The need for adaptation strategies is urgent. And yet, funding remains a significant barrier. In response, Kenya and other African pioneers are exploring alternative financing mechanisms such as green bonds and debt-for-nature swaps. Despite these efforts, systemic challenges hinder progress, underscoring the complex interplay between sustainability, finance and international cooperation in addressing climate change.

Indeed, the climate dilemma in Africa is amplified by contradiction: the continent is responsible for just 4% of global carbon emissions, yet it experiences a significantly higher degree of climate change’s negative effects. Data compiled by the International Energy Agency in 2010 illustrated the global carbon-footprint imbalance with a striking image: at the time, a single American refrigerator consumed three times more energy than the average African used in a year. Africa’s struggle is compounded by its limited ability to access climate finance. As President Macky Sall of Senegal has put it, Africa faces a “double penalty,” not only susceptible to the impacts of climate change but also confronting hurdles in accessing financing desperately needed for adaptation and mitigation.

The African Development Bank estimates that Africa incurs annual losses of between $7 and $15 billion (all dollar figures are U.S.) because of climate change, a figure expected to escalate to $50 billion by 2030. But the continent garners a mere 3% of global climate finance. Africa made up less than 1% of the $2.2 trillion in community green bonds in 2022, according to the African Development Bank Group. Europe alone issued more than $100 billion in green bonds that year. This investment gap significantly curtails African nations’ capacity to tackle their unique climate challenges. 

The situation is exacerbated by high levels of debt from international loans and bonds, placing 21 African countries in or at high risk of debt distress. The intersection of climate vulnerability and unsustainable debt stalls economic development and exacerbates poverty. The burden of debt servicing constrains these nations’ ability to attract investments for crucial climate adaptation and mitigation measures, such as transitioning to cleaner energy sources, adopting sustainable agriculture practices and enhancing infrastructure resilience.

Debt-for-nature swaps, alongside the broader concept of debt-for-climate swaps, are transformative strategies that can address these challenges. By converting a portion of a country’s debt into funds dedicated to environmental conservation, these mechanisms promise financial relief and a pathway to sustainable development for African nations.

This has the potential to alleviate a country’s debt burden and ensures that crucial funds are directed toward combatting deforestation, protecting endangered species and supporting community-based conservation initiatives that provide sustainable livelihoods. The success of these projects hinges on transparent and equitable management, ensuring that the benefits reach the local communities most affected by climate change and biodiversity loss.

In this context, debt-for-nature swaps surface as potent tools to bridge the climate finance gap. Kenya, with its rich natural resources and acute climate vulnerabilities, serves as a prime example of how such mechanisms can be leveraged for sustainable development.

The complex reality of climate finance in Kenya

The Lake Turkana Wind Power project, the largest wind farm on the African continent, is proof of the kind of enthusiasm that Kenya’s renewable-energy sector is generating among investors. While this is crucial for reducing carbon emissions, other vital sectors such as agriculture, forestry, transportation and water management are scrambling to find similar backing to cope with the changing climate.

In other East African countries such as Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda, the potential in debt-for-nature swaps could be a game changer. However, the scale remains modest compared to other continents. The reality is that not enough climate financing is reaching local African communities.

Abdul-Karim Mohamed, an African start-up investor, recently questioned whether climate finance in Africa is “hope, hype or hypocrisy,” noting that less than 10% of committed climate financing from international funds trickles down to the grassroots level. This inefficiency is compounded by a perceived bias from Western funders, who have a strong preference for their own knowledge and methods over those of local partners. Mohamed concluded that if this bias continued “within climate finance initiatives, it will be more challenging to find and support local solutions to local climate change problems.”

In Kenya, the juxtaposition of rich natural resources, poor governance and the challenges of climate change adaptation presents a complex scenario. The country’s lush mangroves and mineral wealth, essential for sustainable development, are often mismanaged, leading to social and environmental repercussions. This mismanagement has seeped into government-backed carbon credit programs, which have resulted in community evictions and protests. 

In the report Blood Carbon: How a Carbon Offset Scheme Makes Millions from Indigenous Land in Northern Kenya, non-profit Survival International casts a critical eye on the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project managed by the Northern Rangelands Trust. This project was first touted as a premier carbon-credit initiative, attracting substantial investment from Meta and Netflix. But the scheme’s ambition to generate $300 to $500 million potentially displaces traditional grazing practices in favour of commercial ranching models, undermining the land rights and cultural heritage of the Indigenous populations involved. Kenya’s experience highlights the critical need for effective and equitable management of natural resources for climate finance, broadening the scope to include comprehensive adaptation strategies across all vulnerable sectors. 

Africa incurs between US$7 and $15 billion in damages from climate change every year but garners just 3% of global climate finance.

The Triple B Framework, conceptualized by Gillian Marcelle of Resilience Capital Ventures in 2021, represents an alternative approach to financing. It addresses common pitfalls such as underutilization and misallocation by refining funding mechanisms, uncovering areas often overlooked by conventional financial systems due to perceived risks or insufficient returns, and harnessing the power of blended finance. This method brings together diverse types of funding, including monetary investments as well as vital non-financial resources, such as expert knowledge, technical support and access to networks, to amplify its impact significantly.

A notable instance of the Triple B Framework’s implementation is the Seychelles’ “blue bond,” which targets ocean conservation and the sustainable use of marine resources – an area that often lacks sufficient investment. Launched in 2018 as the first initiative of its kind, the blue bond garnered $15 million to safeguard marine ecosystems, improve fisheries management and bolster economic development through projects related to the ocean. 

Organizations such as The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the World Wildlife Fund have been instrumental in structuring debt-for-nature swaps across the globe, including in Africa. The debt-for-nature swap facilitated by TNC in 2015 allowed the Seychelles to restructure part of its national debt, with the savings generated from the debt restructuring redirected toward funding conservation projects. The success of this debt-for-nature swap paved the way for the blue bond.

East African nations, with their wealth of terrestrial and marine biodiversity, could certainly benefit from adopting financing strategies similar to those recently demonstrated in Kenya, especially in the realm of green bonds. For instance, Acorn Holdings made history in Kenya by issuing the country’s first green bond, listed for trading on the Nairobi Securities Exchange in 2019. The bond, valued at 4.3 billion shillings ($42.5 million), was issued by the Nairobi-based property developer to finance the construction of eco-friendly student accommodations. 

 This forward-thinking move by Acorn Holdings serves as a practical example of how innovative financing mechanisms can support sustainable development initiatives. It offers a replicable model for other East African nations. 

A call to amplify impact and investment

The journey of Kenya in navigating the complexities of climate finance underscores a broader narrative of resilience and innovation. However, the scale of investment and the reach of these modern financing mechanisms need more amplification. The global community, including international financial institutions, creditor nations and conservation organizations, must rally to support and scale up debt-for-nature swaps in Africa.

Expanding the scope and scale of debt-for-nature swaps in East Africa could serve as a beacon for other African countries, demonstrating that sustainable development and conservation can be achieved even amidst financial challenges. 

Shilpa Tiwari is CEO of No Women No Spice, an organic spice company, and Isenzo Group, a sustainability strategy firm. 

