Then, an unexpected opportunity to reclaim the land presented itself. In 2020, the municipally owned company that runs Antigonish’s utility and those of two other Nova Scotia towns set out to develop three community solar projects for each of the three towns it manages. The residents of Antigonish hope to make their town one of Canada’s first net-zero communities, including with community solar. But to get the project off the ground, they needed space – and the idea of a solar farm offered the chance to give the former landfill new life. 

Since January, the Antigonish Community Solar Garden has been producing 1.65 megawatts of power for residents and businesses, providing roughly 4% of the town’s energy needs (another 40% comes from wind). It’s just one of dozens of projects across Canada that are using brownfield sites – land contaminated by past commercial or industry use, such as landfills, oil refineries and gas stations – to host solar farms. 

In a net-zero world, vast amounts of power will need to come from wind and sun. But real estate is a bottleneck: to phase out oil and gas, panels and turbines need somewhere to go. Ideally, this land needs to be located near existing roads, communities and grid infrastructure – exactly the kind of land that’s in demand for other uses. 

European non-profit the Renewables Grid Initiative estimates that to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, the EU will need to allocate roughly 100,000 square kilometres to renewable-energy generation and grid expansion – an area roughly the size of Iceland. A 2021 paper published in Nature Scientific Reports estimated that to provide 25% to 80% of the electricity mix in some parts of the globe, solar energy would need 0.5% to 5% of total land in those areas. And that has communities like Antigonish going to the old dump for spare land. 

Such projects hold the promise of repurposing lands that meet many of the requirements for renewable power generation, while not being suitable for any other purpose. But as the Antigonish experience shows, they can also be unexpectedly complex, with issues ranging from unstable footing to unhappy residents. “It’s like buying an old house that you’re going to renovate . . . You open the floor and you’ve found that, you’ve found this,” says Antigonish Mayor Sean Cameron. “That’s the kind of the thing we fell into with this one.”

These are the kind of complexities that have turned brownfields into an albatross around the neck of many communities, as governments struggle to deal with the toxic legacy of contaminated sites; in Canada alone, there are tens of thousands of brownfield sites, and the cost of cleaning them up can exceed the value of the land. But with land at an increasing premium and the deadline to shift off fossil fuels approaching, interest in repurposing those sites for renewable energy is growing. Has a brighter future for brownfields arrived?

A tailor-made solution

The concept of “brightfields” – as brownfields used to generate renewable power are known – originates in the United States. In 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy launched the Brightfields Initiative, aimed at helping communities turn former toxic sites into solar energy producers. By 2010, a seminal study in Michigan found that existing brownfield sites could provide 43% of the state’s residential electricity consumption. “They said, for sites that are either heavily contaminated or the market can’t address them, why don’t we put solar panels on them as an interim use or permanent use,” says Christopher de Sousa, professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University and head of a research lab looking at brownfield reclamation. 

De Sousa says these early initiatives established a blueprint, and not just through large-scale efforts; small projects, such as the 3.7-acre, 425-kilowatt solar garden built at the site of a former gas works in Brockton, Massachusetts, also helped set a new paradigm. Nearly every closed landfill in Massachusetts is now a brightfield, and there are more than 600 brightfield projects scattered across the United States. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency continues to run a program called RE-Powering America’s Land, promoting the redevelopment of brownfields for renewable energy.  

Solar is one of the most approachable uses for brownfields; unlike wind turbines, panels don’t require digging deep into the ground, which could disturb hazardous material. Solar farms also don’t expose people to contaminants the way that residential developments or parks would, de Sousa says.

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But while Canada has a federal strategy for contaminated sites, the repurposing of brownfield sites for renewable energy has lagged behind other jurisdictions. A 2016 paper by de Sousa estimated that there were only about 30 brightfields in the country.

Meggen Janes, executive director of the Canadian Brownfields Network, says that’s changed in the last five years, as the conversation about converting brownfields to brightfield projects has accelerated, putting sites that can’t easily be developed for housing or parkland to use. 

This includes an initiative in Alberta, where a company called RenuWell Energy Solutions has conducted a pilot project to turn abandoned wells and oil and gas infrastructure on farmland in the southern half of the province into a 1.45-megawatt solar project across two sites. Because the approach uses existing roads and power lines, it can offer power from small-scale solar at close to the cost of very large sites. Meanwhile, it addresses an existing environmental liability by mitigating the expensive process of closing down old wells; much of the expense of remediating a well site is from removing access roads and revegetating the area, neither of which are required if it’s used for solar.

This significantly reduced the cleanup bill facing the Orphan Well Association (whose coffers are significantly short of the money needed for well cleanups): costs were 80% less than they would otherwise have been, says Keith Hirsche, founder and president of RenuWell. Hirsche says using brownfields for solar is not only cost-effective; it also reduces carbon emissions. “You’re basically [removing] both the energy that it would take to clean that stuff completely up, and then also the energy it would take to put new stuff down . . . across the board, I think it’s a helpful solution.”

RenuWell is now looking to scale up, including with provincial support to build a 20-site grid-scale pilot for solar plus storage, though the company is facing inertia caused by political divides and entrenched interests, including the legacy energy sector. Still, with abandoned oil and gas infrastructure covering at least 340,000 acres in the province, Hirsche says there’s significant room to grow. “This only can impact 10% of [sites] maybe, but . . . if you converted 10% of these abandoned gas sites, you meet almost the projected growth of power demand for the next 10 years in Alberta.”

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No smooth sailing

In Antigonish, the goal for brownfields is more modest.

Unlike most communities in the province, Antigonish owns its own electrical utility. This allows the community more autonomy in setting clean energy targets, and the town has the ambitious goal of producing 80% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. To help with this, the town’s plan was initially to build a 2.1-megawatt solar garden that would expand access to solar for the town’s residents, including those without the means for their own rooftop solar. 

But landfills are among the most challenging types of brownfield sites to develop, and that proved true in Antigonish’s case as well. Because the site was a former landfill, it didn’t provide stable footing, which meant less of the available area was suitable for panels than planned. The town then had to clear some forest to create more space, causing runoff and increasing tensions with some residents. Grid connection was also pricey. The dumpsite was outside of the town, so the municipality had to pay to run power lines to the site, which cost around half a million dollars. “There was a bunch of issues that kind of snowballed,” Mayor Cameron says.

In the end, the solar garden took two years and $2 million more than anticipated – but Cameron says he would still consider brightfield projects in the future, especially on a less complicated site. “If we get more funding, I would certainly explore another solar garden.”

Remediation and reparation

These kinds of issues can drive developers away from brownfield sites. But brightfield projects have an additional benefit working in their favour: righting wrongs done to marginalized communities.

In 2019, the Tŝilhqot’in Nation celebrated the opening of a 1.5-gigawatt solar farm at the site of a former sawmill. It is the first 100% Indigenous-owned solar farm in Canada, on the first such timber mill to be redeveloped as a solar farm.

Since then, other Indigenous communities have seized similar opportunities, including in the Northwest Territories, where an Indigenous-owned business has developed a one-megawatt solar farm on a former brownfield site in Inuvik, and in Nova Scotia, where two Mi’kmaq Nations have partnered with a local municipality to develop a seven-megawatt solar garden at the site of a capped landfill. 

Christopher de Sousa says that because of the legacy of environmental racism, where polluting activities were located near marginalized communities, many brownfield sites are now located on Indigenous land. In some parts of the country, Indigenous communities are also more reliant on diesel and other forms of fuel, making renewable energy on brownfields especially appealing. 

For these communities, de Sousa says, brightfields offer the possibility of remediating contaminated sites, switching to cleaner energy and creating jobs and revenue – projects that have the potential to be “win-win-win.”

Incentives incoming

Across the country, advocates say the primary barrier to accessing these wins is financial. “You know, why am I going to invest time and effort into developing a site that might take . . . a million dollars to clean up,” de Sousa says, “when right next door I have a clean one?” 

This is less an issue for large centres, where land is at enough of a premium that developing a brownfield is worth the cost and risk. Meggen Janes says that small communities, by contrast, often struggle to find the resources to deal with brownfield sites. “I’ve talked with many mayors across the country, and they’re trying to find programs . . . that would support their initiatives.” 

Still, local governments can also be leaders; in Calgary, where two solar farms recently opened on contaminated sites that had been used by a fertilizer company, the city has created a program to incentivize brownfield redevelopment for wind and solar with a reduction in municipal taxes. And in Nova Scotia, a new provincial program that aims to create 100 megawatts of community solar is prioritizing projects located on brownfields.

Ultimately, Janes says, the potential of brownfield sites is vast. In Europe and North America, there are an estimated 3.5 million brownfield sites, making a significant source of developable land. 

In this respect, crises can serve a useful function. The affordable-housing crisis has prompted some Canadian municipalities to focus on brownfield sites for affordable housing. After another summer of droughts, fires and floods, the climate crisis may serve as the motivator to turn polluted sites into the engines of a more sustainable future.  

Moira Donovan is an independent journalist based in Nova Scotia, specializing in the environment and climate change. 

The post A ray of light for brownfields appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Though not quite a silver bullet in the fight against methane emissions, MethaneSAT was something more like an effective and well-placed spy. But just over a year into its five-year mission, the satellite stopped working.

On June 20, the boxy, solar-powered device passed over the North Pole and made a link with the High Arctic ground station in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The communication was normal and there were no signs of trouble. But less than an hour later, after travelling half the circumference of the world at 27,000 kilometres per hour, it had gone silent as it hurtled over the South Pole.

