Paint it white

Dark roads, rooftops and sidewalks absorb the sun’s energy, contributing to a heat-island effect in cities. Los Angeles has painted streets white to reflect the sun, cooling them by 10 to 15°F. New York City has painted millions of square feet of roofs white to do the same, while Phoenix has painted more than 189 kilometres of streets grey. 

Cool islands

Paris, which is set to host this year’s Summer Olympic Games, has created 800 “cool islands,” which are essentially water fountains or public buildings where visitors or residents can get some respite from the heat. 

Warning sign

The Indian city of Ahmedabad has implemented a system that gives residents a seven-day warning when a heat wave is coming and triggers a coordinated emergency heat response by the local government. Heat-related deaths in the city have fallen by 20% to 30% as a result. 

Policy of shade

Seville, Spain, the land of the afternoon siesta where it often hits 40°C during the hottest part of the day in summer, has installed large awnings everywhere in what the city’s mayor calls its “policy of shade.” 

Cool(er) buildings

In Abu Dhabi, some engineers and architects have designed buildings to deflect heat that often reaches above 40°C. The Al Bahar Towers are two 29-storey buildings with a network of automated folding window screens that open and shut depending on where the sun is in the sky, lowering solar gain by more than 50% and reducing the need for air conditioning. 

Plant trees

Increasing tree cover up to 30% could prevent a third of deaths from high temperatures in cities. Sydney, Australia, is planning to plant five million trees in the area by 2030 to offer shade. Montreal wants to plant 500,000 trees by 2030, and Washington, D.C., has an ambitious goal to boost its tree cover to 40% by 2032. 

Illustrations by Alysha Dawn

The post Knight Bites: Six ways cities are trying to keep their cool in record-breaking heat waves appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Since then, insurers have led the way in calling out the risks of flooding, wildfires and other symptoms of a broken world. So you might expect that global insurers, experts in managing risks, would be out front in protecting people and property from climate-related disasters and shunning the industries that poison our planet.

Turns out many insurers are still helping fossil fuel companies boost production by underwriting new projects and investing in oil and gas. At the same time, some are hiking premiums or backing away from coverage of high-risk properties. Canadian home insurance premiums are expected to rise more than 7% in 2024, according to MyChoice.ca, and the average cost of home insurance in Florida is expected to reach almost US$12,000 this year. In France, up to 2,000 towns were recently left uninsured as insurance companies terminated contracts in response to rising storm damage costs.

“Insurance companies prefer to pass on the costs of the climate crisis to communities and individuals, rather than make those responsible (fossil fuel companies) pay,” wrote London-based Insure Our Future (IOF). This spring, the organization called on Axa to stop insuring export terminals for LNG (liquefied natural gas). For the last seven years, IOF has ranked the top 10 insurance firms supporting fossil fuel development.

“If insurance companies took climate science seriously, they would fully align their underwriting and investment strategies with a credible 1.5°C pathway,” said Peter Bosshard, the outgoing head of IOF. “They would be suing fossil fuel companies, to make polluters pay for the growing costs of climate disasters and keep insurance affordable for climate-affected communities.”

If insurance companies took climate science seriously, they would fully align their underwriting and investment strategies with a credible 1.5°C pathway.

–Peter Bosshard, Insure our Future

Sixth on the list of the world’s biggest fossil fuel underwriters is Canadian insurer Fairfax Financial, estimated to have earned US$600 million from oil and gas companies in 2022. Founded by Toronto billionaire Prem Watsa, Fairfax acknowledges climate change as an ongoing business risk – but its 2023 annual report notes that property reinsurers “enjoyed another year of meaningful rate increases.”

Fairfax’s business-as-usual attitude is underscored by the fact that it increased its ownership of Dallas-based oil firm Exco Resources to 49%, up from 44% a year ago. Fairfax’s 2023 report boasts that Exco “did plenty of drilling” in 2023 – boosting its oil reserves by more than twice as much as it extracted through production.

No one expects the insurance industry to solve climate change on its own. But it can start by not making things worse.

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The applicants – KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection, average age 73 – claimed that their government “failed to fulfil its positive obligations to protect life effectively” through appropriate legislation and targets to combat climate change. The court agreed, accepting the women’s contention that older women suffer disproportionately from intensifying heat waves.

Heat-related deaths have spiked by roughly 30% in Europe over the last two decades. A 2023 study published in Nature Medicine estimated 56% more heat-related deaths in European women than men. The judging panel declared 16 to 1 that Article 2 of Europe’s human rights convention guarantees citizens “effective protection by state authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on their lives, health, well-being and quality of life.”

What we do now, we are not doing for ourselves, but for the sake of our children and our children’s children.

– Elisabeth Stern, KlimaSeniorinnen member

The Swiss women’s group, formed in 2016 with the support of Greenpeace, faced an uphill battle. After their case was dismissed by the Swiss Supreme Court in 2020, they turned to the European Court of Human Rights. “We know statistically that in 10 years we will be gone,” KlimaSeniorinnen member Elisabeth Stern told BBC. “What we do now, we are not doing for ourselves, but for the sake of our children and our children’s children.”

Scientists say Switzerland is heating up at twice the global rate. Heat domes last fall set new temperature records. Of course, it’s not just Switzerland. The 2023 Lancet Countdown report on health and climate change estimated that global heat deaths could quadruple by mid-century if the world warms by 2°C. 

Given the court’s ruling, Switzerland will need to review and upgrade its climate policies. While the decision is not technically binding beyond Switzerland, it sets legal precedent for future climate legislation in all 46 countries that have signed the European Convention on Human Rights.