This story is part of our Spring 2024 issue. 

The post Is swapping debt to protect nature the key to solving Africa’s climate woes? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The hero of this revolution: Beijing-based landscape architect Kongjian Yu, whose ideas have been implemented in more than 70 Chinese cities. Yu has pioneered the concept of “sponge cities” – urban landscapes designed to soak up stormwater, that would otherwise run off pavement and lead to devastating floods, while functioning as appealing natural spaces when they’re not busy saving lives and property.

For his decades of innovative city-rebuilding, Yu received the 2023 Oberlander Prize from Washington, D.C.’s Cultural Landscape Foundation. Named in honour of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, a Vancouver-based landscape architect who was one of the first to sound the alarm on climate change, the prize includes US$100,000 and opportunities to amplify Yu’s work.

“He lives and breathes his conviction that landscape architecture is the discipline to lead effective responses to the climate crisis,” said foundation president Charles A. Birnbaum. Yu’s firm, Turenscape, has designed more than 2,000 projects around the world and inspired many more – including seven “sponge parks” in Montreal, which last fall decided to build 30 more, and Toronto’s billion-dollar Port Lands project, which has created a new river valley at the mouth of the Don River to prevent flooding.

Yu’s inspiration comes in part from memories of growing up in a village south of Shanghai. He recalls it as a paradise – before industrialization cut down the forests and polluted the mountain streams. By 2013, China had adopted Yu’s research on natural solutions and sponge cities as a “guiding theory” for ecological protection and restoration.

But sponges can hold back only so much water. Last summer, China suffered devastating floods that killed at least 80 and displaced hundreds of thousands. Experts believe sponge-city infrastructure can handle a maximum of 200 millimetres of rain per day. That’s twice the highest daily rainfall ever recorded in Toronto – but last July, parts of Beijing received 745 millimetres in just three and a half days. Yu says China – and the rest of the world – must move even faster to implement sponge cities. As he told Dezeen recently, “That is why I advocate Sponge Planet.”

This story is part of our Spring 2024 issue. 

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Jakarta (regional population 33 million) also contends with earthquakes, recording more than 80 in 2023 alone. And since the city was built on swampland, rapid urbanization and groundwater extraction have resulted in parts of the city sinking by up to 20 centimetres a year. Surrounded by coal plants, Jakarta is also one of the world’s most polluted cities, and lung disease is on the rise. 

Clearly, bold action is required to transform Jakarta into a resilient 21st-century city. The authorities’ response? They’re moving out.

In what may be the world’s biggest act of deflection, they’re building a new capital, Nusantara, in a lush, hilly landscape on the island of Borneo, 1,200 kilometres northeast. Yes, the government will invest US$40 billion to slow Jakarta’s sinking, but it will spend US$38 billion on the new capital. It’s been billed as a “low-carbon super hub” – but the plan was reportedly approved in just 42 days, making it the fastest bill ever approved by Indonesia’s parliament.

Also hasty is the timetable for building this new metropolis. Construction began in July 2022, and Nusantara’s inauguration is planned for this August. Critics say the planning process was rushed, with limited consultation and environmental consideration. Local people complain they were never consulted about the project, which has disrupted their lives and livelihoods. An Indigenous Peoples’ alliance estimates that 20,000 Indigenous people face relocation – with scant compensation. Not to mention, roughly 2,500 hectares of rainforest have been cleared to make way for the city, and so far reforestation has been haphazard.

Rather than pointing to a better future, Nusantara reflects “the failure of successive administrations in Jakarta to take on and manage the problems of Jakarta,” Ian Wilson, a lecturer in Indonesian politics at Australia’s Murdoch University, told Time magazine. “The problems of Jakarta will remain, regardless of Nusantara.”

Columbia’s Saputra believes the root of all these problems lies in educating more Indonesians on the perils of climate change. But Jakarta’s problems may equally be a global lesson: you can’t outrun climate change. 

This story is part of our Spring 2024 issue. 

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Like many in the environmental movement, I long thought of political conservatives as a nemesis for the environment. I came by this association honestly: from my grandfather, who co-founded the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the predecessor to the left-leaning NDP, to my mother, who once told me that if we elected the Progressive Conservatives in the 1988 federal election, they would chop down all our trees. 

Later, however, after I co-founded Corporate Knights magazine and launched a survey, asking leading environmentalists who had been the greenest Canadian prime minister and U.S. president in history, I was surprised that on both counts, conservative leaders won the green star: Brian Mulroney and Theodore Roosevelt. I remember how moved Mulroney was, when I contacted him to inform him of this recognition from what were normally hostile quarters (reportedly, he considered his “Greenest Prime Minister in Canadian History” award as his most cherished honorific). I was also moved by how prominent environmentalists, including David Suzuki and Elizabeth May, took to the airwaves when Mulroney was crowned the greenest PM, free of any enmity for him, to celebrate the genuinely good things he had done on acid rain and for the ozone layer. It was a nice example of love triumphing over hate.

If there is one thing we know, it is that the environment cannot be a political football. It has to be a trans-partisan issue in which every party and leader can imagine themselves as heroes, especially now in these times that require heroic and sustained climate action.

My old boss Ralph Nader formed the Critical Mass Energy Project in 1974 as a national anti-nuclear umbrella group, which was largely successful in stopping the expansion of nuclear power. Many environmentalists oppose nuclear energy because of the radioactive waste that sticks around for thousands of years. I was always skeptical about nuclear power because of the high costs (due in part to a web of regulatory requirements), but I was also rankled by how the nuclear lobby dismissed renewables. While I still don’t think building new nuclear is the way to go (it takes too long and costs too much), I am in favour of extending and keeping existing emissions-free nuclear online (see Eugene Ellmen’s exploration of the topic).

Many people were involved in the creation of Canada’s carbon tax, including myself. I co-authored a $100-billion carbon tax plan in 2007 launched alongside members of Parliament from three of Canada’s four national parties (guess who was missing), which almost immediately inspired John Baird, then the Conservative environment minister, to coin the attack line “a tax on everything.” Later, at a meeting of decision-makers in Winnipeg, I put forward the idea for a made-in-Canada carbon tax where the money stayed in the provinces, which was welcomed by Gerald Butts, the future principal secretary to the current Liberal prime minister, as “bad policy but good politics” and in 2018 became the law of the land.

Unfortunately, the carbon tax (as our director of research notes) is tailor-made for dividing people, which certain politicians (not just conservative) have gone to town on. And many of the biggest polluters managed to insert fine print that exempted them from paying much at all. It’s little wonder that many big polluters, from Exxon to Suncor, supported a carbon tax, and environmentalists were slow to appreciate this. Although it seemed like a wonderful idea to many political stripes at the time, the love affair with the carbon tax has not panned out, partly because it is individualist and punitive in nature and does not tap into the cooperative “build it together” spirit that is required to lay out the solutions to power a climate-friendly civilization. 

Not all shibboleths are long-held. Some are being formed as we speak, as the meat-industry lobby foments the belief that plant-based foods are too processed and expensive to be an effective climate solution. More on that in our “plant power” package.