EDF has not made contact with the methane-tracking satellite since it mysteriously stopped communicating that day. Subsequent photos taken from space show that the satellite is intact and its trajectory has not changed. EDF has commissioned an anomaly review board to figure out what happened, but the results have not been published.

A new height of ambition

For many, MethaneSAT was a preeminent symbol of human ingenuity in the face of the overwhelming challenge of shifting our entire energy system away from fossil fuels. The project has been lionized in the media and awarded generous philanthropic funding to cover the US$88-million cost to build and launch it into space, including from the Bezos Earth Fund.

Methane, which is responsible for about 30% of global warming, traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. But it also has a much shorter lifespan in the atmosphere, so lowering its emissions is considered a low-hanging fruit for effective climate action – especially because natural gas consists almost entirely of methane, so the industry is theoretically incentivized to avoid bleeding it off into the atmosphere from leaky operations.

“Despite the scale of the problem, solving it is largely cost-effective,” Dominic Watson, a senior manager on the energy transition team at EDF, has said. Plugging leaks also isn’t overly complicated: “It’s plumbing, it’s not rocket science.”

MethaneSAT’s wasn’t the only satellite tracking methane emissions from space, but it was the only one built specifically for this task, and it could measure methane “over large areas but with enough precision to identify specific facilities and oil wells,” The New York Times has reported. The satellite’s high-precision spectrometer could detect tiny differences in the concentration of methane molecules – as little as two to three parts per billion – from 580 kilometres in the sky.

But providing a critical new vantage on worldwide methane emissions wasn’t the only thing that made MethaneSAT special. It also demonstrated that complex and expensive ventures to combat climate change could be realized outside the framework of government or private industry. The satellite represented, both figuratively and literally, a new height of ambition for environmental non-profits.

Coming in the midst of a dramatic reversal on climate policy by the U.S. administration, MethaneSAT’s untimely ending was a most unwelcome development for the climate movement. The announcement that the satellite had gone dark was met with an online outpouring of sadness and disappointment.

But in New Zealand, which contributed NZ$32 million to the overall project, the response among some scientists has been different. They aren’t sad. They’re mad about it.

A troubled relationship

“We were played like a fiddle by these guys,” says Richard Easther, an astrophysicist who was consulted by the New Zealand government about the project, speaking via video call from his office at the University of Auckland, where he teaches in the physics department.

Easther views his government’s sizable investment in MethaneSAT as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to have a huge technical leap in a globally significant area.” New Zealand joined the project in an effort to boost its aerospace sector. Instead, the country “settled for what was always going to be a participation trophy at best,” he argues.

The satellite stopped working just days before students and faculty at the Te Pūnaha Ātea Space Institute at the University of Auckland were scheduled to assume control of the mission, following several months of delays. The failure to transition control to the university at the original deadline in March prompted mounting public frustration and calls for transparency.

Easther is leading the criticism and has called for a no-blame review to understand “how New Zealand blew past so many red flags about MethaneSAT’s operation.” He alleges that the mission operators “kept pumping out upbeat comms even after it became apparent that the spacecraft had major problems.”

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Easther’s ire is directed mainly at his own government, for spending so much money on a space project without soliciting bids for other projects. “It’s not the result of a competitive call for proposals or a pre-existing need,” he says.

New Zealand does contribute to the world’s methane problem, but its emissions come from livestock – those famous cow and sheep burps – not oil and gas. “If we wanted to understand agricultural methane . . . there’s dozens of other things we could have done and they may have been more effective,” Easther claims.

‘Typical teething issues’

The story behind New Zealand’s involvement with MethaneSAT begins with Peter Beck, who holds the title of “the world’s newest space billionaire.” He is the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, the upstart competitor to SpaceX whose shares have gone interstellar in the past year.

Rocket Lab puts satellites into space and has made New Zealand the third-most-frequent country to launch rockets to orbit after the United States and China – a feat that Beck achieved without the benefit of a university degree. New Zealanders are proud of him the way Americans used to be proud of Elon Musk. So when Beck said he wanted to get involved with MethaneSAT, people paid attention.

Rocket Lab’s stunning success in launching satellites was a prime factor that brought the Environmental Defense Fund into partnership with the New Zealand government in 2018. In the end, MethaneSAT grew too big for Rocket Lab, which specializes in smaller launches, and SpaceX won the contract. “If we’d known right from the beginning that Rocket Lab wouldn’t launch it, I am sure the conversation would not have happened,” Easther says.

MethaneSAT’s utility for tracking agricultural methane emissions was also misrepresented, according to reporting by Eloise Gibson, a climate change correspondent for New Zealand’s public broadcaster RNZ. When EDF approached the New Zealand Space Agency at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment about the idea for the partnership, staff saw it as an opportunity to position New Zealand as a serious player in both space science and climate change, she reported.

Gibson obtained communications by space agency staff at the time. They wrote that “the satellite will be able to detect emissions from agriculture” and “importantly . . . should be able to provide data that would enable more precise measurement of methane emissions in New Zealand and help inform policy related to agricultural emissions.”

They were wrong. New Zealand scientists told the space agency the mission was “hopelessly oversold” for livestock gas tracking and “would not add much to New Zealand’s understanding of its greenhouse gas profile from farming,” Gibson reported. The agency ultimately realized the error, but the rationale persisted in underpinning the nation’s involvement in the project.

Jon Coifman, a spokesperson for MethaneSAT, wrote in an email that the purpose of New Zealand’s research investment was to “gain deeper insight and understanding into the usefulness of high precision methane measurements in understanding agricultural methane emissions” – that is, to study the satellite’s applicability for this task.

Once the satellite was in space, it suffered ongoing technical issues that delayed its scheduled handover to the control station at the University of Auckland. One of its three thrusters repeatedly malfunctioned, and increased solar activity caused it to go into “safe mode” multiple times. Rather than being handed off to New Zealand scientists, control was transferred back to its manufacturer, Blue Canyon Technologies in Colorado.

Craig Rodger, a professor of physics at New Zealand’s University of Otago, has questioned whether solar activity should have been so disruptive: “There have been moments when it’s been interesting in the last year and a bit, but there have not been extreme conditions in the space environment,” he wrote in published comments. “We’re talking about normal, slightly active conditions . . . Typically, people build their equipment to handle that.”

Coifman describes these difficulties as “typical teething issues.” Solar activity has not been attributed as a reason for MethaneSAT’s cessation on June 20.

A report by the New Zealand space agency published on November 7 found that the satellite’s technical failure “occurred in components outside of New Zealand’s control and within the bounds of accepted risk in space missions.” MethaneSAT’s sensor “performed exceptionally well and delivered meaningful science data which New Zealand researchers are using,” the report states.

A different model for satellite development

Easther and others have questioned whether MethaneSAT made the best decisions in the satellite’s development. In a post on LinkedIn, Leigh Foster, former director of space systems at Rocket Lab, accused the project of having failed “to select the right spacecraft manufacturer, and a failure to focus on the right level of technical rigor pre-launch and during [optical alignment, integration and testing].”

Responding to these criticisms, Coifman wrote that the project sought to prove that a non-profit could build and launch a “game-changing instrument using as much off-the-shelf tech as possible,” rather than relying on slow-moving government-run space missions or commercial providers that keep the data private. “MethaneSAT is about transparency,” he wrote. “The data is meant to be open source . . . because we believe that’s the fastest way to turn data into action to protect the climate. The urgency of that purpose means we couldn’t afford the time or money involved in those other approaches.”

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If it had been a conventional NASA-type mission, MethaneSAT would have had “back-ups for the back-ups,” Coifman wrote. But adding those layers of redundancy “would have made it much slower and much more expensive – and totally beyond our reach.”

Even so, MethaneSAT was fully tested before launch according to best practices and protocols, Coifman says.

“The teams at MethaneSAT and Environmental Defense Fund worked with some of the most seasoned professionals in the commercial and government aerospace sectors. We had no reason to doubt their judgement,” Andrew Johnson, deputy head of the New Zealand Space Agency, wrote in a statement to Corporate Knights.

Not a failure

In a blog post earlier this month, Easther excoriated EDF for failing to disclose any results from its investigation into what went wrong with the satellite, writing, “Whatever was learnt has not been shared, a situation that comes as no surprise to those of us who watched this saga play out.”

He’s not alone in seeking clarity. “Even though it appears that New Zealand was not likely involved in the chain of events leading to the underperformance of MethaneSat, we as investors in the project are entitled to an explanation,” Nicholas Rattenbury, another physicist at the University of Auckland, has written in a collection of expert reactions on MethaneSAT’s breakdown for New Zealand’s Science Media Centre.

For its part, EDF rejects the idea that its MethaneSAT project was a failure. “We didn’t accomplish all the things we wanted to, but we’re proud of what we did accomplish,” says Steven Hamburg, EDF’s chief scientist and the project lead for MethaneSAT. The project exceeded expectations in terms of data quality, he says. “We really did push ahead a long way from where others were.”

The high-precision data that MethaneSAT collected in its one year of operation showed what many suspected: that emissions from oil and gas operations are higher than previously estimated or that the industry reports.

The data is also starting to serve its purpose in steering the fossil fuel industry toward methane emission reductions, at least by validating successful regulations. In September, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham revealed that her state’s methane intensity – a measure of escaped gas – is only 1.2% compared to Texas’s 3.1%, despite much steeper increases in production, and that the captured methane was worth US$125 million in additional natural gas production and $27 million in tax and royalty revenue. The difference is attributed to New Mexico’s stronger methane rules enacted in 2021.