Andrew Gage, an environmental lawyer with Vancouver-based West Coast Environmental Law, believes the KlimaSeniorinnen decision will influence the outcome of cases beyond Europe – including in Canada, where the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects individuals’ rights to life and security. “While not binding,” he says, the decision sets “a very strong precedent.”

The post How a group of Swiss seniors won a landmark climate case in international court appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“The majority of them sent me emails to say, ‘Can I pay you maybe 50 bucks this week and 50 bucks that week because I can’t afford it, but there’s no other place I can learn these skills,’” Sundance says. She started feeling uncomfortable about charging for the program. “A lot of these people grew up in the same lifestyles as me where you didn’t have a lot of money laying around,” she says. Sundance, 27, didn’t come from a farming background but experienced food insecurity firsthand growing up in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. She fell into the agriculture industry after doing some farm work on her travels through Cuba, where she learned about the concept of food justice. Still, finding an entry point into the industry proved difficult initially as many available training or educational programs were either unpaid internships or expensive farm schools. 

Now Sundance Commons, the non-profit arm of her for-profit Sundance Harvest farm, has a new-farmer training program to teach young people, at no charge, practical skills about farming and how to start their own farms.

Sundance and her partner Jon Gagnon founded the non-profit in 2019 and originally called it Growing in the Margins. They have offered free support for new farmers in the past through their incubation program and workshops while also providing tools and resources. However, the new-farmer training is the first comprehensive educational program at Sundance Commons, providing participants a wide array of tactile skills and knowledge over 15 weeks. 

Thanks to new grants that Sundance Commons secured, the non-profit is able to have two cohorts of 20 participants each year for 2024 and 2025. So far, the applications are all from people 29 and younger, more than 50% are Black, and 95% are women or femme-identifying people.

Sundance Commons began as an 800-square-foot plot of land at Downsview Park and now operates out of four farm locations all within an hour of Toronto. The Rexdale property, located in a diverse, low-income neighbourhood, is where the majority of the new-farmer training program happens, since, unlike most farms, it’s on Toronto’s transit line. “When I started farming, I didn’t drive, and having a TTC-accessible location that has a working greenhouse, that has all the bells and whistles, that has a market garden, allows these amazing youth to really see how things work and to actually see it close by,” Sundance says. 

Participants learn how to operate tractors, prepare beds, compost, keep bees, raise poultry, operate irrigation systems, and grow a variety of vegetables and cover crops. The program also provides mentoring and checking in about participants’ future goals in the agriculture industry, giving them the technical skills needed to either get jobs in the industry or start their own farm businesses. 

When I started farming, I didn’t drive, and having a TTC-accessible location that has a working greenhouse, that has all the bells and whistles, that has a market garden, allows these amazing youth to really see how things work and to actually see it close by.

-Cheyenne Sundance

A critical element of the new-farmer training is that at the end of the program, participants can potentially gain access to land to kick-start their own operations. “That’s part of seeing it in a multi-year phase because farming is not like other kinds of industries – you kind of need time,” says Gagnon, land access coordinator at Sundance Commons. “It might take even more than a season to get a business set up; it might take three to five years.” 

Sundance and Gagnon explain that the barriers to entry are high for young people interested in farming in Ontario. The options to learn are limited to expensive farm-school courses that could cost thousands of dollars or unpaid internships on farms. 

Traditionally, farmland and knowledge has been passed down over generations. All that has changed. Today, many young people interested in farming don’t have that access to generational knowledge of farming or family land. And as a result, there are very few pathways to crack into that world and find a network of people who can help. 

According to a 2023 RBC report, 40% of Canadian farmers plan to retire in the next 10 years, and more than half of them have no plan for their land post-retirement. That means farms will face a dire labour shortage in the next decade without a younger generation of farmers ready to flow into the industry. Today, only 4.1% of Canada’s farm operators identify as racialized or Indigenous. The inaccessibility of the agricultural industry poses a huge gap for its future. “So we kind of build the connections [for young farmers] to basically try to fix that gap that has kept it inaccessible for so many,” Gagnon says. That’s a big part of why the training program “works so symbiotically with the land access,” he adds.

For Selina-Rachel Mendez, access to a support network at Sundance Commons was the real game-changer to build her beekeeping and honey business, The Drip. When she decided to pursue beekeeping, Mendez found that many workshops were dedicated to people who were just curious about it or wanted to keep bees as a hobby, and so touched only on surface-level knowledge.

 “I needed someone to really sit me down and be like, ‘Hey, here is how you need to move within a hive, here is what you need to look for to make sure that your hive is healthy, here is what you need to do throughout the course of the season to make sure that you are being sustainable and ethical with your beekeeping,” she says. 

Through Sundance, Mendez was also able to get free land access for her hives in exchange for a portion of the honey she produced.

 “When you have those connections and you have that network and that support system, it really helps you stay afloat,” she says. She now also teaches beekeeping workshops and will be doing sessions for the new-farmer training program at Sundance Commons. 

For Gagnon, training marginalized youth interested in agriculture is part of a bigger picture of ensuring that young farm workers have equity and agency, he explains. “They are the most important part of the food system.”

Neha Chollangi is a freelance journalist based in Montreal, where she covers grassroots social movements and environmental activism. 

The post How Sundance Commons is training the next generation of young, racialized farmers appeared first on Corporate Knights.