For the sake of the planet, it’s time for all of us to shed the shibboleths that no longer serve the higher good, to come together in protecting the only home we have from spiralling into climate chaos. 

Rather than ostracizing, demonizing or lionizing, the path forward for climate action can be more inclusive, open-minded and clear-eyed, but focused on the practical nuts and bolts and love of the future we can build together.

Toby Heaps is the co-founder and publisher of Corporate Knights.

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Noting the police cars parked in front, I found my friend Leslie standing, in her sweats and slippers, on the high fence of her backyard, embracing the trunk of the magnificent balsam fir tree that towered over her property. Above her, harnessed to the tree, was a helmeted young man with a chainsaw dangling from his tool belt. Below her, on the ground, were two cops.

“I don’t understand why we’re cutting down trees like this when the city has declared a climate emergency,” Leslie said. The cop suggested she come down off the fence. She wasn’t budging. Stalemate hung in the air.

As she explained from her perch, Leslie had tried every legal avenue – writing to all the relevant offices at the city – to defend that tree, which her new neighbour had applied to remove to make way for a bigger and better house. This was her last resort: clinging to it for dear life. Its dear life.

That battle was lost; by the end of the day, that fir tree was firewood. And now a three-storey house with a footprint in excess of Toronto’s zoning bylaws stands where it once did. But the war is far from over. Now, more than ever, cities are recognizing the critical importance of the urban forest to their livability, and they’re working hard to translate that recognition into action.

“Nobody disputes that trees are good,” says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Chicago who researches the impact of urban vegetation on human cognition and emotion. “But the question – especially when budgets are tight – is how good? Why good? And are they worth it?”

City dwellers have always appreciated trees for the beauty they offer, the birdlife they harbour and the shade they cast over sidewalks in the dog days of summer. But in the context of the climate crisis, it’s their less visible benefits that are coming to the fore: their ability to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, to reduce erosion and flooding, to absorb runoff and to mitigate the “heat island” effect that takes hold in a built environment of concrete and asphalt, air conditioners and cars.

Furthermore, as urbanization proceeds apace – the United Nations predicts that more than two-thirds of the global population will live in cities by 2050 – trees are proving essential to human health, filtering particulate matter out of polluted air and boosting mental health and overall well-being.

As the true value of the urban forest becomes more evident, most cities in North America have set expansion goals. But growing the canopy is not just a matter of planting more trees. It’s also about redressing inequities in the distribution of green space, challenging long-held assumptions about urban design and budgeting, long-term, for trees’ well-being.

As part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden allocated US$1.5 billion to urban tree-planting projects, specifically targeting poorer, racialized neighbourhoods. The issue of “tree equity” is gaining currency, particularly in the U.S., where the disparities are most glaring. In 2021, American Forests, a national conservation non-profit based in Washington, D.C., launched a Tree Equity Score that correlates the physical characteristics of a given area – the canopy, surface temperature and building density – with socio-economic metrics like the income, employment level, age and race of its residents. The score, between zero and 100, reflects the equity of tree distribution.

According to American Forests’ data, white-majority neighbourhoods in the U.S. enjoy 33% more tree canopy than communities of colour. As the climate warms and extreme heat events hit cities, this divide becomes less a matter of fairness than of survival. Between 2011 and 2020, the heat-related death rate among Black New Yorkers was twice as high as that of their white counterparts. In the summer of 2022, Phoenix, Arizona, the hottest large city in the U.S., saw a record 359 heat-related deaths, with the highest rates among Black and Indigenous men. Phoenix has become the first city in the U.S. to publicly aspire to “tree equity” by 2030, meaning a city-wide score of 100.

“We’re trying hard to drive resources to the communities that need it most,” says Maisie Hughes, vice-president of urban forestry at American Forests. The colour-coded map of tree equity scores across the U.S. makes this possible. For Hughes, a landscape architect and a woman of colour, the project is as much about trees as it is about overturning the deeply racist “social construct of America.”

In recent decades, rising urbanization and climate disruptions have led to declining urban tree cover on all continents except Europe. Cities in North America are working to counter that trend.

Last November, New York City Council announced that it would be increasing the city’s canopy from the current cover of 22% to 30% by 2035. Phoenix, located on the arid Sonoran Desert, is aiming to boost its coverage from 10% today to 25% by 2030. On average, Canadian cities have more canopy coverage, with the National Capital Region (which includes Gatineau Park) leading the pack at 46%, followed by Halifax at 43%. Toronto is aiming for 40% tree canopy by 2050, up from the roughly 28% it’s at today. But there are countervailing forces. A single ice storm took out 900 trees in Montreal last April, and the city – which announced the planting of 500,000 new trees in its 2020–2030 Climate Plan – has had to fell thousands of trees blighted by the emerald ash borer, an invasive species that has decimated the ash population across North America over the last two decades.

But the successful urban forest is not just a matter of numbers. In 2005, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced with great fanfare that his city would be receiving a million new trees. The plan didn’t account for the cost of water, or the fact that most trees would have to be planted on private land and require the cooperation of citizens. When Villaraigosa left the mayor’s office eight years later, L.A. was only some 400,000 trees richer.

Roughly half of the urban land available for trees in North American cities is privately owned. Conserving and expanding the canopy requires a public that is educated about the importance of trees and willing to help maintain them. Grassroots greening initiatives abound, says Danijela Puric-Mladenovic, a professor of urban forestry at the University of Toronto and co-founder of Neighbourwoods, a project that helps neighbourhoods, school boards and churches create inventories of the trees on their properties and monitor their health and growth.

But while public support of the urban canopy grows, cities continue to cave to the powerful forces of development. Despite its lofty forest-expansion ambitions, Toronto has seen its portion of plantable space decrease in the last decade and impervious land cover increase.

We’re trying hard to drive resources to the communities that need it most.

—Maisie Hughes, vice-president of urban forestry, American Forests

“Planning topples everything,” says Puric-Mladenovic. She says that many North American cities, stuck in a 1950s mentality of “develop first and plant second,” are still building concrete jungles, like the condominium forest of CityPlace in downtown Toronto, that offer nowhere near enough green space and suburban subdivisions that amount to a mass of housing wrapped around one woodlot or baseball diamond. Puric-Mladenovic calls the practice of planting tall trees in the same path as hydro poles – necessitating the regular butchery of their limbs – emblematic.

Given the huge pressure on urban land, cities have to fully integrate, even prioritize, trees in their planning blueprints. Lots of little parks don’t cut it; Puric-Mladenovic says the best way to ensure tree health is to create green swaths, like Toronto’s ravine system, in which species and water systems connect and biodiversity flourishes. Thanks largely to their less car-centric design, European cities offer a model that combines density with impressive amounts of green space.

Help them grow

Cities also need to take maintenance seriously. Trees cause serious damage when they fall or when their roots compromise building foundations, underground waterpipes or pavement. A growing number of cities are using Lidar (light detection and ranging) data, a three-dimensional system that models individual trees rather than the canopy as a whole, to ensure that trees reach maturity, which is when they perform best: throwing the most shade and trapping exponentially more pollutants than young ones.