Jon Goldstein, associate vice president for energy transition at EDF, said in a statement that the data obtained by the satellite proves “that cutting methane pollution and waste delivers economic benefits while protecting air quality and our climate.”

Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.

The post Requiem for a methane hunter appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“I am delighted – but actually not at all surprised – to see your results,” U.K.-based author and entrepreneur John Elkington says. “The U.K. has been a globally significant incubator of thinking on sustainable development, CSR [corporate social responsibility], ESG and climate solutions for decades, with things coming to a head around the time of COP26 [the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference, in Glasgow].”

Exeter in particular has been instrumental in international policy discussions. For the past several years, a team led by professor Pierre Friedlingstein has spearheaded the global carbon budget, one of the COP’s central metrics. Other Exeter initiatives, such as the Global Tipping Points Report led by professor Tim Lenton, also figured centrally in this year’s summit discussions. In fact, several of the United Kingdom’s most influential climate scientists are on faculty at Exeter, and they are part of a team of 1,500 research and education specialists.

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Likewise, sustainability is deeply embedded in Exeter’s curricula, but that doesn’t make it an exception among the ranking schools. Beth Patmore, MBA course leader at Nottingham Business School (ranked 16th), points out that this is part of a broader “systemic shift” in the United Kingdom, where sustainability has also been embedded in national policy frameworks, corporate governance codes and educational standards. “[It] is increasingly seen not as a niche concern but as a foundational lens through which strategy, finance, operations and leadership are taught,” she says.

Take, for example, the business school ranking by the Financial Times in London, a popular resource for MBA applicants. It now gives roughly 20% collective weighting to ESG-related curriculum content, the school’s carbon footprint, and faculty and student diversity among the key criteria in its methodology.

Sustaining a virtuous circle

“To me, this is also a question of supply and demand,” says Frederik Dahlmann, an associate professor of strategy and sustainability in Warwick’s MBA programs. “We know that sustainability matters to our students, for their roles, organizations and future career development, because they tell us it is an important factor when deciding where to study for their MBAs.”

Almost all the programs we contacted for this piece said the same. There is what Dahlmann calls a virtuous circle that is created within this system, where faculty are making meaningful policy and research contributions, attracting students who will go on to do the same, which in turn incentivizes universities to continue to make such contributions.

But what explains this dynamic in the United Kingdom in particular? ESG has waned in popularity in the United States and Canada, with major companies and institutions reneging on sustainability commitments following the election of Donald Trump amid fears of an unfriendly business environment. There were similar fears with businesses pulling back from commitments, fearing penalties from anti-greenwashing legislation (which has since been scaled back).

According to Donald Lancaster, program director of Exeter’s MBA, the likelihood of a similar state of affairs coming to pass in the United Kingdom is low. This is not only because the U.K. government’s pioneering sustainability initiatives have broad cross-party support, but also because strong markets and talent pools have developed around them. Even prior to the election of Trump, Lancaster points out, shareholder value has long been the overriding consideration in the U.S. context. Despite many exemplary sustainability-oriented MBA programs in the United Kingdom, they operate within a different cultural milieu than in the United Kingdom and Europe.

Hugh Wilson, a professor of marketing in Warwick’s MBA programs, suggests that the reason for this cultural discrepancy may be rooted in history. “As the epicentre of two world wars in the 20th century, Europe swung towards greater social and economic equality after each,” he says. European countries have sharp memories of the problems that can accrue in a society where these social and economic factors fall out of balance. Though that postwar ethos has been diluted over time, he proposes that it continues to influence the United Kingdom’s business and educational climate.

“We depend on a socially and environmentally sustainable world; environmental and social crises tend to hit us early and hard,” Wilson says. “[The U.K.] business community is acutely aware of the risks and opportunities that these create.”

Tristan Bronca is an award-winning magazine writer and editor based in Toronto.

The post A ‘virtuous circle’ has made the U.K. the world leader in sustainable business education appeared first on Corporate Knights.

All that began to change in the 1950s in Puerto Rico, when legislators there enacted the first condo laws in response to chronic housing shortages. The idea of horizontal ownership – aka strata – spread rapidly, first to Utah, then many other U.S. states, and eventually Canada in the late 1960s. Legal recognition unlocked consumer interest, especially among lower-income households, as well as mortgages and capital for new projects.

In the early 1960s, many people in the United States did not know how to pronounce the word “condominium,” but by 1972 three out of four people knew the term, the scholar Donna Bennett observed in a 2011 paper in Law Library Journal. Today, there are about 7.4 million condos in the United States, accounting for 6% of all homes. In Canada, the proportion is far greater: 15% nationally, and even higher in cities like Vancouver (32.8% of all dwellings), Calgary and Toronto (both just under 24%).

The appeal acknowledges that most people prefer to own a home rather than rent an apartment. In a growing number of cities, the flow of capital for conventional apartment building projects began to thin in the 1980s, while demand for condo apartments expanded. In some markets, like Vancouver and Toronto, the condo model, which promised developers fast returns, came to dominate the purpose-built rental sector. Conventional private apartment complexes were sustained by rental income as opposed to the sales of individual units, and the landlords had to contend with all the headaches that come with managing large properties. The swap took about three decades, with the condo – both owner-occupied and those acquired by small-time investors – emerging in some markets as the undisputed winner in the competition for real-estate-bound investment capital.

I see it as a structural reset and a return to fundamentals.

– Brandon Donnelly, founder, Globizen Group

Such was the case until about the last year or so. Today, in many big cities like Toronto and Vancouver, as well as metros in Florida, Texas and California, the condo market is either way down or comatose. Developers can’t pre-sell new units, so they can’t secure construction loans, so their projects are iced, scrapped or converted into conventional apartment buildings.

Despite these convulsions, housing affordability continues to erode, not just in Canada and the United States, but also in the supposed housing havens in large European cities – with a few exceptions, such as Vienna, where the Austrian government heavily subsidizes rentals.

The blinding speed of the condo market’s collapse – evidence of a speculative bubble just waiting to burst – raises intriguing questions: Is the condo business model dead? And if so, what will replace it? After all, demand for more housing, and affordable housing in particular, hasn’t gone away, and someone’s eventually going to figure out how to meet all that need.

A changing narrative

Most condo industry leaders are in a white-hot panic about the collapsing market, but some have begun to acknowledge that the current condo business model is done, and not just in a cyclical funk. “I see it as a structural reset and a return to fundamentals,” says Globizen Group founder Brandon Donnelly, an Ontario developer.

In recent years, in frothy markets fuelled by financialization, developers marketed ever-smaller units in ever-larger towers to mom-and-pop investors who reckoned they’d make money in two ways: renting out the units as income properties and then selling them for a capital gain; or buying “pre-sale” units by making a five-figure down payment, waiting for the market price to rise, and then flipping them for a quick profit.

“The reason we had this big surge of condo development had to do with the fact that land zoned for high-density residential earned a greater return for condos than purpose-built rental,” says economist and planner David Amborski, director of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Urban Research and Land Development. “Basically, there was an investor opportunity on the condo side to buy these [units] and rent them.”

Cooperative housing is making a comeback

When interest rates plunged after the 2008 credit crisis, a gold-rush mentality set in. “The irrational exuberance around pre-sale condos that existed during very low interest rates, particularly in the Greater Toronto market, [from] 2019 through to 2023, was sort of the crystal meth of the condo years,” says Mark Richardson, an affordable-housing activist. And as in any other speculative bubble, sales grind to a halt when prices begin to drop because the expectation of price appreciation vanishes.

The condo narrative has played out differently elsewhere. Many U.S. metros have experienced long declines in their condo sectors because of regulatory barriers: federal mortgage rules preventing more than a certain portion of units to be acquired by investors, or regulations that put developers on the hook for structural defects for up to a decade – a consumer-protection measure that drove up prices (the developers had to buy a lot of insurance and fight a lot of legal battles) and depressed sales. As the Urban Land Institute reported in 2022, condo sales, as a proportion of all “multi-family” projects (i.e., apartment buildings) had sunk to their lowest level in half a century in the United States. Which is to say, back to the years when a few pioneering states were passing legislation establishing strata title.

The rise of the missing middle

There are glimpses of how new housing markets might take shape. Non-profits are getting back into the game, using public subsidies to co-sponsor affordable rental projects or acquiring condo apartments in for-profit projects and then sequestering them in land trusts that hold rents low and prevent speculation.

These have been accompanied by the much discussed “missing middle” zoning reforms that allow multiplexes or accessory dwelling units (i.e., small backyard houses, now popular in regions like California and Oregon) to be built in traditional residential neighbourhoods. As well, a younger generation of builders are looking to enter an industry long dominated by very large players with the capital to finance huge high-rises.

“I do see in my interactions with missing-middle developers a significant shift, and that shift might just have to be with a new generation versus an older generation,” observes Carolyn Whitzman, an Ottawa-based planning and housing researcher, adding that these next-gen builders are interested in more modestly scaled projects.

Some missing-middle advocates are pressing for reforms to North American building-code conventions that effectively prohibit “point access block apartments,” which are legal and ubiquitous in much of the rest of the world. These tend to be low-rise apartments constructed around a single stairwell/elevator shaft as opposed to the standard apartment building configurations in North America, which require long internal corridors with apartments on both sides with emergency exits at either end of a floor (the thinking is that every occupant should be able to reach an escape route in the opposite direction from a fire).

Such safety requirements produce buildings with smaller apartments that face only in one direction. Point access blocks, on the other hand, allow for more livable apartment layouts and enable developers to make more efficient use of space (i.e., no long corridors). Nor is there any evidence that they’re less safe. Some cities, such as New York, Vancouver and Los Angeles, are experimenting with code changes that allow point access block buildings, but their potential, in North America, remains nascent.

