Here’s a look at how protectionist measures are pushing countries into walled markets that limit the flow of low-cost clean technologies:

Since 2020, countries around the world have implemented nearly 200 trade policies targeting clean energy, compared to only 40 in the five years before.

Close to 40% of those trade measures were protectionist, and 70% targeted three technologies: solar power, batteries and electric vehicles.

China dominates all three of those sectors, and almost half of its vehicle exports are now electric.

The United States has imposed a 100% tariff on those EVs and raised its tariff on Chinese solar to 50%.

Meanwhile, the World Trade Organization says that non-tariff restrictions are on the rise and they can be up to 10 times more restrictive than tariffs.

All these barriers are changing the flow of green goods: 31% of China’s cleantech exports now go to emerging markets, up from 23% in 2022.

To circumvent trade restrictions and tap new markets, Chinese firms have pledged more than US$210 billion for overseas green manufacturing since 2022.

From the spring 2026 edition of the magazine

Sources: Net Zero Policy Lab, International Energy Association, OECD, WTO, BloombergNEF

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The C40 is one fairly robust example of subnational climate diplomacy, but it’s not the only one. The U.S. Climate Alliance, a league of more than 20 blue states, partners informally with European Union institutions and member states. The conjoined California-Quebec cap-and-trade market, which has been operating for about 12 years, shows how regional governments on different sides of a national border can create carbon markets. Earlier this year, in fact, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, went one step further and pushed his state’s climate diplomacy all the way across the Atlantic, inking a memorandum of understanding with the United Kingdom’s Labour government to support decarbonization efforts, promote resilience, exchange technical expertise and “engage in mutually beneficial economic and innovation activities through increased research and academic cooperation.”

News of California’s deal with Westminster attracted, predictably, the ire of President Donald Trump, who first belittled Newsom and then stated that it is “inappropriate” for the United Kingdom to be dealing with a climate-minded governor. After all, the U.S. government’s national policy on climate change and the energy transition tacks in precisely the opposition direction, as evidenced by billions in stalled or cancelled clean-energy subsidies (although some offshore wind received reprieves in the courts), the declawing of the Environmental Protection Agency and the administration’s seemingly inexhaustible support for coal.

This latest clash between Trump and Newsom – hardly the first and unlikely the last – raises a tricky question: if international affairs is the natural purview of national governments, should subnational entities – states, regions, even cities – have the latitude to go their own way, especially when the climate stakes are so stark?

During Trump’s first term, the White House went to court to kill the California-Quebec cap-and-trade market, citing a provision in the U.S. Constitution that grants Washington the exclusive right to conduct international diplomacy unless Congress provides an exemption. But the Trump administration’s resulting lawsuit didn’t survive regime change, and the Biden administration dropped the case in 2021. A year later, Biden signed a law formalizing the role of subnational diplomacy, and even set up a dedicated division within the State Department, complete with its very own “special representative for city and state diplomacy.” That gesture, unsurprisingly, did not survive into Trump’s second term.

The case for a transatlantic framework

So now what? “In the absence of federal-level commitment and in the presence of federal contestation of climate change and energy security policy,” says Jakob Wiedekind, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “it is clear that we are looking for other channels and avenues to cooperate across the Atlantic . . . This is not the first time we had to do that [because] American positions and climate change policy have fluctuated.”

In a recent article in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Wiedekind laid out the case for creating what he dubs a “Transatlantic Subnational Resilience Framework” that could help sustain international dialogue on climate change and renewable energy in a period when Washington is very much not in the mood to engage, especially with the European Union.

The EU, of course, has plenty of its own experience with subnational diplomacy and what Wiedekind calls “multi-level governance.” For example, he cites the diverse ways in which EU member states sought to wean themselves off Russian natural gas after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with a heavy emphasis on renewables. That exercise, dubbed REPowerEU, originated with directives from the European Commission but “allowed member states specifically and regional actors to share expertise on how that would be done,” he says, adding there could be other such top-down/bottom-up efforts to confront issues such as the wildfires and flooding that have swept through much of Western Europe and the United States in recent years.

Wiedekind argues that a transatlantic framework for subnational climate diplomacy could work in a similarly flexible and decentralized way, through regular meetings, leveraging commercialized clean technologies, and shared commitments to achieve resilience goals. Wiedekind, however, stresses that any such group should not become part of the annual conference of the parties (COP) that have joined the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which, he says, has become too politicized.