In defence of trees, some cities are now assigning a dollar value to their contributions. In its most recent strategic forestry plan, for instance, the City of Toronto assesses the “structural value” of its forest – defined as what it would cost to replace it – at $7 billion and estimates that it provides $28.2 million annually in ecological services (pollution removal and energy savings) while representing a carbon storage benefit of $25 million. But cost-benefit assessments don’t capture the full picture.

“You can’t just take the bean-counter view,” says Hashem Akbari, an environmental engineer at Concordia University. It’s an interesting perspective, coming from someone who deals largely in numbers and efficiencies. As co-founder of the Heat Island Group, a research lab at the University of California, Akbari has spent much of his career considering which measures – from building materials to roof construction to city planning – are most effective in reducing urban heat.

He says that trees in Canadian cities may provide energy savings of around 20% through the shade they create in summer (reducing the need for air conditioning) and the windbreak they offer in winter (insulating buildings from the cold). This benefit, he says, is more significant than their carbon performance, given that urban trees in Canada – battered by road salt and dog pee – live considerably shorter than their cousins in the wild; when they die and decompose, the carbon they sequestered is released back into the atmosphere.

Nonetheless, Akbari is unequivocally pro-tree. “There are so many aspects of the tree you can’t quantify,” he says.

Psychologist Marc Berman studies some of those unquantifiable aspects in the Environmental Neuroscience Lab he runs at the University of Chicago. His research suggests that trees go a long way toward restoring a kind of neurological balance in people living in the “arbitrary” environment of the city. Experiments conducted in his lab have shown that even brief engagements with nature – like a walk in a park – boost the brain’s capacity to focus and to remember.

The findings have profound implications for city planners and leaders. In addition to carbon, energy and pollution services, the canopy’s more subtle benefits translate directly into economic ones: improved human productivity, higher property values, reductions in healthcare costs and crime rates.

“Green space must be treated as a necessity, not an amenity,” Berman says. “There has to be a revolution in how we think about these things.”

This story is part of the Sustainable Cities section in our Spring 2024 issue. 

The post There’s an urban tree revolution underway in North America appeared first on Corporate Knights.

While EV uptake has moved beyond the early adopters, concerns around public charging reliability continue to give many North Americans pause. According to J.D. Power’s latest survey, Canadians who aren’t currently considering purchasing EVs say that range anxiety (63%) and a lack of charging station availability (55%) are factors holding them back.

For everyday driving, EVs are largely charged from the comfort and convenience of the owner’s home. At-home recharging accounts for 80% of charge time for personal EVs, according to the government of Quebec. It’s around the remaining 20% that Canadians get nervous. That includes drivers who are unable to install EV chargers at home, such as those who live in condos or apartments or who rely on street parking, plus trips that exceed the distance covered by a vehicle’s full range (like, say, a drive from Toronto to Montreal). For these scenarios, EV charging relies on public infrastructure.

We analyzed existing public charging infrastructure in eight Canadian cities to see how closely these concerns are met with reality.

The state of EV chargers in Canada

Reliable information on charging stations is still hard to come by.

We started our search with publicly available data from Natural Resources Canada’s Electric Charging and Alternative Fuelling Stations Locator. However, we quickly found discrepancies between NRCan’s data and that published by resources such as PlugShare, Google Maps and individual charging networks. In instances where NRCan’s data is incomplete or unclear, we supplemented it as much as possible using data from these other sources. The average EV driver cannot do this depth of research when seeking charging stations on the road, which is bound to result in frustrating and negative experiences. Early adopters have persisted through this issue for years, but better solutions are needed as electric driving goes mainstream.

Infrastructure needs are about to change rapidly.

The lines between Tesla’s charging protocol – now referred to as the North American Charging Standard (NACS) – and other port types are blurring. While owners of Teslas and other EVs were formerly limited to their native port types, adapters are now available that allow drivers to use more charging stations. Plus, many auto brands have announced their intent to switch from the “combined charging system” (CCS) – currently the non-Tesla fast-charging standard – to NACS beginning in 2025, including Volkswagen, Hyundai, General Motors, Subaru, Honda, Jaguar Land Rover, Volvo/Polestar, Rivian and others. Staying ahead of this incoming shift in demand while continuing to meet the needs of owners buying today could be a delicate process to navigate.

About this data

Chargers: Counted within each city and any contiguous suburbs as noted. Data to calculate EV chargers per 100,000 people is based on 2021 census data from Statistics Canada for the same geographic areas. Note that the number of ports is higher than the number of chargers; many direct current (DC) fast-charging stations have multiple port types available, but only one can be used per station at a time.

Charger use type was separated into three categories:

Tourist: Likely to be used by visitors or drivers transiting through the city. Includes fast chargers at gas stations, rest stops or retail areas near highways, as well as hotels and key tourist destinations.

Local: Best located for use by residents. Includes multi-unit dwellings, office buildings, shopping centres away from major highways, libraries or municipal buildings, schools, hospitals, airports, community centres and transit stations.

Business: Includes fleet garages, industrial areas and car dealerships. Stations tend to have restricted hours and prioritize owner use over the general public.

Stephanie Wallcraft is an automotive journalist based in Toronto and a past president of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada.

This story is part of the Sustainable Cities section in our Spring 2024 issue. 

The post EV Faceoff: Which large Canadian city has the most chargers? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As car ownership took off in the 1950s, urban planners and engineers designed streets and roads around automobile travel, allowing suburbs and sprawl to proliferate along highways. 

Many parts of Europe avoided this car-centric approach. The Netherlands, which was quite car-friendly in the 1960s, rethought its roads after more than 400 children died in car accidents in 1971 and widespread protests called on the government to “Stop de Kindermoord” – or stop the child murder. During the 1973 oil crisis, Denmark figured it was better to use transportation methods that reduced its reliance on oil-producing nations. Ever since, both countries’ cities have led the world in their cycling infrastructure.

A growing number of congested cities in North America are now trying to rethink their streets in similar ways to make them safer and more climate-friendly, but they’re having to undo decades of entrenched engineering practices and standards that favoured cars. Some blame John Forester, a Californian cycling advocate, for those engineering standards. In the 1970s, Forester fought against rules that were introduced in the town of Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, that forced him to ride in protected bike lanes and on the sidewalk, banning him from sharing roads with cars. He became highly influential, mobilizing cyclists against separate bike lanes and publishing an engineering guide that argued that roads should be shared by drivers and cyclists.

“There’s no question that the John Forester effect on engineering standards has been huge. And those engineering standards are still in the process of being revised,” says Kay Teschke, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who has done groundbreaking research on helmets and bike infrastructure. 

For decades after Forester’s efforts, much of the research around bike safety focused on helmet wearing and showed that, yes, if you’re in an accident while cycling, a helmet will lower your risk of head injury. But the sole focus on helmets neglected something studies later revealed: that proper bike infrastructure prevented cyclists from getting into those accidents in the first place. And research has also shown that a lack of separated bike lanes was the largest obstacle to people feeling safe cycling. 

“It’s a bit of a vicious circle,” Teschke says. “When you don’t have infrastructure, people don’t bike; they drive. And then the demand falls off for biking infrastructure. Kids don’t bike to school any more. Parents don’t bike. The whole thing compounds.”