The question is whether missing-middle-type development can be accelerated sufficiently to address the need for housing. After all, the condo business model, for all its flaws, quickly generated a lot of apartments. Many housing experts are skeptical and don’t think missing-middle projects will fill the void left by the collapse of the condo industry. Others see a half-full glass: “Right now, there’s a lot of market interest in developing at smaller scales, which wasn’t the case pre-2022,” Donnelly says, citing the “critical” importance of more permissive zoning rules in traditional house neighbourhoods.

What will take over?

The candidate most likely to fill the gap, at least in larger Canadian cities, is large-scale purpose-built rental apartment buildings. In the past few years, deep-pocketed institutional investors, such as Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt public pension fund, have become increasingly committed to underwriting these apartments. Their ranks include public-sector pension funds that have also traditionally invested in malls.

In the United States, while there’s been some growth in the development of rental apartments, the builders of multi-family housing still battle NIMBYism, land-use restrictions and powerful tax incentives that encourage sprawl.

Building and owning rental apartment towers is a very different business than erecting condos. Because there are no small investors to buy individual units in advance of construction, as is the case with condos, apartment developers have to take on long-term mortgages, which means they need healthy balance sheets. It’s not an in-and-out type business. Yet apartment buildings generate exceptionally stable income streams, which appeal to institutional investors like pension plans or real estate investment trusts (REITs). They also tend to be better built than condo towers, Richardson notes. “The developers themselves have some skin in the game long-term.”

The rental market has a carbon problem – here’s how to solve it

Like almost all categories of residential real estate, the viability of rental projects has turned on certain public policies. In the case of apartment buildings in Canada, in the 1960s and 1970s, an obscure federal tax credit permitted investors to write off losses in their non-real-estate holdings against income generated by rental buildings. That measure attracted a massive amount of capital from smaller investors and underwrote an entire generation of slab apartment buildings in many large Canadian cities.

Mark Carney’s Liberals have promised to resurrect this tax break, and the federal government is also plowing billions in loans and loan guarantees into purpose-built rental projects that offer affordable rents to lower- and middle-income tenants. Given the moribund state of the condo business, where developers can’t start new projects because so few people are prepared to put down deposits on pre-sale units, Carney’s timing couldn’t be better.

Whether the rental sector surges, as it did half a century ago, remains to be seen. Donnelly feels the jury is out. “It’s hard to say because the development landscape is very much in flux right now. But the margins on new purpose-built rental projects are significantly tighter than what they were on new condominiums pre-2022. I don’t think we’ll see [purpose-built rentals] dominate in the way condominiums did unless the returns become more attractive.”

Yet, as Amborski notes, investors no longer see condos as a viable asset class that can generate better returns than the stock market or gold, which means all those dollars that flowed freely into tiny investor-owned units have gone elsewhere and may not return any time soon.

Donnelly is optimistic about the fact that the bursting of the condo bubble has driven out speculators, which is good news for people who want to live in the apartments they buy, and also for asset managers who want to invest in rental buildings. Without the condo sector, these firms will no longer be forced to compete for outrageously overvalued real estate with small-time investors looking to make a quick capital gain. “The focus going forward is going to be on meeting end-user demand,” he says. “This is a healthy thing for the market.”

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

The post The condo model is collapsing. What comes next? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The RV industry, which is dominated by three manufacturers, is the largest U.S. consumer of tropical wood. NGOs operating in Indonesia claim the industry devours 500 giant trees every day. Its preferred hardwood is lauan, which makes light, moisture-resistant floors and cabinets. Lauan is plentiful on the island of Borneo, but activists have found that price-conscious RV manufacturers regularly buy the wood from unethical suppliers who bulldoze forests rather than manage them sustainably. 

Ford’s new ‘Model T’ moment is all about EVs

Last fall, Washington, D.C.–based Mighty Earth and London-based Earthsight invited a team from The New York Times on an investigative mission to Borneo’s interior, home of the Dayak people. They found drained wetlands, ruined landscapes and communities displaced. According to Mighty Earth’s forest commodities director, Amanda Hurowitz, the probe “exposed the destruction of 100,000 acres of orangutan habitat and Indigenous Dayak forest, fueled by Winnebago and other RV companies.”

Most RV makers and suppliers contacted by The Times chose not to comment on the issue. The largest RV company, Thor Industries, which makes Jayco and Airstream products, said it was “not aware” of any deforested wood in its supply chain. 

Hurowitz wants the RV industry to insist on transparency and sustainability in its supply chain. Mighty Earth estimates that buying from responsible lauan suppliers would cost the industry less than US$20 per vehicle. She says Indonesian authorities have worked hard to reduce commercial deforestation, although “a handful of unprincipled companies have attempted to evade forest protections.”

Hurowitz challenges RV owners to demand change from the industry. It shouldn’t be too hard, as the RV industry purports to revere the environment. Jayco, for instance, offers tips on “Making Your Next RV Trip More Green,” such as separating trash, turning down the thermostat and making your own cleaning products. Now it’s time for RV owners to ask the manufacturers to clean up their act.

The post The environmental dark side of camper vans appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Degrowthers want an economy that benefits many more than the few and where lifestyles are less dependent on earning capacity. They want an economy where bellies feel full of cheap, local food, where bodies feel stronger from universal healthcare, and where the world feels easier to navigate because common infrastructure like public transit is more abundant and accessible. It’s a world with fewer stresses.

Omer Tayyab, an ecological economist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, describes it as a shift to “public luxury and private sufficiency.” 

Degrowth offers a solution to not just a major economic problem, but a social one. For Matt Orsagh, of the Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance, the community focus is the selling point, as well as “less time working, more time for care, more time for your family.” 

An influential degrowth movement could help stitch back together some of society’s frayed social threads, those we read about in surveys where respondents admit to identifying less with their communities than in decades past. Any fix to the climate and economic crises we’re navigating will require people to see beyond their individual needs. This is part of what makes degrowth unique: it offers a pathway to not only mitigate climate change, but to help save the community-driven part of our nature that makes us human.

What might we give up to achieve this lofty vision? For starters, industries with disproportionately high resource use might feel worth sacrificing, depending on your lifestyle. For instance, 92 million tons of fast fashion enter landfills annually, to say nothing of the electricity and oil used to produce synthetic textiles. Or how about the private jet industry? It caters to a small swath of the global population, yet in 2023 it caused about 4% of all civil aviation emissions. The cruise ship industry is another natural target, along with other sectors associated with decadence and excess, which benefit or enrich a small portion of the population. 

Degrowth is also a call to scale back the sustained, upward economic growth our culture expects, from individual corporations up through entire economies. In a podcast interview, Jason Hickel, author of Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, put it this way: we tend to see efficiencies as opportunities to expand production, rather than to right-size our economy.

The shift that degrowthers propose is the antithesis of the self-focused consumer culture and workaholic grind in which most of us are steeped – and that we may not be able to physically sustain.

There are also natural limits that perpetual growth necessarily confronts. Marie-Josée Privyk, a consultant who advises companies on their ESG disclosures, uses the example of setting up new renewable-power generation. “There aren’t enough resources to generate the infrastructure required to displace all the fossil energy we are consuming,” she says. The pivot to electric cars offers an example. Yes, they produce dramatically lower emissions than their gas-powered counterparts. But according to the MIT Climate Portal, mining lithium (a non-renewable resource) for electric car batteries can unleash up to 16 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. A degrowth approach might seek to reduce the number of cars on the road and invest in mass transit. 

Instead of trying to innovate our way out of crisis, a less technical approach might be necessary: a sharp cultural shift away from the consumption that propels our economic lives onward and upward and our collective mood downward.

For most of human history, we didn’t pursue growth in the way we do today. Wealth was a measure of success, but GDP became a global economic tool only 80 years ago. The more the economy grows, the greater the number of jobs and wealth. This creates resources that broadly improve the lives of citizens.

How the abundance agenda could unshackle the green economy

Along the way, the GDP yardstick has morphed into a different beast. “Now it’s tied up in our culture. It’s tied up in our politics, it’s tied up in our business, it’s tied up in our [retirement savings plans],” Orsagh says.

Degrowth, meanwhile, has a shorter history, taking its modern roots from the “décroissance” movement of early-2000s France. The idea took hold so strongly that former French president Nicolas Sarkozy enlisted Nobel-Prize-winning economists to head a commission that explored possible alternatives to GDP as a progress indicator. Degrowthers have many to choose from, ranging from health metrics like life expectancy or alternative indicators like the Sustainable Development Index or the World Happiness Report.

While in recent years the European Parliament, the European Union’s legislative body, has hosted two degrowth conferences, the movement has less clout in North America. That’s partly because, in Tayyab’s view, institutions like labour unions, environmentalist organizations and socialist parties are stronger in Europe, making their voices more powerful on the subject, and, in turn, making degrowth more viable. One of the leading voices in degrowth, Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito, says EU countries make more space in their economies for noncommercial activities, which is, he told Foreign Policy, “already half-degrowth.”

“[Degrowth] is well established in Europe and finds resonance with similar ideas from the Global South like Buen Vivir (Latin America), Swara (India) and Ubuntu (Africa),” Tayyab says.

Since governments operate at scale and can leverage state institutions to achieve degrowth targets, Tayyab says this power is necessary for degrowth: “The problem is that our governments during the neoliberal era have become followers of markets rather than shaping them for the people they putatively serve.”