Indeed, the whole point of the exercise Wiedekind envisions is to depoliticize those international conversations as much as possible so they don’t become a target. He also contends that shifting the focus to climate-adjacent topics like wildfires, flooding and profitable clean-energy ventures could evolve into a strategy for engaging state-level Republican lawmakers who might otherwise steer clear of climate policy per se.

Such ideas reveal both the desperation and opportunities of a moment when the world’s most powerful government has become consumed by climate denial. No matter how hard it tries, the Trump administration can project its philosophy only so far. Other nations and other jurisdictions are resisting. The resulting conversations around collaboration and work-arounds offer evidence, however slight, that climate diplomacy will persist until this storm passes.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist who writes about cities, climate and business.

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But like many other developing nations that are feeling the increasing burden of climate change, the main challenge is finding the money. To assemble the financing, Nigeria is turning more and more to a tool that is already yielding results: the green bond. Late last year, the government issued its third and fourth tranche of sovereign green bonds totalling 300 billion naira (US$220 million).

Nigeria started down this path back in 2017 when it became the first African country – and the fourth worldwide – to issue a sovereign green bond, valued at ₦10.69 billion (US$7.85 million). Certified by the London-based nongovernmental organization Climate Bonds Initiative, investor demand outstripped the offer and the bond was oversubscribed.

Two years later, the West African nation issued another sovereign green bond valued at ₦15 billion (US$11.16 million). Like the first, the 2019 sovereign green bond saw a 220% oversubscription, bringing the total value of subscriptions to ₦32.93 billion ($23.57 million).

Like regular bonds, green bonds pay a fixed rate of interest to investors, but they keep the focus on raising capital for environmental and climate-related projects, from renewable-energy and clean-transportation to afforestation and climate-change-adaptation projects. The success of the inaugural 2017 green bond and the subsequent tranche in 2019 “signals growing investor appetite for green assets even in emerging markets,” says Dare Ogunbona, chief executive officer at Green Advisors Limited..

Green bonds gaining traction

Launched in 2007 by the European Investment Bank, the market for green bonds is growing steadily worldwide, reaching US$2,625 billion as of December 2024. In that year alone, $522 billion of new green bonds were issued, up from $135 billion the previous year, according to French asset manager Amundi’s 2024 Green Bond Impact Report. However, Africa is yet to fully tap into this potential. The continent accounts for about US$5.1 billion – less than 1% – of the total $2.2 trillion green bond market. But in recent years, the market on the continent is making major gains. For example, green bond issuances grew by 125%, from $600 million in 2022 to $1.4 billion in 2023.

Other countries on the continent are also picking up on the trend. In 2020, Egypt became the first country in the Middle East and North Africa to issue a sovereign green bond. That bond, too, was oversubscribed, leading the government to increase its initial offering from $500 million to $750 million.

Back in Nigeria, Ogunbona credits green bonds with “meaningful structural progress.” Proceeds from green bonds issuances have helped the Nigerian government to fund projects such as afforestation programs, the 10-megawatt Katsina wind farm power project, and off-grid solar power plants. However, these projects have been severely challenged, including by inadequate monitoring and weak sustainability frameworks. An investigation by a local newspaper also found that green-bond-financed afforestation projects failed largely because of poor implementation.

Given that so many climate projects still need to be funded, Ogunbona believes that green bonds will remain a viable option for the Nigerian government, especially as investors show increasing commitment to sustainability. “As of March 2025, 95.44% of proceeds from the 2019 green bond had been deployed to approved green projects,” he says. “For investors with a medium to long horizon and appetite for emerging market risk, Nigeria’s green space is very much in play.”

Saint Ekpali is a Nigeria-based journalist who covers the environment, health and energy in Africa.

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With sustained winds of nearly 300 kilometres per hour, storm surges of four metres, and half a metre of rain, Hurricane Melissa flattened much of western Jamaica, doing somewhere between US$8 and $15 billion in damage. But even as roofs were still flying off churches and palms were bending like stalks of grass, Edmund Bartlett, Jamaica’s minister of tourism, was already giving interviews to international media, encouraging travellers to visit and to visit soon.