Across the U.S. and Canada, the landscape for urban cycling is rapidly evolving. In some cities, like Montreal, things have shifted into high gear as holistic cycling networks with separate bike lanes are being built. In Washington, D.C., like a lot of North American cities, a combination of bureaucratic inertia and political pushback have kept cyclists in harm’s way. 

Like the legislative and vehicular congestion it’s known for, the progress of D.C.’s bike infrastructure has been slow when compared to international cities. So much so that of the G7 capitals in advocacy group PeopleForBikes’s 2023 rankings of the best cities for biking, Washington, D.C., ranked dead last. It came in 261st place overall in the ranking of more than 1,700 cities thanks to its dangerously disjointed bike lanes. Last year, 33 D.C. cyclists suffered major injuries in collisions, and three died. Cycling advocates admit that bike infrastructure has progressed a lot in the city over the last two decades, but its fragmented network of lanes is leaving cyclists exposed.

“By American city standards, D.C. is doing very well. By global standards . . . we have a long way to go,” says Colin Browne, director of communications for the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, an advocacy group that pushes for better cycling infrastructure. “There are a lot of places that you still can’t get to in a way that feels safe on a bike.”

D.C. has built approximately 167 kilometres of bike lanes, including just 39 kilometres of separated lanes. When the district looked to build a 2.5-kilometre separated bike lane on 9th Street, the project saw years of delays after a loud contingent of residents and business owners voiced concerns about losing parking spaces and the effects of bike lanes on their bottom lines. And cycling advocates are worried that a proposed project on Connecticut Avenue – a major thoroughfare that runs from suburban Maryland to downtown Washington, D.C. – will suffer the same delays.

“When they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they mean it,” says Elizabeth Kiker, executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association. 

To counteract these forces, cycling advocates are organizing one-on-one conversations with business owners to explain the environmental, health and economic benefits of bike lanes. Getting support from within the business community is always a big step up, Browne says. And it’s hard to argue with the research: studies show that building bike lanes improves business in retail and restaurants and that taking one trip a day by bike rather than by car can lower your individual transportation-related carbon footprint by 67%.

When they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they mean it.

 

– Elizabeth Kiker, executive director, Washington Area Bicyclist Association

Advocates say policies that mandate separate bike lanes can help cut some of those arguments off at the pass. “It shouldn’t really be a debate at the start of every bike project – whether we’re going to [build bike infrastructure],” says Rebecca Davies, the city ratings program director for PeopleForBikes, which has released a legislative guide for lawmakers. “It should be about how we can [build bike infrastructure] in a way that best meets all of the needs of the community.” 

Mayor Muriel Bowser has helped spearhead a lot of the new cycling infrastructure in D.C., but advocates say her office has let bike-lane opponents stall important projects, such as the 9th Street one. 

Electing strong, consistent leaders who won’t let these kinds of arguments slow down bike infrastructure can be a huge part of the battle, say advocates, who point to cities like Montreal and Paris, where Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s government shut down a major road running along the River Seine to car traffic. 

“Without the political leadership, it’s hard to move quickly on anything,” Davies says. 

Lessons from Montreal

D.C.’s bike network stands in stark contrast to that of a city that has been an outlier in North America: Montreal. Quebec’s largest city boasts a network of more than 900 kilometres of bike lanes (717 kilometres of which are cleared of snow during the winter months and 218 kilometres of which are separated from car traffic) – and it’s building more. 

The city, which placed 57th in the PeopleForBikes ranking (and was the top-ranked large Canadian city), has had a bit of an active transportation renaissance in recent years under the leadership of Mayor Valérie Plante, whose Vision Vélo initiative plans to expand the bike network with an additional 200 kilometres of separated cycling lanes by 2027 and a network of high-capacity lanes called the Réseau Express Vélo.

Montreal built its first bike paths in the late 1970s, connecting a few parks. Cyclists later started pushing for paths that would take them to other places they needed to go. In the early 2000s, the city built westbound bike lanes on De Maisonneuve Boulevard in downtown Montreal. Simply having those paths made residents see what was possible, and from there, they wanted more. “You can see a progression in the bike infrastructure in Montreal that shows what can be done,” says Stéphane Blais, the director of research and consulting at Vélo Québec, an advocacy organization. 

It’s taken a while since its first bike paths for Montreal to build out its infrastructure, but things have been accelerating in recent years. And electing a staunchly pro-bike mayor has gone a long way in getting good bike infrastructure built. Advocates say that the city, under Plante’s leadership, refocused its efforts on bike infrastructure that is separate, rather than simply painting “sharrows” on the roads. The city is looking to expand popular bike lanes that opened on Saint Denis Street in 2020. 

You can see a progression in the bike infrastructure in Montreal that shows what can be done. 

 

– Stéphane Blais, Vélo Québec

Beyond electing the right leadership, bike advocates in Montreal say it’s important to have meaningful consultations on bike plans to figure out exactly what communities want. “So every time people are arguing that we’re taking away space for not the right reason or that we should put it on another street, we go back to these consultation nights and say we heard what people had to say, and this is what they wanted,” Blais says. 

It’s also vital to have officials go door-to-door to explain the new infrastructure that’s coming. But the point is not to restart the whole debate on whether the infrastructure is necessary. “You are not consulting people [at that stage] on whether we need a bike lane or not,” Blais says. “You’re consulting people on small issues that maybe the designer didn’t see.”

And rather than making the debate about bikes versus cars, Blais maintains that we should be talking about the fact that these kinds of projects simply provide more choice for how people can get around a city. 

Blais says that within three to six months of a bike lane being built, the anger tends to dissipate and people tend to see the benefits and forget what it was like before. 

Blais and many other Montreal residents now bike with their children down streets that they would never have imagined biking down just a few years ago. With any luck, that will also be the case for a growing number of Washington, D.C., residents and cities across North America as the bike infrastructure grows. 

“We’re really fortunate to live in this period of time when a lot of change is coming,” Blais says.

This story is part of the Sustainable Cities package in our Spring 2024 issue. 

The post Lessons on how (and how not) to build a bike-friendly city appeared first on Corporate Knights.

For all that, Montreal struggles to meet its ambitious carbon reduction targets, says Blaise Rémillard, manager of planning and mobility at Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal (CRE Montréal), an environmental watchdog group. “We have a lot of good plans and a lot of good targets,” he says. But Montreal’s carbon has climbed since the pandemic, and the prospect for hitting the 2030 mark – 55% below 1990 levels – seems poor. “We don’t really know how we can do a reduction of about one-third of emissions within the next five years.”

The City of Toronto also has an expansive net-zero plan, dubbed TransformTO, as well as one of North America’s few municipal policies (the Toronto Green Standard) designed to push builders to drive energy efficiency beyond the low bar in the Ontario Building Code. But it suffers from the same dilemma. TransformTO, says Sarah Buchanan, campaigns director at the Toronto Environmental Alliance, “still doesn’t have the energy, funding and oomph behind it to make it do what council committed to.” Case in point: city council finally approved, but has not yet allocated funding for, a waterfront LRT meant to provide transit access to existing and planned high-density developments on Toronto’s de-industrialized port lands.