Creative defiance

The business world would also have to start reshaping itself for a degrowth economy, and the jury is out on how this will take shape. Some firms may keep similar models – like public health or transit agencies – while others may have to explore new business lines or corporate structures as they negotiate the balance between their own scale and profit, and the health of people and planet.

Another obstacle might be the “D-word” itself, with its negative prefix and all the attached gloomy presumptions, like the fears of austerity or Luddism that boosters say are extreme reactions. Degrowth is less a regression than a reallocation of economic energies, they argue. “There’s still going to be things that grow, but let’s not grow the things that are destroying us or life-support systems,” says Christopher F. Jones, a historian of environment, economics and energy at Arizona State University.

But degrowthers exist on a wide spectrum, and they advocate for a lot of different things. Politicians and business owners may, because of competing interests, draw their limits to keep political donors happy or preserve profits, but everyday boosters frame degrowth in their own image too.

Some supporters apply degrowth ideals with relative conservatism. The economy they want to live in might end up more like a steady-state economy, which values improvement over expansion and focuses on optimizing resources. Others take a more radical approach, pontificating on burning the capitalist system down and starting over in a socialist (if not communist) utopia. This reset strategy must be dismissed as it offers no real plan for incremental improvements. Lives improve only if and when utopia is found. Environmental crises and lifestyle challenges would compound in the meantime.

For a movement selling itself to a skeptical public, having wildly different visions of degrowth exist in the same conversation is a marketing nightmare. Conversations about degrowth sometimes conflate it with “doughnut economics,” a regenerative economic model designed to account for environmental limits. Shaped like the pastry, the doughnut model has an inner ring of basic human needs but with the ecological ceiling as the outer ring, finding a balance in the space between for the well-being of people and planet. Degrowth boosters also increasingly use “postgrowth” and “degrowth” interchangeably, despite them previously being treated as more distinct concepts.

Orsagh, who writes a newsletter on degrowth but whose institute has “postgrowth” in the title, sees the former as a tool to get to the latter. “Degrowth isn’t a replacement for capitalism,” he says. “It’s what the path is to whatever comes next.”

North America represents a final frontier of sorts for degrowth. “In Canada, there doesn’t yet exist a strong enough political force that can articulate these demands,” Tayyab says.

Even so, in some niche areas, degrowth policies are taking hold in Canada and abroad – mostly related to reducing the time spent at work.

The right to disconnect, a policy that allows employees to ignore work-related emails and calls outside of their contracted hours, is one example of the trend. In Canada, it is already law in Ontario for firms with 25 or more employees. The federal government may soon enforce such a law for regulated industries, such as banking. At least a dozen nations have versions of similar regulations on the books.

Four-day workweeks and universal basic income, two other policies in this vein, are also increasingly becoming part of economic conversations, shifting away from traditional ideas of growth, productivity and work–life balance. Multiple countries, Canada included, explored basic income supports through a suite of emergency benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were successful in untangling the ability to live with dignity from labour value and lifting people from poverty. In Canada, the percentage of Canadians living in poverty dropped from 10.3% in 2019 to 6.4% in 2020. One analysis found the assistance sufficient to move a single person out of poverty even in pricey Toronto. Such pandemic relief also led to record low poverty in the United States in 2023. Both countries lost this momentum after the policies lapsed, with rates creeping up.

Jones, who recently authored The Invention of Infinite Growth, thinks promoting the idea of a well-being economy, instead of hammering against GDP, can help degrowth make inroads. “Not every culture has to define well-being the same way, but everyone could agree we want to pursue it,” he says.

It’s an idealistic future to hope for, but that isn’t a criticism. Degrowth may be at odds with today’s economy, but it’s not necessarily at odds with a world we’d enjoy living in or one where we make faster progress toward tackling the climate crisis. It may seem disconnected from reality, but that’s a failure of imagination, and imagination is precisely what we need to move forward – to look at what we have at our disposal and get creative, rather than push it any further beyond its limits.

Rob Csernyik is a freelance journalist specializing in business and investigative reporting, as well as long-form features.

The post Why the degrowth movement thinks it can do abundance better appeared first on Corporate Knights.

If you haven’t heard about abundance yet, you probably will. The concept is having a moment and shaping policy discussions in North America and around the world. Titles like Klein and Thompson’s, Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck and Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works all make versions of the same case. 

Abundance is starting to step off the bookstore shelf, igniting policy discussion forums at think tanks and universities. In September, more than 120 U.S. local politicians formed Abundance Elected to mould future local political leaders in the concept’s image.

Listen to any podcasts discussing abundance (themselves abundant) and critical realities are often glossed over. Innovations rarely take hold overnight, and some big swings will spectacularly fail. Abundance is often inscrutably clouded in start-up speak and the dynamic postures and sky’s-the-limit potential of aspiring Elon Musks pitching to venture capitalists. Financial speculators can take a punt on whatever risky start-up they want; it’s their dime. But for reimagining society, politicians and business leaders need to focus on concrete issues, not vibes. It is necessary to sell the sizzle and the lab-grown steak.

Abundance proponents suggest that a sizable amount of the scarcity we live with is born of assessments, bureaucratic processes and regulations. For example, the International Energy Agency estimates that around 1,650 gigawatts of clean energy capacity in advanced development stages is waiting to be connected to the grid. By reducing barriers, we can spur innovation, fight climate change, grow the economy and live our best lives. 

Though abundance is a more-is-more policy, the growth it inspires is not indiscriminate. “They want growth in very specific areas: growth in climate technology, growth in scientific discovery, growth in housing stock that allows people to live in cities,” says Christopher F. Jones, a historian of environment, economics and energy at Arizona State University. Though Jones disagrees with some of the key arguments the book makes, he says this focus makes abundance “different and more subtle” than simply chasing gross domestic product.

While talking heads sell abundance as new, in some respects it’s not radically different from the economic system we already have. Abundance is pro-business, friendly to entrepreneurs and new entrants, and it doesn’t sideline traditional metrics like GDP growth and job creation. It is a maximalist creed that caters to desires people have for the latest tech and enjoying lives of leisure, if we can step out of our own way.

In their telling, scientists, clean energy companies and real estate developers are sitting idle like cars at a red light, waiting for it to turn green so they can solve problems like illness, climate change and scarce housing. One example is the COVID-19 vaccine. Creating a working vaccine in short order required the U.S. government to launch Operation Warp Speed (OWS), reducing red tape for drug approval, investing in research, and collaborating with corporate America to get jabs in arms. Klein and Thompson point to the speed and effectiveness of OWS as an example of what abundance-style thinking leads to.

The crises spread plainly before us – climate and housing especially – add urgency to this narrative. “We either build faster or accept catastrophe,” they write. 

Fewer restrictions, more big swings

In Canada, we build slow. In a recent podcast appearance, Prime Minister Mark Carney advocated changing the federal government’s approach to green-lighting and regulation, shifting “from why to how” when it comes to major projects. For example, it’s not unheard of for projects facing federal environmental assessments such as interprovincial transmission lines, hydropower or railways to expect the process to take years. And a review from Blakes law firm says the climate of environmental regulations in Canada is growing stricter, rather than more relaxed. Meanwhile, Europe is dramatically simplifying its climate reporting standards for companies to boost competitiveness.

According to the abundance crowd, the reflex to keep tightening environmental rules has become an anachronism. As the toll of our activities on the planet shocked the public in the 1960s and 1970s and led them to demand change from those in power, the price for building green became building slowly. It served us then, but boosters of abundance suggest these regulations now prevent us from building and innovating enough, and the costs and time delays have become if not discouraging, prohibitive. With fewer restrictions and more big swings, the growth we realize, in theory, could go on forever.

Yet keeping lifestyles robust and expanding the economy – even with pure and green aims – is at odds with the more penitent, scaled-back approach that critics say the climate and ecological crises demand.

Consider the expected growth of AI use, powered by electricity-intensive data centres. The World Economic Forum estimates that globally such centres will use more power than Japan by 2030. An abundance argument doesn’t demand a societal pivot away from AI tech, or disincentivize the industry – it switches it to green energy, so we can have our cake and eat it too. At least to a certain point.

“When confronting the reality of infinite growth and resource consumption on a finite planet, they resort to hand-waving it away via techno-optimism: the belief that new technologies will overcome resource constraints,” says Matt Orsagh, co-founder of the Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance.

If abundance’s central problem is society not flexing its innovation muscles enough, there’s another critical dilemma alongside it. Have we pushed the limits of our ecosystem too far with pollutants and resource extraction, and if not, how much further can we morally and physically go?

Who benefits?

Abundance harkens to David Potter’s mid-20th-century “people of plenty” concept, which suggested that Americans defined themselves by the economic abundance that shaped their lives and coloured national character after the Second World War. It ushered in a new prosperity for many, in those less regulated days, even if key ingredients in examples of the time included exploitative practices (like extensive rail lines built using poorly paid immigrant labour) today’s society wouldn’t accept.

Abundance proponents suggest we can all benefit under a wide economic umbrella. But Jones says that Klein and Thompson focus too much on urban audiences in Abundance and that policies that concentrate too keenly on cities might leave behind low- and middle-income rural residents. Omer Tayyab, an ecological economist at the University of Barcelona’s Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, notes that the United States is already a wealthy country per capita yet chooses not to distribute the wealth. “Having a more deregulated system, even if it were to produce more, wouldn’t necessarily mean that the most vulnerable are uplifted,” he says.

Then there is the trust question. In an abundance society, political leaders will decide where to focus deregulation and growth opportunities. Business people will choose how to innovate in ways that make society more plentiful, which may not always bless their bottom lines. Yet we’re in an era unconducive to trusting these groups to reform in the best interests of the hoi polloi. Earlier this year, Angus Reid polled liberal and conservative Canadians to see what groups they trusted. Both overwhelmingly have a “great deal or fair amount of trust” in scientists. Political leaders, big businesses and large tech companies scored low.