The almost manic push to have all the island’s hotels operational by mid-December, when the peak season begins, threw into sharp relief a contradiction that underlies the Caribbean as a whole: it depends on an industry that, in some respects, is also responsible for its undoing.

The Caribbean is the most tourism-dependent region in the world. It is also one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Warming oceans, rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather events represent existential threats to the region: not only to residents but also to the tourism industry on which they depend. Sustainability, in this context, is not a nice add-on, but a necessity. If tourism is to remain a mainstay of Caribbean economies, it has to be resilient to the impacts of climate change, protective of increasingly fragile ecosystems and beneficial to local economies as a whole.

It’s asking a lot of an industry that, as Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid argued in her 1988 book A Small Place, exhibits a similarly extractive quality to the slave-based plantation economies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Kincaid draws a direct line from Caribbean sugar to sand: resources that have been exploited by foreign powers with little to no regard for the well-being of locals.

“Tourism is both a lifeline and a liability,” says Therez Walker, who grew up in Antigua and is now a lecturer on sustainable tourism at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. “It’s a very uncomfortable reality that a lot of people don’t want to face.”

Half a century ago, when the imperial powers that colonized the Caribbean dropped preferential trade arrangements for their agricultural exports – primarily bananas, sugar and rum – these tropical islands, with World Bank support, set their sights on the postwar middle class’s growing appetite for beach vacations. Tourism ministries were established and tax incentives were offered to foreign developers. In 1970, some four million international guests visited the Caribbean. Since then, the figure has increased almost 10-fold.

Tourism now accounts for an average of 11% of the gross domestic product of the 33 political entities – sovereign states, dependencies and overseas territories – that make up the Caribbean. But in some countries, the sector constitutes a virtual monoculture. In Antigua, for instance, tourism generates 88% of the country’s GDP and provides 91% of all jobs, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

Such dependency on a single industry creates vulnerability, particularly when only a fraction of its economic benefits flow back to the country. The vast majority of revenue generated by Caribbean tourism lands with the foreign operators who control it: airlines, cruise companies and hotel chains. The United Nations World Tourism Organization puts the level of economic “leakage” from Caribbean tourism at about 80%. At the same time, local governments have to contend with 100% of the waste that the industry generates.

Climate change is only amplifying this vulnerability. Over the last five decades, rising sea temperatures have cost the Caribbean almost half of its hard coral cover: a blow to the marine life that coral sustains as well as the huge revenues generated by snorkelling and diving. At current rates, sea level rise is expected to reduce the Caribbean’s sandy beaches by half and to force the closure of a third of existing hotels by the end of this century. Likewise, extreme heat and storm events like Hurricane Melissa are becoming more intense and frequent.

When Walker, who has been based in the Netherlands since 2022, returns home to Antigua, she feels both frustration and sadness. The beach she went to as a child is barely recognizable. The water is higher, the shore depleted. Gone are the mangrove swamps and the thriving fish populations they once hosted. In her community, water is in chronically short supply: many households have running water only twice a week. When she drives past water trucks parked outside the island’s all-inclusive resorts, she is resentful – not of the guests inside, but of decision-makers who have failed to protect domestic and environmental interests.

The needs of tourists and residents are often not aligned. Drought for locals translates into a sun-filled vacation for visitors. The mangroves that serve as natural barriers against erosion and storms are the enemy of the pristine sand beach. The protected coastline that hosts animal, plant and marine life is an obstacle to shoreline resorts.

“Our policymakers go to UN climate conventions and talk about our vulnerability,” Walker says. “And then they come home and approve another huge development on an ecologically sensitive coastline.”

According to Beienetch “Bennie” Watson, who teaches tourism policy and planning at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, the problem with Caribbean tourism is its foundation in a “colonial logic” that is top-down and externally driven. “Those seated around the table haven’t reflected the voice of ‘the people,’” she says. “The people’s vision of tourism hasn’t been heard.”

But in recent years, Watson has seen a shift, prompted in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, when Caribbean hotels stood empty and tourism revenue dropped by half. Some islands took the opportunity to promote homestays and longer-term accommodation options. Others directed visitors to more tailored experiences in eco-, adventure, and rural tourism. Watson is encouraged by a younger generation of traveller that, often prompted by social media, wants to explore outside resort walls.