A few other cities have fared better when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are. Halifax Regional Municipality last year imposed a climate change tax as a pillar of its broader sustainability strategy, dubbed HalifACT. “At the time, it was the only one of its kind across Canada, and that had some really contentious public support,” says Kortney Dunsby, sustainable cities co-ordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax. The funding has gone toward investments such as building retrofits.

However, recent population growth and housing price spikes in the Halifax region appear to be driving sprawl as developers snap up cheap land along the region’s edges, with little resistance from the municipality and little in the way of transit investment to service those emerging communities. “Greenfield development [i.e., building projects on completely undeveloped land, such as farmers’ fields] is becoming a conversation, which is sometimes at odds with our climate plan,” observes Ahsan Habib, a professor at Dalhousie University and director of the Dalhousie Transportation Collaboratory.

The problem with city climate plans

As Canada has become more urbanized, greenhouse gas emissions from Canadian urban communities have declined by 17% from 1990 levels. Meanwhile, emissions from the rural economy – heavy industry, mining, oil and gas, agriculture and intercity transport – have increased by 30% over the same period. Since 2005, moreover, urban emissions have fallen by more than a quarter, while rural emissions from those same sectors have remained stable. Both statistics show that cities are driving Canada’s progress toward its 2030 targets.

Still, there’s a chasm between what municipal climate plans call for and what they actually deliver, and that fact of urban life is not new. Sustainability consultant Jeb Brugmann, the founder of Resilient Cities Catalyst, describes it as “the implementation gap,” adding that this type of shortcoming stems from the fact that municipal climate strategies originally took hold among planners. “Part of the planning conceit,” he says, “is that if you do planning, somehow it triggers implementation.” In his experience, climate plans falter because city officials don’t follow through by then doing the hard work of hacking through the Gordian knot of regulatory and cultural obstacles to change.

Others point out that these strategies may do little more than reinforce actions cities were already taking. A decade ago, then–McGill University geographer Adam Millard-Ball did a deep dive into the climate plans and policies for 600 U.S. cities and concluded that in most cases, they simply reflected the prevailing political preferences of individual cities, and spelled out actions that would have likely happened with or without an overarching strategy. 

“Cities with climate plans have had far greater success in implementing strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than their counterparts without such plans,” he wrote in the Journal of Urban Economics. “They have more green buildings, spend more on pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and have implemented more programs to divert waste from methane-generating landfills. I find little evidence, however, that climate plans play any causal role in this success.” 

Part of the explanation for the buyer’s regret with climate plans can be found in the tangle of overlapping jurisdictions that touch the climate file and make it exceedingly difficult for cities to drive ahead with solutions. In Montreal, mobility-related emissions have remained stubbornly high because the province continues to pour money into highways. While EV adoption is impressive thanks to subsidies and the deployment of charging infrastructure (see p. 38), EV owners will drive instead of taking transit, which remains a far more climate-friendly solution. 

As for energy, Montrealers rely in part on cheap natural gas because Hydro-Québec has long exported the province’s surplus hydro power and relied instead on “peaker plants.” (Even though 94% of the province’s electricity capacity is hydroelectric, fossil fuels account for more than half of all the energy consumed in Quebec.) Rémillard describes Quebeckers’ view of natural gas as “complacent.” In Toronto, the city incentivizes builders to disconnect from natural gas, but the provincial government has continued to expand Enbridge’s gas distribution network. 

[TransformTO] still doesn’t have the energy, funding and oomph behind it to make it do what council committed to.

 

– Sarah Buchanan, Toronto Environmental Alliance

What’s more, the story of hobbled city-driven climate mitigation or adaption plans is also a function of regulatory inertia. In most jurisdictions, for example, building codes – that is, minimum standards for fire and structural safety, energy efficiency, et cetera – are set at the provincial or state level, which means municipalities are limited in how effectively they can push developers, using their own permitting systems, to reduce building-related carbon.

Of course, emissions don’t care about administrative borders. Yet administrative borders determine municipal climate action plans, such as transit investment. The result is that suburban areas, which tend to be car-dependent because of sprawl-oriented planning policies made decades ago, may care much less about spending on transit, not necessarily because their mayors and councils are climate dinosaurs, but because transit infrastructure in low-density areas is incredibly expensive.

The analysis becomes even trickier depending on what type of urban carbon we’re choosing to measure. According to a 2020 peer-reviewed study published in the journal Sustainability, city climate strategies typically focus on the production of carbon, via tailpipe emissions, energy generation and so on. But if you widen the focus to include consumption-related carbon – for instance, carbon generated by the manufacture and distribution of consumer goods purchased in the city, everything from food to consumer electronics, and including the supply chains that lead to urban markets – the total is considerably higher. Paradoxically, cities with ambitious climate plans may also be wealthier, which means more consumption and thus more carbon.

All of these cross-currents butt up against one of the more dominant strains of climate politics, which is that global cities and their mayors have established themselves at the vanguard of carbon reduction, often in response to the lack of effective policy from national governments. Organizations like the C40, an international network of sustainability-minded cities, work hard to promote ambitious strategies, pilot projects and technologies that have moved the needle in various metropolitan areas. 

Tough questions hover around the achievability of these urban sustainability goals that depend primarily on government investments but lack proper enforcement mechanisms and penalties. Some cities are beginning to think in those terms. At the Toronto Environmental Alliance, Buchanan points out that the City of Toronto is looking at a proposal to compel the owners of larger commercial structures to disclose their carbon consumption – a figure that, theoretically, might cause tenants to think twice about energy-inefficient buildings and the unnecessarily high energy costs they may incur in their lease arrangements. Eventually, she adds, landlords may face fines or fees for failing to upgrade their buildings, but city council hasn’t signed off yet on such a move.

There’s evidence from elsewhere that tougher policies do work. In New York City, for example, Local Law 97, which was enacted in 2019 and comes into effect this year, sets emissions caps on buildings of a certain size, with non-compliant landlords facing hefty fines. The regulation applies to 50,000 properties that exceed 25,000 square feet in total area. City officials say the vast majority of landlords have already moved to comply with the 2024 target reduction, but they’ll have to push even further to satisfy the 2030 benchmark (40% reductions).

The other conundrum is whether overly broad city climate plans become bureaucratically unmanageable because of their breadth of ambition – the “too much body/not enough blanket” problem. Asked to identify the most impactful municipal climate policy, the Ecology Action Centre’s Dunsby replies, “In planning, we call these wicked planning problems.” Halifax’s housing crisis isn’t unique to this city, she adds, “but I do think that focusing housing development in already serviced areas and focusing on trying to build out truly complete communities – mixed-use, walkable, transit-oriented development – would truly help to reduce our community-scale emissions.”

A large body of evidence confirms that land-use planning and development that drives density is, in fact, among the most effective ways to cut urban emissions. In a paper published this spring in the journal Cities, an American-Mexican team of geographers scrutinized land-use regulation in 431 urban areas in 40 countries. “Our findings confirm that dense, compact urban areas, with built-up downtowns and shorter roadway segments, have lower per capita carbon emissions,” they concluded, adding that restrictions on intensification, such as the protection of low-rise neighbourhoods, fuels sprawl and all the carbon that sprawl brings.

