a pace that doesn’t deplete their endowments so they can continue to exist for years to come – for family foundations, this perpetuity can be tied up with notions of legacy. On the other hand, there’s a growing movement of private foundations choosing to “spend down,” or grant out all their money within a short period of time, many prompted by the urgency of climate change.

“We sometimes save money for a rainy day, but it’s raining,” Beaty says. “We need to address our problems, because it’s pouring outside.” The Sitka Foundation isn’t planning to spend down, but Beaty is clear: she wants her family’s legacy to be one of wealth redistribution. She’s vocal in encouraging other wealthy families to adopt this mindset, too.

Trottier is a member of a global group called Millionaires for Humanity, which advocates for a global wealth tax of 1% on multimillionaires. Other Millionaires for Humanity include Walt Disney heiress Abigail Disney and Austrian chemical and pharmaceutical heiress Marlene Engelhorn, who makes headlines regularly for her wealth-redistribution advocacy. Trottier says philanthropy isn’t enough, that structural changes like taxation are required to meaningfully address social and economic inequality.

Some critics argue that family philanthropy can serve to reinforce systemic inequality. In a 2020 paper, U.K.-based philanthropy researchers Jessica Sklair and Luna Glucksberg write that wealth managers promote family philanthropy “as a ‘succession planning strategy’” – since younger generations can be more attracted to the idea of using the family business for the common good – and in doing so, “attempt to legitimise the extreme accumulation of wealth among the super-rich.” It’s a process that the researchers conclude serves to “obscure the ways in which growing wealth accumulation drives the widening chasm of economic inequality seen around the globe.”

For many business-owning families, the urge to hold on to their wealth can be strong, says Olivier de Richoufftz, general secretary of Family Enterprise Foundation (FEF), a charity focused on research and education around family enterprises in Canada. “And protection [of wealth] is not the driver that the family enterprise needs in order to help society as a whole.” That can mean holding on to extractive and destructive business practices to continue maximizing profit, never mind giving away that profit to charity.

According to FEF, more than 60% of the country’s family businesses (which together generate almost half of Canadian private-sector real GDP) are expected to change ownership within the next decade. Interestingly, more than 80% of business family members aged 18 to 24 say keeping ownership in the family is either extremely important or very important to them – compared to around 70% of those over the age of 44.

“There’s much at stake about . . . the family reputation, the legacy, the harmony of the family, but also the responsibility that those businesses have toward society,” de Richoufftz says.

Of course, there’s plenty of research showing that millennials and Gen Zs are more worried about climate change than baby boomers, so regardless of whether businesses remain family-owned, there could be a shift in practices toward environmental sustainability as a new generation of workers moves into leadership. But some say family enterprises present a unique opportunity for impact. “Most family businesses . . . are more values-driven than publicly traded companies,” says Matt Knight, the executive director of the Alberta Business Family Institute.

There’s much at stake about . . . the family reputation, the legacy, the harmony of the family, but also the responsibility that those businesses have toward society.

 

– Olivier de Richoufftz, general secretary of Family Enterprise Foundation

The problem is they can also be less structured, especially if they’re still run by first-generation founders. Most family businesses, despite saying they’re driven by social values, don’t have clearly defined ESG statements, Knight says. A succession or a younger family member joining the leadership team is often a prompt for a family enterprise to “professionalize.” Knight says family businesses should focus on the “G” in ESG before they can meaningfully implement the “E.”

On the family philanthropy side, too, this rings true for the Trottier Foundation. When the foundation hired Sylvie Trottier’s husband, St-Pierre, in 2016, it was the first time they had paid staff.

That was around the time the foundation started pivoting toward funding the climate fight, too. St-Pierre says there’s space for many more family foundations to start funding climate action.

“The reality is a lot of the wealthier families are often approached by very well-paid fundraisers from hospitals and universities, so they get all of their attention . . . and then they want their name up on a wall,” he says. “There’s a lot of work to be done to [help] those families realize, actually, there’s stuff you can fund on climate that’s equally as important and extremely urgent.”

Kylie Adair is a Montreal-based journalist.

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