On a frosty January day in 2006, a dozen inspectors from Quebec’s environment ministry, accompanied by a dozen members of the Sûreté du Québec, rolled into the farm of Clément Roy, in the Beauce countryside south of Quebec City. Together, they loaded all of Roy’s livestock – 585 sows, hogs and piglets, plus 12 cows – onto a fleet of transport trucks and drove them to the regional auction house to be sold. Vast quantities of the pig slurry and manure stored in Roy’s barns were sucked onto 50 tank trucks and removed.

The bill for this unprecedented “nettoyage,” plus a stiff fine, went to Roy. For more than a decade, the intransigent farmer had been violating environmental and agricultural regulations, ignoring repeated requests from the farming union and the environment ministry to clean up his act.

The message was clear: rules are rules. And the messenger was Tom Mulcair. The decision to put Clément Roy out of business reflected Mulcair’s conviction that for sustainable development to be anything more than a lofty goal, it needed to be codified in law, and that law needed to be enforced. This belief led to the crafting and passing of Quebec’s Sustainable Development Act, which anchored the principles of sustainable development in all facets of the provincial government’s administration while also adding the right to a healthy environment to the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. It was the first legislation of its kind in Canada.

This year, Corporate Knights is honouring Mulcair’s efforts with the 2024 Award of Distinction, announced in June. Past recipients include former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell and Adèle Hurley, co-founder of the Canadian Coalition on Acid Rain.

From the outset, it was clear that the government of Jean Charest, elected in 2003 after two terms of Parti Québécois rule, was going to make the environment a priority. Having served as federal environment minister in Brian Mulroney’s government, Charest had led the Canadian delegation to the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992 – where 154 countries signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreeing to work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and where Agenda 21, the action plan for achieving sustainable development, was launched. As premier, he renamed the Quebec portfolio the Ministry for Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks – the first and only of its kind in Canada – and appointed Mulcair, a whip-smart jurist and feisty parliamentarian, minister.

Mulcair was 49 when he joined the Charest cabinet; he had previously served two terms as a Liberal MNA for a Laval suburb and, prior to that, ran a private law practice and worked in legal capacities for multiple government ministries. His first priority as minister was to address two major – and related – environmental problems in Quebec: the blue-green algae blooms that were causing major ecosystem die-offs in many of the province’s lakes and rivers, and the agricultural run-off that was feeding them.

Having established itself as a major pork producer and exporter, Quebec had seen its pig farms grow in size and number and become a major source of leaked manure. Mulcair describes the relationship between pork producers and the government when he took office as “open warfare.” In an effort to bring the parties together, he agreed to lift the moratorium on new hog farms that had been declared by the previous government, on condition that all farms meet clearly established environmental standards. He also made it clear that there would be zero tolerance for violations, which is what led to that morning in mid-January, and the order that Mulcair now calls the toughest decision he made as minister.

“Sustainable development is not something you pound over people’s heads,” he says on the phone from his lake home in the Laurentians north of Montreal. “You have to work with people, to accompany them in their challenges. But you also have to enforce the rules.”

Mulcair’s determination to cultivate widespread understanding – and support – for the idea of sustainable development was reflected in the four-month road tour he took in 2005 with the first draft of his Sustainable Development Act. In a series of public hearings held in 21 municipalities across Quebec, Mulcair listened to Quebecers’ suggestions and concerns. He says the “super worthwhile” process resulted in a much stronger piece of legislation.

“It’s not Moses and the tablets,” he says of effective environmental policy. “This can’t just be the work of parties and bureaucrats.”

The Sustainable Development Act baked the idea of sustainable development into every aspect of the public service. It made “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” the government’s goal and enumerated 16 principles to guide it in getting there. Among them are the precautionary principle, which requires actors to err on the side of caution with respect to potential environmental impacts; polluter pays; and the internalization of costs, which insists that the value of a good reflect its entire life-cycle cost – including disposal. Mulcair considers the principle of “subsidiarity,” which delegates decision-making authority to the level of government closest to the citizens and communities concerned, to be a critical one. It has enabled Quebec municipalities to take a lead role in climate action. Key to the legislation’s effectiveness was the establishment of the position of sustainable development commissioner: a senior bureaucrat who evaluates each ministry’s implementation of the act and reports back to the auditor general.

It’s not Moses and the tablets. This can’t just be the work of parties and bureaucrats.

 

-Tom Mulcair, 2024 Award of Distinction

“There were lots of initiatives at the time,” says legal scholar Corinne Gendron, a professor of strategy and social and environmental responsibility at the Université du Québec à Montréal, “but they weren’t coordinated. The act meant that all ministries had to use the same strategy. The government had to change its practices to actually engage. It made sustainable development a core preoccupation.”

It also made it a human right. The Quebec charter was amended to include the clause “Every person has a right to live in a healthful environment in which biodiversity is preserved, to the extent and according to the standards provided by law.” It would be 17 more years before the federal government added this right to the Environmental Protection Act; it has yet to amend its own Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

It seems unfortunate, but fitting, that Mulcair stepped down from his ministerial position on a matter of principle. When he objected to the Quebec government’s proposal to sell a good chunk of Mont-Orford, a large national park in the Eastern Townships, to private developers, Charest shuffled him out of his ministry. The two had already done battle over Mulcair’s insistence that a developer restore a wetland in Laval that he had built on illegally. Clearly Mulcair’s convictions were, at times, inconvenient. So he packed them up and left provincial politics for the federal stage.