But both Buchanan and Dunsby caution against the notion that there’s a silver bullet when it comes to decarbonizing cities. “The investment in accelerating housing development and density has to come at the same time as investing in really high-functioning, efficient and reliable transit systems,” Dunsby says.

[Burnaby’s Metrotown is] a very unique hub. That ain’t no 15-minute city. That’s a five-minute city.

 

– Jeb Brugmann, founder, Resilient Cities Catalyst

Indeed, Ahsan Habib and many other climate-conscious planners argue that cities need to make decisions on how they grow and develop in lockstep with investments in green transportation infrastructure. “Whenever we are growing certain parts of the city, do we have a plan in place to move those people [and] achieve certain target modal splits [i.e., the proportion of people who travel by transit, bike or foot as opposed to cars]? If we do that, there is no chicken-and-egg problem.”

Brugmann points out that in some cities, strong political leaders have broken down silos that too often stand in the way of urban climate action. He cites the case of Curitiba, Brazil, where a long-serving mayor with no patience for official plans used his power to build an extensive bus rapid-transit network, a formula now in use in many large Latin American cities. 

He also cites examples closer to home, such as Metro Vancouver, where far-sighted planning and investment led, over three decades, to high-density development in the West End and impressive intensification around the expanding SkyTrain network. Brugmann lived for several months in Metrotown – a dense, transit-oriented community in Burnaby that’s grown up over the past two decades or so and seems to be delivering on the vision of a compact, pedestrian-friendly community connected to the region by transit. “It’s a very unique hub,” he says. “I’m telling you, that ain’t no 15-minute city. That’s a five-minute city.”

For our spring issue, Corporate Knights looks at a handful of urban indicators – greenhouse gases per capita, tree canopy and EV charging infrastructure – in eight large cities across Canada. Check back here for more city  features from our Spring 2024 issue. 

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

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While demand for beef, chicken and pork are on the rise on the continent, Africans consumed just 9.6 kilograms of meat per capita from 2020 to 2022 compared to North Americans’ 78.6 kilos. Grains like millet and maize form the backbone of African cuisine, but they merely hint at the continent’s diverse culinary landscape. Take Nigeria, where okra, fufu (made from yam or cassava) and vibrant leafy greens like ewedu and spinach grace daily meals. In Ethiopia, teff injera, a gluten-free flatbread, pairs with lentil-based stews (wats) bursting with vegetables, while Kenyan ugali (cornmeal porridge) is served with sukuma wiki greens and indigenous fruits like tamarind and baobab. These food cultures, intricately connected with geography, climate and tradition, showcase the ingenuity and adaptability of African communities.

Deep cultural and spiritual threads are woven into the fabric of plant-based diets in many African nations. Abstaining from certain foods serves as ritual cleansing, ancestor veneration or a way to strengthen community bonds. It underscores the profound connection between food, faith and cultural identity in many African communities. Understanding these nuances is crucial as Africa’s food systems evolve. 

Parallel to this, in the United States, African American women have emerged as leading voices in the vegan movement, illustrating a profound and transformative cultural shift. A 2015 Harris Poll survey found that 8% of Black respondents were vegetarian or vegan, while that was true for just 3% of the overall population. This movement is not merely a dietary trend but a significant cultural renaissance, echoing a broader historical narrative in which African American dietary customs, shaped under the harsh conditions of slavery, resulted in soul food that originally comprised scraps from the slave owners’ tables, fried to make them more palatable. 

Today African American women are also leading a wave of plant-based start-ups and restaurants, such as Samantha Edwards’s New Breed Meats, with offerings like plant-based jerk chicken. More than just a dietary trend, Afro-veganism and African American veganism are vibrant movements that celebrate a plant-based diet’s cultural depth, ecological wisdom and culinary creativity. These movements are not just about choosing plant-based foods but about reclaiming and redefining African American food traditions.

Moreover, these dietary shifts are intertwined with broader discussions about food sovereignty, access to healthy foods in Black neighbourhoods and the environmental impact of food choices. Afro-veganism and African American veganism advocate for a more equitable food system that honours the planet and its people.

The challenges of expanding the plant-based economy in Africa – ranging from fragile infrastructure and food spoilage to deep-seated cultural preferences for animal protein – have spurred innovative solutions from local entrepreneurs. Among these, VeggieVictory stands out as a pioneering force. As Nigeria’s first vegan restaurant and plant-based food tech business, VeggieVictory is influencing the societal narrative around meat consumption, showcasing that plant-based foods can fulfill both nutritional and cultural needs.

With that in mind, the founder of VeggieVictory, Hakeem Jimo, helped spearhead ProVeg International’s expansion into Nigeria last year. As the director of ProVeg Nigeria, Jimo said he’s hoping to “transform the food system to help people transition to healthier, more climate-friendly diets.”

Nigeria isn’t the only African nation experiencing a shift. South Africa also has a ProVeg office, and The Plant Powered Show in Cape Town has quickly become one of the most successful food and lifestyle events on the South African exhibition calendar. All further evidencing the growing appetite for plant-based consumer choices. 

The people who will benefit most from this transition are those in the Global South for whom land pressures from animal agriculture have forced them to leave their land.

 

– Hakeem Jimo, director of ProVeg Nigeria

As the continent evolves, so will its plant-based story, offering unique contributions to the global conversation on food, sustainability and cultural identity. With this evolution comes a web of opportunities and challenges. Increased global demand for plant-based products could empower local farmers, create new jobs and generate economic prosperity. Yet navigating this shift equitably is paramount. 

Currently, land distribution is often skewed toward smallholder farms, which are vital for rural livelihoods and national food security. Research from the non-profit Grain and the International Land Coalition highlights how large-scale land acquisitions by corporate entities are increasingly prevalent, particularly in regions primed to expand plant-based crop production. These acquisitions often prioritize export markets and can undermine the economic and social fabric of rural communities. To counteract these potential disparities, policies and frameworks that prioritize equitable land distribution, support for smallholder farmers and sustainable agricultural practices are crucial. 

“The people who will benefit most from this transition are those in the Global South for whom land pressures from animal agriculture have forced them to leave their land,” ProVeg Nigeria’s Jimo said in a statement. The group is pushing for a national strategy that implements “a better food system by encouraging food innovation, particularly in the plant-based egg, milk and protein spaces.”

“It’s all about the numbers,” Jimo said. “Nigeria is set to become the world’s third most populous country in the next couple of decades. But time is not on our side. To truly address climate change and health epidemics, we need to shift our diets today.

Shilpa Tiwari is CEO of No Women No Spice, an organic spice company, and Isenzo Group, a sustainability strategy firm. 

Check back here as we roll out our Plant Power package this week, along with the release of the 2024 Spring issue of Corporate Knights.

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Soon after, he bought his first farm, in northern Arizona, and started growing his own food.

Like most land in the American West, this 37-acre property had been extensively over-grazed by cattle. It was the late 1990s, and Videle relied on agricultural industry magazines and farming norms of the day to fertilize his farmland. He used liquid Miracle-Gro and dried manure paddies to get some summer squash going and built his first chicken coop.