Rebuilding public trust will be critical to chasing an abundance agenda in the United States. Recent polling suggests Democrats respond more favourably to populist rather than abundance-coded messages.

Mark Carney: Abundance bro?

Abundance policy offerings are scarce in Canada. Provincial governments in Alberta and Ontario have successfully won mandates with promises to trim red tape, but fixes have mostly been small, mundane bureaucratic processes rather than at-scale fixes to unlock abundance. Tariff threats, lagging productivity and failure to commercialize innovation make abundance a timely concern.

Canada’s 2025 election polls showed that Canadians were worried about the country’s relationship with the United States, housing affordability and cost of living. Abundance policies align with these concerns, but the connection has to be explicitly drawn by lawmakers. 

As a centrist liberal politician, Mark Carney aligns ideologically with the dominant view of abundance circulating in society. But suggestions from columnists and other wonks that he is an abundance politician conflates abundance with willingness to build. Case in point: Build Canada Homes. The new federal entity has a goal of increasing home construction in Canada, and Liberals have promoted it using abundance language. Carney recently announced initial funding of $13 billion and the construction of 4,000 new homes on six sites across the country.

But abundance is meant to unleash tools we have at the ready. The goals of Build Canada Homes, though promoted in abundance-speak, are heavily predicated on advanced prefab technology that isn’t at scale yet, plus Canada lacks the construction workforce to build this influx of homes.

Mike Moffatt, an economist with the Missing Middle Initiative, points to the Federal Housing Accelerator fund as another example of abundance-flavoured policymaking to address the housing crisis. The $4.4-billion purse is directed at helping municipalities increase housing stock faster, tying approval to outcomes like increasing density and growing supply faster than historical averages. What separates it from status quo thinking is not only the big vision, but a program designed to outpace current expectations for housing growth and the willingness to change regulatory habits to make it happen.

It’s too early to tell if the abundance movement will take itself, as one advocacy group puts it, “from op-eds to outcomes.” But interesting times call for solutions that meet the moment. Our culture of regulation has led to a point where many feel society is stagnant and regulations are preventing us from thriving. Abundance represents a clear break from this history. If making inroads on housing, climate change and more bountiful lives is really only a matter of turning red lights to green, perhaps it’s time to finally start making the switch.

Rob Csernyik is a freelance journalist specializing in business and investigative reporting, as well as long-form features.

The post How the abundance agenda could unshackle the green economy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It’s the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, that lofty climate pledge that has helped push – in some cases reluctantly – countries toward carbon-cutting measures. COP30 organizers are determined to make this year different, shifting from “ambition to implementation,” and they’re making the point with a backdrop of stark inequality.  

“We cannot hide the fact that we are in a world with lots of inequalities and where sustainability and fighting climate change is something that has to get closer to people,” André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, president designate for COP30, said in an interview with the Associated Press. “President Lula wants this to be the COP of truth. He wants people to be told the truth about how climate change will affect their countries,” he added in September.  

Brazil proved to be its own study in contradictions in the lead-up to Belém, which has made headlines for a dearth in accommodations for the influx of thousands of delegates, as well as a controversial new highway cutting through rainforest to facilitate the conference. South America’s largest country, with a population of more than 212 million, Brazil has sought to regain environmental bona fides that were left in tatters under the previous administration of Jair Bolsonaro, when deforestation ran rampant in the Amazon.  

Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, former union leader turned president, assumed his third term in office in 2023 with bold pledges to end deforestation in the Amazon by 2030, boosting the use of satellite monitoring and other mechanisms to guard against illegal logging and mining in the so-called lungs of the earth. He also established a dedicated ministry for Indigenous Peoples as a way to protect their rights, setting out to demarcate their territories. In the lead-up to COP30, Brazil launched a tropical-forest conservation fund that aims to raise US$125 billion. Hosting COP30 was an important show of his government’s environmental commitment. Brazil has pledged to reduce its emissions by 59% and 67% below 2005 levels by 2035. But various activists and organizations have drawn attention to the cracks in Brazil’s narrative, not least for its plan to continue to exploit its oil reserves.  

Lula has pushed for Brazil to drill in the mouth of the Amazon, arguing that the development will help the country complete its energy transition. The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources approved the drilling of an exploratory well in an offshore oil field in the Amazon, a site that had long been in the sights of the national oil company, Petrobras. The petroleum giant had previously been denied rights to explore, in large measure because of doubts over its ability to respond to oil spills or other accidents in the ecologically sensitive area. In its October approval, the environmental watchdog said the company had made various improvements to its emergency response plan, which led to the green light. 

Brazil is also pushing ahead with new mining projects for critical minerals, with as many as 800 mining companies exploring in the Amazon. “There is no energy transition without mining,” Alexandre Silveira, minister of mines and energy, said in early 2024. 

“Brazil cannot lead the world to a cleaner, healthier future by loosening environmental regulations, promoting a fossil fuel build out, and allowing mining projects that violate Indigenous sovereignty and destroy carbon sinks like the Amazon,” Patricia Rodriguez and Jan Morrill wrote in a commentary for Earthworks, an organization that advocates against oil, gas and mining pollution.   

The question of environmental regulations has exposed fault lines within Lula’s administration. Environment and Climate Change Minister Marina Silva, an internationally acclaimed environmentalist, slammed a decision by the Brazilian Senate in May to approve a bill that loosened environmental licensing rules, calling it a “death blow” to important protections in Brazil. Her position in turn drew the ire of industry and other sectors. The legislation was later modified, earning Silva’s support. 

But the showdown underscored the powerful forces that are at play in Brazil, which has taken an even more prominent role on the international stage as President Lula presents one of the clearest voices of opposition to U.S. President Donald Trump and his trade war tactics.  

In opening remarks at COP30 last week, Lula stressed the need for true climate commitments, to “take the scientific warnings seriously” and “face reality.” He closed by thanking people for coming to the Amazon.

“Many people did not believe that it was possible to bring a COP to an Amazonian state, because people are more used to parading around big cities,” he noted. “We wanted people to come here to see what the Amazon really is.”

The post Brazil’s balancing act at COP30 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The “impact” metric was introduced to the Corporate Knights MBA ranking several years ago as a bonus, but this year is the first that it has become part of the official ranking. Corporate Knights evaluated 179 programs and ranked the top 40 for their focus on sustainability. Ninety percent of the score these rankings are based on is awarded for the content of the curriculum, and now 10% has been awarded for impact – what schools’ alumni are doing post-graduation.

The school with the highest score on this measure this year was Bard College in New York, with an impact rating of 56%. Out of 62 graduates, Corporate Knights identified 35 who are either in sustainability roles or working at companies recognized for their sustainability efforts. By comparison, the average alumni rating was 16% among other schools that made the ranking. Only the University of Vermont’s MBA program had a comparable impact rating of 52%. 

For the last three years, Bard has consistently ranked in the top five MBA programs for sustainability. Bard stands out as one of the few business schools specifically designating its MBA as an MBA in Sustainability, another being the University of Vermont. “They are not shy about putting the program’s sustainability focus front and centre,” says Corporate Knights research analyst Muhammad Talha. 

We need our students out changing the world at scale in a hurry.

– Eban Goodstein, founder of the MBA in sustainability, Bard College

Bard’s graduates have compelling stories: a schoolteacher who went on to become a vice president of ESG (environmental, social and governance) for the Americas at Deutsche Bank within just one year of graduating; the emergency medical technician who became a managing consultant at the global firm Guidehouse. Perhaps the most famous example is Chelsea Mozen, who developed the idea for Etsy to offset its carbon emissions from shipping during her capstone project at Bard. Just four years after graduating, she was the chief sustainability officer for Etsy, making it one of the first major global companies to commit to a climate pledge.

“Our students’ interests range from food to fashion to energy. There’s a lot of variability,” says Eban Goodstein, an economist and the founder of Bard’s program. He explains that the program is highly experiential. “I think of it as 20 four-day retreats spread out over two years,” he says. “It’s almost more like a fine arts degree where you are learning directly from artists.”

In Bard’s MBA, students begin working on real-world projects in their first year, often with major industry players. The goal, according to Goodstein, is not just to respond to, but entirely shift how we address – and prevent – mounting environmental and social challenges. “We need our students out changing the world at scale in a hurry,” he adds.

All of the MBA programs on the list open up a multitude of options to get that done. For many of these students, it means taking on a key corporate sustainability role at a global leading company, or launching their own enterprise with values of social responsibility and environmental sustainability embedded in the organization’s DNA. But in a different economy, the approach post-graduation might look very different.

2025 Better World MBA top 40

Take, for example, the top-ranked “large” school, defined as a program with more than 80 graduates annually. This year, the spot belongs to Centrum’s PUCP in Peru. Centrum was one of just two South American schools on the top 40 list (the other, Colombia’s Universidad Externado, jumped from 112 in last year’s ranking to 40 in this year’s).

Centrum operates in a different context than the majority of schools in the ranking, which are overwhelmingly from the Americas or Europe. The Peruvian economy is largely “informal,” associate dean Sandro Sánchez explains. While many Centrum graduates are vying for corporate jobs (about 20 graduates of the last two years landed at companies like Vestas and Schneider Electric), the majority of these students go on to work in – or start – smaller companies, including those outside the urban centres in sectors like mining and agriculture, which remain the engines of the Peruvian economy. 