In 2007, he was elected MP for the Montreal riding of Outremont, representing the New Democratic Party, which had never made inroads in Quebec. As lieutenant to party leader Jack Layton, Mulcair helped grow support for the NDP in Quebec to the point that the party won the majority of Quebec seats in the 2011 federal election. This “orange wave” put the NDP in Official Opposition in Ottawa. Following the death of Layton, Mulcair was elected leader of the federal NDP, a position he held until 2017. As leader of the Official Opposition, Mulcair opposed the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines, pushed for an end to fossil fuel subsidies, and called for a cap-and-trade system for emissions and more rigorous environmental review processes.

Now retired from politics, Mulcair has made sustainable development the focus of his academic career. Having taught for several years in the political science department of the Université de Montréal, he is now expert in residence at the Université du Québec’s École nationale d’administration publique in Quebec City. This year he stepped down as chair of the board of Earth Day, a position he held for seven years.

As a political commentator, Mulcair disparages all the “emoting” he hears from politicians over the climate. What’s required, he says, is action. Easier said than done, some might say. To which Mulcair would doubtless respond: better said and done.

The post Tom Mulcair gets to the heart of green governance appeared first on Corporate Knights.

That hard work is often hard to see, the product of millions of Canadians and thousands of businesses quietly, persistently adopting new approaches to life and work, eschewing waste, prioritizing collaboration and generally learning to do more with less. Since 2002, Corporate Knights has recognized this work by publishing the Best 50 list of Canada’s top corporate citizens – the businesses that prize sustainability as well as commerce.

Now in its 23rd year, the Best 50 helps track how Canadian businesses are meeting the low-carbon and green-transition challenge – as well as where they’re getting stuck in the process.

You already know many of these companies – you’ve ridden their buses (Société de transport de Montréal), pocketed their coins (Royal Canadian Mint), used their phone networks (BCE, Telus and Rogers), shopped there (Canadian Tire) or bought the T-shirt (Gildan Activewear). The companies that made the Best 50 are mostly corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenues, as well as Crown corporations, large co-ops and members of the S&P/TSX Renewable Energy and Clean Technology Index. What sets them apart is their commitment to doing business differently – they’re companies that derive significant revenue from greener products and services, invest in increasingly sustainable projects, and prioritize equity in their operations.

Crucially, the companies’ average sustainable investment (as a percentage of total investment) hit 58.9% this year, up 9% over last year’s 49.7% – that’s compared to just 8.4% for the average large Canadian corporation.

2024 Best 50 ranking table

*Indicates a tie as a result of a formula correction
**Revised rank due to a formula correction

“How a company invests its capital expenditures today is a major determinant of how sustainable its revenue will be tomorrow. The fact that we’re seeing a significant jump in sustainable investments among Best 50 companies tells us that more corporate leaders see sustainability as a business imperative,” says Michael Yow, director of corporate rankings at Corporate Knights. There’s also evidence that companies can do better by doing good. Since the inception of this list on June 1, 2002, the stock prices of publicly listed companies on the Best 50 have outperformed the S&P/TSX Composite Index by 80% (as of April 30, 2024).

Driving into first place

In first place on the list this year is a different kind of public company: Société de transport de Montréal (STM) gets 85.4% of its revenues from delivering greener public transit. Better still, Corporate Knights researchers found that 82.3% of STM’s capital investments (up from 45.8% last year) now go toward building low-carbon infrastructure – including the expansion of its Metro line and a large underground garage to support subway service expansion.

Beyond cutting carbon, STM stands out for its commitment to equity and inclusion. In an era of runaway executive compensation, its CEO earns just 5.2 times more than the company’s average worker – well below the Best 50 average of 76 times. In addition, women make up half of the company’s board of directors, and STM has committed to “universal accessibility,” striving to minimize barriers to the use of transit for all its customers – even as it maintains a personalized para-transit service.

Second-place Stantec, which calls itself “a global leader in sustainable design and engineering,” is also committed to building sustainable cities. Ranked as the world’s ninth-most-sustainable company earlier this year on Corporate Knights’ Global 100 list, Edmonton-based Stantec has built its latest three-year strategic plan on “purpose-driven growth.” To Stantec, the climate crisis is one big opportunity; it’s focusing in particular on the energy transition, coastal resilience, ecosystem restoration, smart cities and international development.

The Best 50 includes many firms in industries central to the energy transition, such as power generation and transmission (which includes a whopping 14 companies, from giants such as Hydro-Québec and Ontario’s Hydro One to renewables specialists such as Innergex – last year’s top company – and Brookfield Renewable). But the list also identifies values-based companies in many other sectors, including manufacturing (six), communications (five), banks and insurance (four), and rail transportation, engineering services and forest products (two each). More evidence that any company, in any industry, can choose a more sustainable path.

The fact that we’re seeing a significant jump in sustainable investments among Best 50 companies tells us that more corporate leaders see sustainability as a business imperative.

–Michael Yow, director of corporate rankings, Corporate Knights

This year’s Best 50 list also demonstrates that the road to the future is not perfectly straight. For instance, CEOs are still pushing the limits on executive compensation. While the average ratio of CEO pay to average employee pay dropped this year to 76:1 from 108:1 among last year’s Best 50 cohort, that stemmed mainly from unusually large decreases at just two companies compared to 2023. Our researchers report that, of the companies appearing on both years’ lists, 21 firms green-lit increases in their CEO pay ratios, and just 13 managed decreases.

In another sign of fitful progress, executive gender diversity improved to just 28.4% this year, versus 26.8% last year. But while there are still more CEOs named Michael than there are female CEOs in Canada, 12% of Best 50 companies are led by women. Especially making their presence felt are Marie-Claude Léonard, a 20-year STM veteran who leads the top firm on the list; Tracy Robinson, appointed CEO of Canadian National Railway in 2022, who is the first Canadian woman to run a national railroad; Marie Lemay, who heads the most-improved organization, the Royal Canadian Mint; and Mairead Lavery, who runs Export Development Canada, the company with the lowest ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay.