By 2005, he had adopted certified organic protocols, which lean heavily on the use of manure as fertilizer instead of synthetic nitrogen, but a question lingered in his mind: was it possible to grow fruits, vegetables and herbs productively without animal inputs like manure?

The true regenerative agriculture

We’ve turned our planet into an animal farm. Globally, 3.8 billion hectares – more than a third of all habitable land – is used for farming animals. The latest 2021 research in Nature Food estimates that animal agriculture is responsible for more than 19% of direct greenhouse gas emissions. If we include the lost-land opportunity to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into rewilded pastureland, that estimate jumps to 28% according to the largest meta-analysis on food and the environment, published in Science in 2018. And this doesn’t factor in wider environmental implications like the billions of tons of manure produced each year.

In just five days, America’s 10 billion farm animals produce enough manure to cover the entire U.S., exceeding what farmland can safely absorb. A noxious mix of natural and synthetic fertilizers washing off farmers’ fields and down the Mississippi River has resulted in dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico that stretch more than 20,000 square kilometres.

Given this dire situation, how do we change farming? Agriculture norms are protected over generations by a cultural shield, seemingly untouchable politically. Organic agriculture has become synonymous with spreading manure. But we can learn from those who have changed their minds despite the pressure to conform to common practices.

Transformational changes in farming don’t come easy. They certainly didn’t at first for Videle. But after several years of working on tropical farms throughout Hawaii and Latin America, Videle discovered the ease in exclusively plant-based composting and farming. Just like in a healthy native forest where the only manure deposited is by wild animals that pass through, he learned that the vast majority of organic matter should come from the plants in agricultural systems.

In 2014, after settling down in Boileau, Quebec, Videle and his wife, Mélanie Bernier, established La Ferme de l’Aube, a vegan organic farm on a six-acre parcel of land featuring mixed forest and open spaces for cultivation. They now cultivate more than 400 varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, flowers, shrubs and trees, yielding 5,000 pounds of food from less than half an acre, leaving the rest of the acreage for nature.

“Nobody wants to believe that it works, but by taking out manure and putting in plants, you’re gaining nutrients,” Videle says.

The rise of veganic farming

While the term is new, veganic – or vegan organic – agriculture practices date back millennia and have their roots in Indigenous methods. The “three sisters” method of growing squash, beans and corn together was practised by the Iroquois, Cherokee and other Indigenous Peoples throughout Turtle Island (North America) and Mesoamerica and often involved a minimal amount of animal inputs. Veganic methods naturally fertilize the soil by using soil-feeding crops, cover crops and compost without animal products or byproducts. One can also find similar ecological motivations in “stock-free” (livestock-free) organic and conservation agriculture movements.

While there are tremendous benefits in simply shifting away from farming animals to growing plants for human consumption – and efforts are underway to support this “transfarmation” – a shift to veganic farming is seen as the pinnacle of regenerative agriculture by proponents.

A seven-year research study we did at La Ferme de l’Aube showed an increase of soil organic matter of 38.46% while increasing yields and biodiversity on and near the farm.

Dominating discussions around regenerative agriculture, including Big Ag–funded projects, has been the grazing component – using “regenerative grazing” to rotationally graze cattle on pastures, allowing fallow areas to recover to help rebuild soil health. Yet replacing intensive feedlot beef production in the U.S. entirely with grass-fed cattle isn’t feasible, and U.S. pastures could support only about 27% of the nation’s beef production. Regenerative ranching would use two and a half times more land than the niche movement of grass-fed beef.

A more sustainable approach would involve moving away from manure and scaling up veganic compost, which could include municipal and commercial fruit and vegetable scraps, yard and field waste, or chipped wood.

Synthetic fertilizers or manure: The false dichotomy

Organic farming, dominated by manure application rather than synthetic fertilizers, faces challenges with lower crop yields, leading to the need for more land and resources to match conventional farming’s output, according to a 2011 meta-analysis. This synthetic fertilizer or manure comparison is agnostic to the animal-versus-plant-based debate, which largely ignores that it’s more important to look first at what we eat versus how it’s grown. One can also argue that yields should be measured over longer periods of time, taking into account land degradation.

The Green Revolution that started in the 1960s brought in waves of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and higher yields across the world, lifting billions out of food insecurity. Some describe this as a positive step, while others have documented negative tradeoffs, including mass runoff creating land and ocean dead zones affecting all forms of life, along with other adverse effects on the environment and public health.

What would have happened if, instead of growing more than a third of all crops to feed farmed animals, we had built an agricultural system focused on feeding diverse and healthy plant foods directly to humans? We could potentially feed 3.5 billion more people, according to one 2013 study published in Environmental Research Letters.

Preliminary research from Videle’s farm has found that veganic can be 2.3% more productive than conventional synthetic-fertilizer-based farms and 41% more productive than organic-manure agriculture. Sweet potatoes and tomatoes grown in rich humus soil had yields 21% to 45% higher than those grown with inorganic fertilizer.

Beyond Videle’s small farm, there is a growing network of veganic food producers.

Nobody wants to believe that it works, but by taking out manure and putting in plants, you’re gaining nutrients.

Jimmy Videle, veganic farmer

Iain Cleator, a recently retired University of British Columbia medical school professor, now has a 2,650-acre farm in Wynyard, Saskatchewan, emphasizing ancient grains such as Red Fife and spelt, crop rotation and biodiversity to enrich soil naturally without synthetic fertilizers or manure.

On several stock-free organic farms in Eastern Europe, Strassner Family Farms grows cereals, corn, soya, pumpkin seeds and beans and has become a critical supplier in the area.
If this style of farming is easier, helps the ecosystem thrive, yields an immense amount of food per acre, and provides a great farming lifestyle, why aren’t more doing it this way? “There’s an awareness issue, there’s pervasive beliefs and ideals, but the bottom line is there’s the undeniable pressure from animal agriculture that makes agricultural universities, schools and organic programs promote that manure and animal products need to be used,” Videle says.

While the transition would be complex, veganic agriculture is the pillar of regenerative agriculture since it can increase soil organic matter, increase production per hectare over any animal-based system, and free up land to address the extinction crisis.

Videle now spends a significant amount of time helping other farmers throughout North America become certified veganic (there are currently a dozen certified veganic farms in North America). In 2023, he published a veganic farming handbook with practical and accessible steps to farm this way.

Careful consideration of potential reduced food yields needs to be taken with any sweeping change to global farming practices, as was evident in the decision to abruptly ban agrochemicals in Sri Lanka, resulting in food insecurity and increased reliance on expensive food imports. What is clear is that the organic versus conventional debate misses the mark. Instead we should be focusing on what we produce – more plants for human consumption – and shifting to more stock-free veganic methods if we want a win-win for the planet.

Our society as we know it faces an existential crisis. By incentivizing transformative changes, such as those undertaken by Videle, we can foster a profound regeneration of nature, benefiting wildlife and enhancing our collective well-being.

Nicholas Carter is an independent ecologist with Plant Based Data and is the director of environmental science at the Game Changers Institute.

Check back here as we roll out our Plant Power package this week, along with the release of the 2024 Spring issue of Corporate Knights.

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