A 2025 World Bank report on the future of Caribbean tourism emphasized the importance of moving beyond “sea, sun and sand,” pointing out how the short-term economic benefits of volume tourism – all-inclusive resorts and cruise tourism – have overshadowed their high environmental, energy, water-consumption and emissions costs.

Three months after Melissa, Jamaican Tourism Minister Bartlett went on an international marketing blitz to boost investor and traveller confidence in his island. At a luncheon in New York City, he announced that 70% of Jamaica’s hotels were up and running: a remarkable accomplishment.

But Watson, who lives in Kingston, has witnessed recovery on another level. Members of her church go out every Thursday to help communities that are rebuilding. She says the hurricane has proven something important to Jamaicans: that the island is close-knit, solidarity is strong, and residents’ needs matter.

Therez Walker agrees that change has to come from below. “We need to demand more of tourism,” she says. “This is an ‘us’ problem.”

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

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Suzlon Group is a renewable-energy provider headquartered in Pune, India, with wind projects in approximately 17 countries. In January, Suzlon announced that it had secured a 248.85-megawatt wind power order from the global steel giant ArcelorMittal Group. The deal is part of a larger US$900-million investment in clean energy across a series of projects across Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Together, they combine 250 megawatts of wind power, 736 megawatts of solar power, and 800 megawatt-hours of battery storage and are set to double ArcelorMittal’s renewable-energy capacity in India to two gigawatts by 2028. Collectively, they are expected to cut roughly 1.59 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

Steel production makes up about 12% of India’s carbon dioxide emissions. For every tonne of steel made domestically, around 2.55 tonnes of carbon dioxide are released, roughly 38% higher than the global industry average of 1.85 tonnes. India’s steel industry is responsible for around 240 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually, a figure expected to double by 2030.

Adding renewables makes a difference, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter the equation for the steel industry. Suzlon’s wind projects cut electricity-related emissions, also known as Scope 2, which come from the power that steel facilities buy from the grid. They don’t replace the actual blast furnaces that account for the bulk of steel’s direct, on-site emissions, or Scope 1. That gap sits at the heart of debates over what qualifies as “green steel.”

To cut emissions further, steelmakers can incorporate carbon capture technology and use low- or zero-carbon fuels alongside recycled steel, but ultimately, they need an alternative to blast furnaces. Electric arc furnaces powered by renewable energy provide an answer, but they rely on recycling scrap for a primary source of iron, and building them demands huge upfront investment, so they’ve been slow to scale. Today, a little over a quarter of global steel production comes from electric arc furnaces.

The lack of a shared definition of “green steel” allows companies to make environmental claims without substantial emission reductions. With no widely accepted framework, green steel is vulnerable to misleading marketing.

Governments are starting to write their own definitions into law. India was among the first, adopting an official definition in December 2024. The European Union is working on its own standards for low-emissions steel under upcoming green product rules. In the United States, federal programs now steer public purchasing toward low-carbon steel, and proposed legislation would support new steel plants aligned with the criteria set by ResponsibleSteel, an international sustainability standard for the industry.

According to Ysanne Choksey of Agora Energiewende, a German think tank, regulatory frameworks serve as critical benchmarks for assessing whether steel producers are genuinely meeting climate standards. What the industry needs are rules that direct investments into low-carbon technologies. Weak standards risk enabling greenwashing, allowing companies to label products as “green” without making the capital investments necessary to decarbonize their operations.

Akshaya Krishnan is a journalist in North York, Ontario.

With files by Alexandre Paquet.

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Tom Chi doesn’t have much patience for that whole routine. In a wide-ranging conversation about his new book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future (Wiley, 2026), the Google X co-founder and innovator offered a metaphor that’s both blunt and clarifying: “Trying to solve the climate problem by first persuading people who don’t accept the basic physics is like trying to build an aircraft with people who don’t believe flight is possible. You don’t get anywhere.”

This isn’t “stop persuading.” It’s “stop postponing.” Secure the minimum agreement needed to act, then let real-world progress do the persuading.

Chi has honed this capacity across a range of disciplines, from astrophysical researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at the age of 15, to Fortune 500 company consultant. He’s played a pivotal role in the development of tools that are synonymous with the modern age, including Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo Search. At Google X, he shaped Google Glass and its self-driving cars. As a founding partner of At One Ventures, he is driven to direct seed funding to disruptive tech innovations that help industries become a net positive to nature.