Climate commitments legend

1.5°C: Business Ambition for 1.5C

SBTi: Science Based Targets initiative

FCCA: Fashion Charter for Climate Action

NZAM: Net-Zero Asset Managers Initiative

NZAO: Net-Zero Asset Owners Alliance

NZBA: Net-Zero Banking Alliance

The post These 50 Canadian corporations are betting big on green appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Click here to find out what companies made the 2024 list of Canada’s Best 50 corporate citizens.

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Yet in the transit-friendly annals of Montreal mobility, STM last year was overshadowed by a fresh-faced regional counterpart, the very new light-rail operator known as Réseau express métropolitain (REM). Last summer, VIPs gathered for the ribbon cutting of the first leg of REM’s shiny new LRT network, which is operated by a public–private partnership, will cost $8 billion and will eventually connect the island with its mainland suburbs. REM had barely carried its first passengers before it made international news, thanks to per-kilometre construction costs that came in dramatically lower than most comparable transit ventures.(REM has also faced criticism for construction delays and missed deadlines.)

However, STM’s accomplishments for 2023, though far less sexy, are much more salient in terms of Montreal’s push to slash emissions. The agency’s ridership finally broke free of the post-pandemic/work-from-home doldrums, reaching 82% of its pre-2020 levels – the third highest for all North American transit operators and well ahead of rivals like the Toronto Transit Commission (73%) and New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (65%). Even more remarkably, STM’s 2023 ridership jumped by 21% from 2022, reaching almost 230 million trips.

“Our vision is to be a leader in sustainable mobility,” says CEO Marie-Claude Léonard, who’s been with the agency 21 years and CEO since 2022. “This leads us to go even further in integrating sustainable development at the heart of all our organization’s activities. Our ambition is that each of our actions and decisions take into account the impacts on human life, the planet and economic sustainability.”

So here’s the question: what exactly makes a transit agency sustainable, above and beyond its raison d’être as well as the convenient fact that Quebec’s electrical grid is almost entirely green? As it turns out, STM – which tops this year’s Corporate Knights Best 50 ranking – has several answers to what may seem like an obvious question.

Take, for example, its bus fleet. As with many municipal transit operators, those vehicles were, once upon a time, entirely diesel, meaning they spewed fumes, particles and carbon into the city’s air. But STM has moved quite aggressively to replace its end-of-life diesel buses with hybrids and electrics. Today, 42% of its buses fall into one of those two categories, and the agency is aiming to have an entirely electric fleet by 2040 (i.e., no more hybrids). The plan is to house them all in a vast underground garage (albeit one that has gone way overbudget).

NYC’s MTA, by contrast, is still fiddling around with a hydrogen fuel cell bus pilot, while the TTC, which has been running hybrid and some electric buses for several years, is bogged down with supply chain issues as it tries to transition its fleet.

Another: the organization, like most others these days, has put out all sorts of ambitious long-term strategic plans that aim to cut carbon. But STM has made sure its senior management team has skin in the game. “The performance contracts of our managers, executive committee and CEO include targets related to service offering, health and safety, and employee mobilization, all of which contribute to maximizing the benefits of public transit,” it says.

What’s going on here is that STM has focused on driving ridership growth, a goal that transit aficionados love but which requires more effort from politicians, who love to announce big-ticket expansion projects and then turn up at the VIP events when they open.

It’s true that STM has a big project on the books: a five-station extension of the Metro network. But the agency is intent on rebuilding all that ridership lost during and after the pandemic, which is tough sledding, as many other cities have discovered. (Its capacity to build out the subway network further is sharply limited by funding freezes imposed by the provincial government, as well as competition from REM’s light-rail network.)

Our ambition is that each of our actions and decisions take into account the impacts on human life, the planet and economic sustainability.

—CEO Marie-Claude Léonard

Part of its fleet transition strategy, for instance, is intended to provide riders with the smoother and quieter rides that e-buses deliver. “The fact that they emit fewer GHGs will attract new customers that are looking for even more sustainable ways to commute,” the agency says.

STM is also pushing to steadily expand the network of bus priority routes – that is, those with bus-only lanes and traffic lights programmed to give buses a head start. “In 2023,” according to an agency spokesperson, “34% of bus trips made use of reserved lanes and 39% made use of priority traffic lights.” Again, the goal is to get riders to their destinations as quickly and conveniently as possible – an approach that is known to drive up ridership numbers (and thus reduce the use of carbon-emitting private vehicles).

The agency moved to add security on its vehicles and in its stations following a threefold jump in complaints from riders about the presence of homeless or intoxicated people and open substance abuse. While STM is hardly unique in contending with this particular set of rider gripes – symptomatic of the housing affordability crisis that afflicts so many big cities now, as well as the opioid epidemic – the agency tries to cast its response as a way of building loyalty and increasing, or at least not losing, ridership.

Whatever Léonard and STM’s 11,000-plus employees are doing, it seems to be working. Unlike the inhabitants of many other big cities, Montrealers appear to have gotten back into the transit habit, which surely comes as close to the definition of sustainability as it gets these days.

Click here to find out what other companies made the 2024 Best 50.