This is not the same business environment where you tend to see corporate sustainability officers or climate pledges. But this is precisely what makes this training so important. It’s here that graduates’ vision for social and environmentally positive change – a vision they develop in their MBA program – will have the greatest impact.

Tristan Bronca is an award-winning magazine writer and editor based in Toronto.

2025 Better World MBA top 10 large schools

METHODOLOGY

The 2025 Corporate Knights Better World MBA Top 40 ranking examines the performances of 179 business schools, drawn from the most recent FT100 MBA Ranking, the Princeton Review Best Green MBA, the Top 40 from the 2024 Better World MBA ranking, and all current PRME Champions; and business schools accredited by the Association of MBAs, the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) or the EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development) QualityImprovement System (EQUIS) and also signatories to the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education that opt in for evaluation. Based on publicly disclosed information on their websites, schools are evaluated on the sustainability content of their core courses and can review and request revisions to the analysis. Additionally, schools may voluntarily provide the number of recent graduates employed with impact organizations, which is worth 10% of the overall score.

The post These top global MBAs for sustainability are maximizing impact appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Leah Gotkin

28, Toronto, ON
Senior manager, climate change – Scotiabank

Leah Gotkin began her career promoting electric vehicle adoption in Canada, then advanced sustainability strategies at Upswing Solutions, with an emphasis on equity and Indigenous engagement. Now at Scotiabank, she drives the bank’s $350-billion climate-finance initiative and supports decarbonization across high-emission sectors.

 

"My courage comes from a belief that climate action can unlock shared value. Everyone has a ‘why,’ and the beauty of working in climate is that competing ‘whys’ can co-exist."

Marissa Louie

25, Toronto, ON
Associate manager, climate reporting – TD Bank Group

Marissa Louie has helped TD Bank Group strengthen its ESG disclosures and has been instrumental in shaping communication around its plan to achieve net-zero by 2050. She led a rigorous review of external disclosure practices to help ensure credible climate-reporting in alignment with regulatory and stakeholder expectations and acted as a lead writer for its the TD and Indigenous Communities in Canada report.

"Sustainability reporting can be a catalyst for change. It’s not just about producing reports – it’s about connecting ambitions, promoting transparency and accountability, and integrating sustainability into business-as-usual."

Samita Rimal

27, Halifax, NS
Specialist, energy transition – Eastward Energy

Samita Rimal became Nepal’s only female graduate of hydropower mechanical engineering in 2019. Today, she leads Nova Scotia’s first green-hydrogen production and blending project. She has also co-founded the Student Energy chapter in Newfoundland.

“Growing up in Nepal’s energy poverty and now leading energy transition projects in Canada, I’ve learned that true progress comes from the courage to question, learn, unlearn and relearn.”

Adrien Roy

29, Toronto, ON
Manager – Quinn and Partners

Adrien Roy has completed more than 60 climate projects focused on baselining greenhouse gas emissions, modelling decarbonization pathways, and building net-zero transition plans and strategies. He has helped set six science-based net-zero targets covering 1.5 million tonnes of GHGs.

“In 2025, the climate battle is shifting from developing new solutions towards implementing existing solutions at scale. It’s become clear that no single person, company or technology will solve the climate crisis independently. The courage needed to win this battle is therefore rooted in collaboration.”

 

Armaan Makhani-Kotadia

22, Waterloo, ON
Youth climate educator and planetary health researcher – McMaster University | The Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care | TEDx

At McMaster University, Armaan Makhani-Kotadia has contributed to a campaign to reduce plastic water bottles on campus and install more water refill stations, and he co-founded a fund that awards marginalized students for sustainability initiatives. He is also part of the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care, contributing to national networking hubs and training resources to address greenhouse gas emissions from healthcare buildings.

“My courage is guiding me to weave together health, equity and climate action – threads too often kept apart. I bring the skill of transforming climate anxiety into agency, helping young people step into their own power as leaders rather than bystanders.”

Annabelle Liao

24, Vancouver, BC
Project lead | founder and director — Kambo energy group | Project Arrowroot

Annabelle Liao has held roles in cleantech at Foresight Canada, climate finance at Vancity, and community wealth building at Social Innovation Canada. Beyond that, she’s volunteered in grassroots and international organizations advancing global climate action and led a team at ClimaTalk that created resources to de-jargonize international climate negotiations. She also founded and is the director of Project Arrowroot, an NGO funded by the Canada Service Corps and Re-Earth Initiative that paves paths to green careers for young people.

“I place my hope in the 95% of young people around the world who are worried about the impacts of climate change and the 85% of Canadian high school students who want more climate education.”

Sehjal Bhargava

28, Saskatoon, SK
Family medicine physician – University of Ottawa, Harvard University

Sehjal Bhargava’s passion for affecting the social determinants of health has led to a focus on climate change and its impacts on health. She has served as Saskatchewan chair and is currently Ontario co-chair of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. In 2021, she launched PaRx, a program that encourages Saskatchewan physicians to prescribe time in nature to improve patients’ health.

“As a physician, I firmly believe that we are only as healthy as our environment. I am driven by experiences to look outside of the clinic and toward policies that focus on improving the health of people and the planet.”

 

Ali Tapaquon

29, Oskana kâ-asastêki, SK
Principal and founder – Tatâga Inc.

Ali Tapaquon is founder and CEO of Tatâga Inc., a consultancy that integrates traditional ecological knowledge with modern strategy to advance environmental, social and cultural sustainability. Tapaquon developed the Reconciliation Assessment Report – a tool that helps organizations operationalize sustainability through Indigenous rights, knowledge systems and anti-racism.

“My sôhkitêhêwin (courage) comes from the teachings of my culture and Peoples. Our ways are rooted in responsibility and stewardship for the land, waters and skies. I intentionally practise Indigenous strategy to guide organizations in seeing climate action not as a technical fix, but as a relational duty to future generations and to themselves.”

Yazan Zamel

25, Toronto, ON
President – Sustainable Engineer Association 

As an energy-efficiency consultant, energy analyst and now guided projects coordinator at Student Energy, Yazan Zamel champions net-zero energy projects in low-income communities. He has coordinated more than a dozen solar installations in underserved areas, reducing diesel reliance. He is president of the Sustainable Engineers Association at the University of Toronto and founder of the Ray of Hope program that connects refugees and youth with education and jobs.

“I find hope in young people realizing that their voices matter and in communities lighting up with renewable power, which is proof that climate justice is possible when we act together.”

 

Zeina Seaifan

25, Montreal, QC
Scholar-activist – McGill University | Shake Up the Establishment

Zeina Seaifan is a scholar-activist pursuing a PhD at McGill University, researching migration and environmental justice. She now leads the policy committee at Climate Sirens, a feminist climate-justice organization where she mentors 12 women in climate advocacy, and volunteers at Shake Up the Establishment. Seaifan has led national environmental consultations, co-authored policy reports and created accessible educational tools for youth and newcomers.

“Worldwide, climate devastation is informed by the twin flames of colonialism and extraction. We’re advocating for sustainable systems rooted in Indigenous perspectives and other overlooked knowledges.”

Andrea Kilibarda

26, Montreal, QC
 Co-founder, head of client delivery and impact – Climate Finance Advisors

Andrea Kilibarda co-founded a climate-finance advisory firm based in Montreal. To date, her firm has supported the sustainable alignment of approximately $3 billion in assets on behalf of asset owners, collectively targeting a reduction of approximately 500,000 tonnes of financed carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions by 2050. She has also worked with developing countries on plans to align finance with sustainability and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“We are facing the greatest financial challenge of our time: closing the $7.4-trillion annual climate finance gap. I find hope in the growing movement of purpose-driven leaders building a new investment paradigm that reimagines capital as a force for good.”

Rasul Huseynzade

20, Vancouver, BC
Youth ambassador, sustainability champion, policy adviser and human rights advocate – Jane Goodall Institute – Roots & Shoots

A former UN Development Programme champion and UNICEF youth advocate, Rasul Huseynzade has co-founded various youth-led organizations, including The Children’s Union, a regional Fridays for Future and Youth for Climate Turkiye. He currently serves as a youth adviser to the Jane Goodall Institute, Aga Khan Foundation, It Gets Better Canada and The King’s Trust Canada. He is also a climate ambassador for the World Bank Group.

“I had to go through many difficulties, but I feel like this journey shaped me in every way, because it taught me to be a team, it showed me that change doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t just happen; it made me realize that change is a process.”

Astrid Wilson

27, Bella Bella, B.C.
Economic development coordinator – Heiltsuk Economic Development Corporation

Astrid Wilson is intimately involved in supporting sustainable, culturally grounded economic development in her home community of the Heiltsuk Nation, on the central coast of British Columbia. In 2022, she helped organize the Commission for Environmental Cooperation’s Joint Public Advisory Committee gathering, in Victoria, ensuring that Indigenous voices and perspectives were meaningfully included in international environmental dialogues.

Kiemia Rezagian

28, Windsor, on
Engagement and training director – Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment

Kiemia Rezagian has designed and run an advocacy and mobilization program for physicians, spearheaded by the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. The program aims to empower physicians to increase their involvement in climate crisis advocacy. To date, it has trained some 150 health professionals, and its success is based in large measure on Rezagian’s leadership.

“Doctors see every day how unhealthy environments lead to sickness and even death. I’m helping them tell these stories so more people see what is at stake.”