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The participants included municipal, county, state and federal officials, leaders of local faith groups, meteorologists and even someone from an Arizona tourism promotion department. But the first speaker, a veteran public health epidemiologist named Eugene Livar, bore a novel title that seemed intended to signal a seriousness of purpose in the fight to come. Earlier in the year, Governor Katie Hobbs had appointed Livar to serve as Arizona’s first “chief heat officer.” The move was part of Hobbs’s far-ranging extreme-heat preparedness strategy, which she unveiled in March. It marked the first time that Arizona would be pressing ahead with an emergency response that, as Livar pointed out, “needs buy-in from all levels of communities across our state.”

Livar is a member of a small but growing fraternity of chief heat officers (CHOs) around the globe that have been appointed with much fanfare in the last few years. There are CHOs in municipalities like Miami-Dade County, Phoenix, Athens, Dhaka North in Bangladesh, Freetown in Sierra Leone, and Melbourne, Australia.

It’s not difficult to understand why. Every year, thermometers are reaching stifling new heights: 48.8°C in parts of Europe in 2021, Australia cracked 50.7°C in 2022, China breached 52.2°C in 2023, with new records already being set in 2024. Heat has closed tourist attractions in Greece, schools in Bangladesh and has already cost the global economy trillions in human health, productivity, and agricultural output since the 1990s, according to a study from Dartmouth University. Combined with drought conditions, heat domes have helped amplify massive wildfires that tore through California, northern Canada and large swaths of southern Europe. In 2021, the tiny community of Lytton, B.C., went completely up in flames after it became trapped under a heat dome featuring 50°C temperatures.

Thanks to the rising crescendo of emergencies, public health officials have begun to focus more of their efforts on confronting what has become an annual season of “global boiling,” as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres famously said last July. The question is whether the appointment of CHOs will prove to be more, well, resilient and effective in terms of confronting a deeply thorny climate crisis.

The lethal consequences of heat waves and the urban heat-island effect aren’t a new phenomenon. In July 1995, the brutal combination of an extreme heat wave and widespread power outages killed more than 500 people in Chicago, many of them elderly residents of public housing, who died in apartments that had become furnace-like cells from which they were too afraid to venture because of the risk of violence. 

But deadly heat waves are becoming more frequent. Extreme heat is now by far the leading cause of weather-related death in the United States, according to the National Weather Service, giving heat the moniker of being the “silent killer” of climate change. Over the past decade, heat waves in Europe and Asia have claimed tens of thousands of lives. And, of course, the impact of extreme heat is nowhere more ferocious than in the poorest and most exposed regions of the world, where electricity, much less air conditioning, is scarce.

Three years ago, I never envisioned that anybody would be doing this job. The idea of a heat role in local government didn’t exist.

 

– Dave Hondula, director of heat response and mitigation, City of Phoenix

The appointment of heat officers around the globe is largely the result of a project by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center and the Atlantic Council, a think tank. The Rockefeller Foundation has been involved in promoting resilience, a malleable but trendy goal, for some years. In 2013, it endowed a fund to mark its centennial that would enable municipalities around the world to provide funds to hire 100 “chief resilience officers,” or CROs. 

The foundation discontinued its resilient cities program in 2019, pivoting to the more focused concept of installing heat czars. (Many cities that signed on to the earlier initiative subsequently got rid of their CROs.) Some of the new CHOs, however, had served as CROs. UN-Habitat recently hired a resilience official from Greece, Eleni Myrivili, who had previously served as the CRO of Athens. She’s now the UN’s first CHO. 

Unlike resilience, an indistinct concept, extreme heat as a policy challenge has the virtue of being highly specific. There’s a broad consensus on how cities should equitably confront extreme heat, both in the short term and the longer term, and on what not to do, in terms of exacerbating the crisis by failing to act.

Major science and health journals such as Nature and The Lancet regularly publish policy-minded scholarship about the health risks of extreme heat – including cardiovascular, cognitive and kidney failure – and the effectiveness of a wide array of cooling techniques. Public health officials are also paying much more attention: to the plight of people working outdoors, as well as lower-income households and the homeless – all groups that bear the brunt of extreme heat. 

Municipalities have expanded access to respite services such as cooling centres as a short-term measure. Planning and design experts, meanwhile, have laid out a menu of longer-term solutions – everything from extensive tree planting to the deployment of shade structures to the use of materials that deflect heat. Indeed, a World Economic Forum modelling study published last year estimated that if the typical European city enlarged its tree canopy from the average 14% coverage to about 30%, that move alone would reduce heat-related deaths by a third.  

Yet even, or perhaps especially, the hottest cities do all sorts of things that conflict with the goal of mitigating the impact of extreme heat – approving commercial developments with large surface parking lots or building new highways. The consumer market for air conditioners offers a vivid example of the inherent contradictions: AC, from a health perspective, is the most effective way of countering the physiological symptoms of extreme heat. Some jurisdictions, such as Ontario, have been debating whether access to air conditioning is a human right. But surging AC use also places extreme pressures on local electricity grids, triggering brownouts that may inflict the harshest conditions on marginalized communities.

A study published in 2022 by the Journal of the American Planning Association shows there’s still considerable ambiguity about who, exactly, should resolve these conflicts and coordinate the response. “Although more heat governance is needed, it is unclear who bears primary responsibility,” the authors noted. The study surveyed planners in 69 cities and found no consensus about which level of government or which department should steer and coordinate public sector response. “These findings suggest that if heat strategies are not coordinated across the full network of plans, policies are likely to be at cross purposes and lead to undesired or inequitable outcomes.”

Soon after Jane Gilbert was appointed to serve as Miami-Dade County’s chief heat officer in 2021, the first such post to be created in the United States, she embarked on preparing a comprehensive strategy for a sprawling region that experiences increasingly humid conditions in the summer months. “In the 14 years prior to 2023, we had an average of six days out of the year that reached at or above a heat index of 105 degrees,” Gilbert told NBC News earlier this year. “Last summer, we had over 42 days, so it was seven times higher than the average.”

Her plan, underwritten by Arsht-Rockefeller and released in late 2022, incorporates input from every level of government, the National Weather Service, business groups, non-profits and local universities. She also commissioned experts to carry out vulnerability mapping within the region. 

“My role is different than some typical government jobs in that I work across departments and across sectors,” Gilbert, who is part of the county’s 25-person Office of Resilience, explained in a statement, adding that she is laser focused on extreme heat. “On any given day, I might be reviewing a new policy that could impact how we respond to or mitigate extreme heat. It could be updating our emergency management protocols, writing a grant with departments on tree planting, going out and speaking at a community event or conducting a training for some staff or community members.” Yet her resources are modest: she has a staff of two, a US$300,000 budget for heat season, and another $2.5 million for tree planting and other initiatives. (Miami-Dade declined a request for an interview with Gilbert.)

Dave Hondula, director of heat response and mitigation for the City of Phoenix, says his understanding of his role as CHO is to ensure both short-term emergency measures but also longer-term strategies “for cooling the city and making it more comfortable,” as he explained on The New York Times’s Daily podcast last year. He freely acknowledged how quickly the political conditions have changed. “Three years ago, I never envisioned – nobody envisioned – that anybody would be doing this job. The idea of a heat role in local government didn’t exist.”

What remains to be seen is whether CHOs can deliver the policy goods. UN-Habitat’s Myrivili acknowledged, during a panel discussion at last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, that the complexities posed by extreme heat require the attention of multidisciplinary teams. But, she added, “finding new ways of financing [is] crucial.” After all, it’s one thing to add some money to an emergency services budget to set up more cooling centres during the hot months. But retrofitting an urban area with reflective roofs, better transit, much more greenery, purpose-built shade structures and dwellings that don’t function like convection ovens in the summer months is quite another.

I am worried about a lot of smoke and light around a ‘heat czar’ that is not sufficiently wired into established processes to actually change anything.

 

– Zack Taylor, Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance

As Melbourne co-CHO Tiffany Crawford says, “I think that the scale of the transition that’s required around nature-based solutions and adaptation is monumental.”

Can one office, tasked with a daunting mandate, muster the resources and the bureaucratic heft to get all the players to row in the same direction? “From a governance perspective, I wonder about where it will fit into the organization,” says Zack Taylor, founder of Western University’s Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance. “Where would you put it? Planning? Building? Or as a ‘central agency’ function within the CAO/city manager’s office? Ultimately,” he says, “I am worried about a lot of smoke and light around a ‘heat czar’ that is not sufficiently wired into established processes and procedures to actually change anything.”

It’s worth pointing out that a growing number of cities, as well as state governments, around the world have been hustling to put in place a wide range of policies and programs in response to extreme heat, including many that don’t involve chief heat officers. Some are comprehensive – New York State’s detailed action plan is fairly typical for big cities these days – while others leave much to be desired, such as a widely ridiculed effort by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to install tiny shade structures at bus stops.

Yet substantive reforms have surfaced in cities with CHOs: Phoenix city council this past April enacted a regulation requiring airport authorities and construction companies to establish heat-protection plans for their workers, a move that is expected to affect 10,000 people. Miami-Dade, in turn, this year increased budgets within public housing, transportation and community action departments for improved weatherization services, installation of energy-efficient AC systems, and installation of bus shelters in urban heat islands. 

For all that, countless municipalities – in sun belts as well as more temperate climates where communities aren’t prepared for brutal heat – will need to come to grips with the fact that this kind of climate-related threat challenges so many of the business-as-usual approaches to city building and urban design. Half-hearted or for-show greening efforts must be abandoned in favour of truly effective strategies. We’ll have to break our addiction to impermeable asphalt or concrete surfaces. Architects and developers must find alternatives to air conditioning as the default way of cooling buildings, using time-tested techniques such as better cross-ventilation, tactical use of building materials with passive cooling features (e.g., concrete floors) and the deployment of heat pumps as more energy-efficient alternatives to AC.

There’s no doubt CHOs can play a role in this transition, both in terms of ensuring that disparate bureaucracies are not working at cross purposes as well as communicating with the wider public. But cities and regions that truly recognize the value of these positions will move quickly to wean themselves off the philanthropic funding, institutionalize their CHOs, and then give these officials the regulatory and budgetary clout they’ll need to do the job properly.

“Being the chief heat officer in a place like Phoenix means coming up with great ideas and realizing they’re very hard to pull off within the rules and realities of a city government,” Hondula told The Times. “I would argue it means being a little persistent and being willing to try to ruffle some feathers a little bit. But through those experiences, we’ve generated a little saying among our team: ‘The heat office wasn’t created to maintain the status quo.’”Which is certainly encouraging, because the climate emergency demands far more than business-as-usual. 

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

Illustration by Ryan Garcia 

The post Can a wave of chief heat officers help cool a melting planet? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Today, India has 461 million people living in urban centres. A proportionately staggering pace and scale of construction is underway, leaving the country vulnerable to major climatic impacts. A ballooning carbon footprint compounds matters, as globally the buildings and construction sector is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for 37% of global emissions, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Applying the ubiquitous “modern international style” to Indian buildings is only making the situation worse.