 

Paris Liu

24, London, ONTARIO
Master’s student in environmental policy at Sciences Po; former climate change project assistant at ICLEI Canada – Sciences Po 

Paris Liu co-developed McMaster University’s first climate change civil engineering course and co-founded a national working group through the Canadian Federation of Engineering Students to embed climate education into engineering curricula across Canada. She spearheaded zero-waste programs at McMaster, including Coffee to Compost, diverting more than 270 kilograms of waste from landfill, and co-founded Students for Bike Share, a campaign to secure discounted bike share passes for undergrads.

“I am especially passionate about exploring how low-carbon, resilient solutions can tackle both the climate and housing crises, particularly in post-disaster contexts.”

Sarah Machane

29, Montreal, QC
Innovation lead – CASCADES

Sarah Machane works to embed sustainability into the everyday practices of healthcare providers. Through her role with CASCADES (Creating a Sustainable Canadian Health System in a Climate Crisis) as the innovation and regional lead for Quebec, she has helped reduced unnecessary diagnostics and supported initiatives such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions from anesthetic gases and lowering medical imaging’s carbon footprint.

“For me, courage is about consistently showing up, even when we feel out of place and the challenges feel so much bigger than us. My energy goes into community: strengthening networks, trying to break silos and helping people connect across disciplines.”

Fatou Dieng

29, Montreal, QC
Climate solutions lead – Manifest Climate

As an immigrant, Fatou Dieng has worked to elevate the voices and needs of marginalized communities. As a climate strategist, she helps organizations understand and implement climate-related strategies and regulations. She has advocated at the Quebec National Assembly for the creation of a youth committee on climate and sustainability. In Senegal, she helps steward her family’s farm as a site of resilience, food sovereignty and ecological restoration.

“My courage comes from entering spaces that many of my people cannot access. When I speak of a ‘happy ending,’ I mean not only the fight against climate change and its unequal impacts but also our struggles against oppression, injustice, genocide, and racial and social disparities.”

Samuel and Michael Marty

undisclosed/23, Frog Lake First Nation

Samuel: Renewable relations liaison
Michael: Community energy manager

Samuel and Michael Marty are cousins and proud members of Frog Lake First Nation. With the goal to make their community self-sufficient and not reliant on fossil fuels, they have both been working to advance clean energy initiatives. Through capacity built from Indigenous Clean Energy’s programs, Samuel has been leading clean energy projects ranging from net-zero housing design to community communications that showcase his Nation’s green energy initiatives. As clean energy manager, Michael is advancing projects that reduce carbon emissions while fostering economic self-sufficiency and cultural resilience among Indigenous youth.

“We are all inherently stewards of the land. Mother Earth has nurtured us with the love and generosity only a mother can give. Now, it is our turn to return that love, to care for our planet with the same compassion.”

Samuel

“I find hope in seeing our communities not just adapt but thrive, building resilience, cultural pride and sustainable futures together.”

Michael

Julia Wright

21, Montreal, QC
CEO – MycoNurseries

Fungi enthusiast Julia Wright co-founded a “mushroom club” to grow oyster mushrooms from spent coffee grounds. They have transformed the project into MycoNurseries, a registered non-profit that grows and distributes mushrooms to food-insecure communities while providing experiential education to youth about sustainable fungiculture. Wright also works at McGill University’s Office of Sustainability as a Sustainable Labs intern.

​​“The climate crisis can be overwhelming, but I believe that even small actions, when many do them, can make a difference. I place my energy into acting locally and practically."

Sonia Vinogradova

26, Ottawa, ON
Co-founder – Spark Source Consulting

As co-founder of Spark Source Consulting, Sonia Vinogradova builds what she calls triple planetary solutions: projects that treat energy, ecology and economy as one system. She has led two solar installations on farms in Eastern Ontario, saving 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually and cutting energy costs by 40%. She has secured more than $70,000 in public funding for clean energy and is scaling the model through new partnerships.

“The solutions to create a low-waste, low-emissions economy exist, and I’m implementing them.”

Inaam Chattha

22, Toronto, ON
Medical student – Green Mind Canada

As an immigrant who grew up in a remote Albertan town, Inaam Chattha understands how climate change, mental health and access to resources are deeply connected. He founded Green Mind Canada to create space for young people to talk about climate anxiety. He also wrote three children’s books that help children understand climate emotions and feel empowered to act. He is an Ocean Wise ambassador.

“My courage is guiding me to nurture spaces where young people can share their fears about climate change and feel empowered to act.”

Tianna Philippot

28, Teulon, Manitoba
Founder – Renewable Roots

Tianna Philippot is from rural Manitoba (Treaty 1, homeland of the Red River Métis Nation) and largely credits her connection with the environment to her Indigenous identity. Philippot is the founder of Renewable Roots, an organization dedicated to connecting her community to accessible and sustainable agriculture. Her wheelchair-accessible greenhouse will operate on clean energy in a repurposed container, demonstrating the interconnected relationship of food and energy sovereignty.

“I am continuously understanding the depth of the interconnected relationship between personal and climate resilience. Each exists because of unwavering determination and thoughtful navigation through pain, grief, passion and desire for balance.”

Jumanah Khan

29, London, ON
Owner and director; research associate – White Egret Consulting; Dalhousie University

As program manager for ALUS (Alternative Land Use Services) Elgin, Jumanah Khan led the restoration of more than 400 acres of environmentally sensitive land, managed substantial budgets and coordinated with diverse partners to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem benefits. Her efforts include the diversion of an estimated four tonnes of total phosphorus from Lake Erie and its tributaries. 

“My skills lie in translating data into narratives – helping transdisciplinary knowledge and worldviewsspark community-driven action.”

Clara Phillips

25, Iqaluit, Nunavut
Development project manager – Nunavut Nukkiksautiit Corporation

Clara Phillips is the development project manager for Nunavut Nukkiksautiit Corporation, based in Iqaluit – Nunavut’s first 100% Inuit-owned renewable-energy developer. Phillips is currently managing the construction of the Anuriqjuak Nukkiksautiit Project, a wind and battery energy storage project located in Sanikiluaq, Nunavut. The goal of the project is to offset the community’s diesel fuel use by 70% while securing a revenue-sharing agreement with the Sanikiluarmiut people.

“I prioritize listening, an undervalued but essential skill in creating meaningful change and supporting community-led clean energy projects..”

Lara Varty

26, Courtenay, B.C
Coordinator, sector innovation – Foresight Canada

Lara Varty is an integral part of Foresight Canada’s B.C. Net Zero Innovation Network that is helping the province hit its target of a 40% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. She has supported the development of four cleantech innovation clusters centred on mining, water, forest bioeconomy and transportation. Her efforts have contributed to the network’s key accomplishments, including securing $78 million in private cleantech investment, forming 100 new partnerships and launching 26 projects with Indigenous participation.

“Creating space for honest and open dialogue about what barriers are in place in addressing climate issues is the first step in creating change.”

Lily YangLiu

16, White Rock, B.C.
Co-founder/high school student – DMUN Foundation

Lily YangLiu is deputy executive director of the DMUN Foundation, a youth-led, non-profit advocacy platform. She co-developed a climate curriculum with university professors and early childhood educators and has delivered workshops to students across British Columbia. In 2022, she launched Daily Climate News, a bilingual social media series engaging followers in China across WeChat and Xiaohongshu. 

“I try to create spaces where advocacy is not just about sacrifice or urgency, but about community, creativity and resilience, recognizing that we are human, not machines.”

Gordon So

29, Toronto, on
Head of sustainability – Relocalize

Gordon So is an integral part of Relocalize, which creates microfactories that are closer to distribution points, eliminating middle-mile transportation and reducing cold storage needs. So spearheaded Relocalize’s carbon impact analysis in collaboration with the Oxia Initiative.

“Courage, to me, is proving that climate solutions don’t have to wait until 2050. They can transform industries today. I find hope in knowing that when better options exist for both business and the planet, they will always win.”

Alison Gu

29, Burnaby, B.C
City councillor – City of Burnaby

At 24, Alison Gu became the youngest city councillor elected in Burnaby, the third-largest municipality in British Columbia. She spearheaded a policy in her early days at city council that ensures all climate change motions include an equity lens, support reconciliation and be nature-based where possible. Since then, Gu has sat on a task force seeking to reduce building emissions with retrofits and pushed for infrastructure improvements to deal with severe weather events. 

“I place my energy in the fights that teeter the line in being attainable and bold, realistic and impactful. I find hope mostly in loving community, but also in the small wins, knowing that every one has a real impact on people.”

Kimia Shafighi

27, Montreal, QC
CEO and founder – Biocene

Through Biocene, Kimia Shafighi is tackling the urgent issue of harmful algae blooms, which are exacerbated by climate change and threaten water quality, public health and biodiversity in urban and rural aquatic environments. Her innovation removes these blooms from the water and transforms them into valuable biomass, such as biofuel, bioplastics and biocoke, turning a major environmental hazard into a circular economic opportunity.

“Each step forward, no matter how small, reinforces my belief that change is possible. In the end courage is knowing it might not work, but doing it anyway, and doing it together.”

Drew Bernard

28, Lennox Island, P.E.I.
Project manager and housing administrator, L’nu Energy – L’nu Energy

Drew Bernard is a proud Mi’kmaq leader and the energy lead for Lennox Island First Nation, where he is guiding the development of multiple utility-scale solar and wind projects. As co-founder and VP of Awtij Energy, a member of P.E.I.’s Net Zero Advisory Committee, and project manager and housing administrator at L’nu Energy, Bernard has been unlocking energy solutions for homes, fleets and infrastructure across Atlantic Canada.

“I find hope in the rising strength of Indigenous voices across Turtle Island and beyond, and I place my energy everyday in uplifting Indigenous values on the world stage.”

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