More than four decades ago, in an influential essay called “Form Follows Climate,” Charles Correa, a renowned Indian architect and advocate of sustainable design, wrote, “To live in the Third World is to respond to climate. We simply cannot afford to squander the kind of energy required to air condition a glass tower under a tropical sun.”

For the first 40 years of the Indian republic’s existence, its architectural language was noticeably punctuated by “climatic devices” like vertical fins/brise soleil, window overhangs (chajjas) and latticed brickwork (jalis). These broke up the intense sun into shadowed patterns, kept out the rain and ventilated buildings naturally – almost eliminating the need for air conditioning. 

However, this changed with the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s that saw multinational corporations begin to set up shop in the country. A post-colonial social pressure to be “as good as the West,” coupled with the corporate urge to unify brand image across countries, saw many Indian commercial buildings look identical to their U.S. and U.K. counterparts despite a drastically different local climate. The shift created a sense of “urban placelessness” – and made India’s tropical heat worse. 

The southern Indian city of Bengaluru (also known as Bangalore), dubbed the “garden city” and the “Silicon Valley of India,” saw IT parks mushroom, with “international style” buildings erected in heat-trapping concrete, glass and steel. Soon a sea of high-rises with glass curtain walls (and little ventilation) that could have been in New York, London or Vancouver was built, leading to a greater reliance on air conditioning. Although air conditioning cools interiors, it releases hot air and greenhouse gases into the environment, increasing temperatures both short- and long-term. Rising temperatures leads to more air conditioning use in a vicious cycle. 

Today, Bengaluru, which has a population of 14 million, has morphed from a sylvan garden city with mild temperatures into a dystopian concrete jungle, with untameable traffic, toxic foaming lakes, dire shortages of water and record-breaking heat waves. In April, Bengaluru recorded its second-hottest day in 50 years. As an X user observed, “Never in my twenty years in Bangalore, I ever thought we would need an AC.” Some air conditioning dealers reported an alarming 35% uptick in inquiries, when summer had barely begun. 

LEED buildings still heat-trapping

A second, more climate-conscious wave of corporate offices began with India’s first LEED-certified building in 2004, with a green roof, biological water-treatment ponds and solar panels. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the world’s most widely used rating system for energy-efficient and environmentally safe buildings. In 2023, India ranked third globally for the number of LEED green-certified projects built (with China in first place and Canada coming in a close second). But LEED-certified designs in India mostly use the same Western paradigms of design and heat-trapping materials with large carbon footprints.

A 2023 UNEP study revealed that climate progress in the construction sector has come from reducing operational carbon emissions – those released during the heating, cooling and lighting of buildings – with not enough of a push to address embodied carbon (emissions embedded in the whole life cycle of construction materials such as concrete). While an imminent update to LEED, called v5, promises to address this, so far it has led only to the proliferation of what architect and planner Robert Orr has called “cookie-cutter green projects that can be placed in any climate, instead of creating a green project that reflects the neighbourhood and region in which it is built.”

Local materials, cooler climate

A growing number of Indian architects are reviving indigenous techniques into designs for modern functional comfort. Architectural materials like compressed stabilized earth bricks (CSEB), rammed earth and bamboo are the new alt kids on the block.

Made with the most local of materials – excavated earth – CSEB is a compressed mud brick/adobe with added stabilizer giving it greater strength. Since CSEB is simply sun-dried, its production consumes 3.9 times less energy than kiln-fired brick. Using excavated earth for these alternative bricks is a circular method that can eliminate the production and transport of carbon-intensive fired brick, thereby drastically reducing carbon emissions. 

In Auroville, an experimental town in southern India, it is common to see two-storey load-bearing designs using CSEB with no concrete whatsoever. The use of these stabilized earthen bricks is possible in even taller buildings – such as the six-storey Symbiosis University Hospital in Pune, India – when combined with strategic supports in concrete. The best part about using mud bricks is that their high thermal mass and porosity makes internal building temperatures in the summer daytime vastly cooler. 

We simply cannot afford to squander the kind of energy required to air condition a glass tower under a tropical sun.

 

– Charles Correa, Indian architect

Though building with mud today is commonly limited to arid regions, architects like the award-winning Tallulah D’Silva, who builds rammed-earth houses in rainy Goa, argue that it can withstand tropical rainfall, too. “Goa has a history of mud building over 1,000 years, as seen . . . in the local ‘taipa’ and cob houses,” D’Silva says. Taipa is an indigenous mud technique that uses wet soil with bamboo reinforcement. Building on indigenous oral references, D’Silva experiments with various local soils and an array of unlikely, but traditionally vetted, stabilizers like cow dung, carbon-absorbing lime and slag (a by-product of the industrial production of glass). 

Bamboo has long been used in the creation of flood-resistant traditional dwellings in India’s northeast. Its incredible growth rate, low embodied carbon and high tensile strength sees it being used today across the country to design radical projects. The Bamboo Research and Training Institute in the state of Maharashtra may be the largest office building anywhere that uses bamboo as the main structural element. And like mud bricks, bamboo also has thermal properties that may in fact cool the structures it is used to build. 

The cauldron of complexity and contradiction that is India contains both some of the world’s most dire climate impacts and its most innovative solutions, many of the latter drawing from rich indigenous canons. However, even with robust building codes and technical prowess, corruption leaves India with vast unregulated, carbon-intensive construction. Yet climate optimism springs eternal. 

As D’Silva says, “In the sea of unsustainability, every drop of good practice counts. If we expose young construction professionals to the right climate-positive methods, in time they will no doubt be adopted as the first method of choice for all.”

Richa Narvekar is an independent academic and architectural designer based out of Toronto and Goa, India.

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