Chi says we need to change how money, rules and decisions work – and we need to move quickly. To achieve that, he offers a diagnostic: watch the vocabulary. “When you’re actually advancing on a problem, the language around the problem keeps advancing.”

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In fields that are genuinely learning, nouns evolve. Conversations become more precise. Arguments get technical. Questions shift from whether something is possible to how it’s built, financed, regulated and deployed. You can feel the difference between a debate that is stuck performing morality and a discipline that is moving toward execution.

Climate hasn’t had enough of that linguistic evolution. In fact, it has often moved in the opposite direction – toward softer terms and convenient vagueness. We’ve normalized “climate change,” a phrase that makes a crisis sound like a gradual shift you can adapt to over time. But what we’re living through is a loss of predictability: more extremes, more swings, more disruption. That’s why “climate destabilization” is the more accurate description, according to Chi.

Chi argues that the real story isn’t just warming; it’s volatility, or the breakdown of predictability that underpins everything from infrastructure engineering to actuarial models. As he puts it, “The killing edge of climate risk is volatility, not averages. We should have been tracking variance and standard deviation.”

Averages don’t overwhelm storm sewers; extremes do. Averages don’t shift growing seasons, then whiplash them back; variance does. And in Canada, where climate impacts are now colliding with household budgets, volatility is increasingly visible on one front in particular: insurance.

When catastrophic losses rise and become harder to price, the cost doesn’t stay in the balance sheets of insurers or reinsurers. It moves into premiums, deductibles, exclusions – and then into politics. Affordability becomes the headline, and the climate signal gets translated into the language of family finances: can I insure my home, and if I can, what am I giving up to do it? For Chi, “destabilization” captures how climate risk migrates across systems – from weather into underwriting, from underwriting into housing costs, from housing costs into inequality.

Climate Capital is about how the economy is designed – and how capital can be used to redesign it, so we stop financing damage and start financing durability. Chi treats economics as a design discipline, not a natural law. Which is another way of saying: the world we have is not inevitable; it’s governed.

And governance, in his telling, is not only spreadsheets and oversight. It’s culture. It’s relationships. It’s the invisible infrastructure of decision-making inside institutions that claim they want change while rewarding stasis. Chi’s most practical move is to argue that the “soft stuff” is not soft at all: “The financial performance stuff is table stakes. The other half of board management is emotional labour – and the quality of relationships is what determines outcomes.”

Transitions fail not only because technologies don’t exist, but because institutions can’t hold the trade-offs. They fracture under conflict, treat legitimacy as branding and assume that trust is a “nice-to-have” rather than a form of capital that compounds, or collapses.

This is where Chi’s “4Cs” rubric – critical thinking, creativity, compassion, community – becomes less a personal development list and more an institutional capability set. Critical thinking to interrogate the assumptions embedded in risk models. Creativity to fund deployment pathways, not just prototypes. Compassion and community to maintain the relational capacity required to make hard decisions repeatedly, at speed, without losing the room. This last requirement becomes non-negotiable in a destabilized climate, he argues.

The climate conversation doesn’t need another round of rhetorical victories, Chi says. It needs different builder behaviour: procurement that values resilience, not only unit cost; financing structures that bridge first-of-a-kind projects across the valley of death; investment committees that treat adaptation as investable infrastructure, not an afterthought; and insurers working with governments and builders so “build back better” stops being a slogan and becomes a default.

The test of whether we’re moving forward won’t be whether we publish another eloquent climate statement. It will be whether we can start naming things as they are and following up with tangible actions.

The following excerpts have been edited and condensed.

Chi on the urgency of the era

“There is a type of urgency to technology, but it’s really more a competitive urgency where you try to be the first to do an innovation. You’re going to be the first to go and get a new feature out there, to be more attractive to customers, all that sort of thing. There is no more foundational timeline to it other than the urgency of capitalism: trying to be an innovator in a competitive field.”

“But when I saw the [coral] reef die and I talked with a bunch of coral scientists about it, a very specific timeline started to come into view. We mostly talk about them as planetary tipping points, and I actually think that’s a little bit too abstract. There’s a lot of things that are happening which are one-way doorways we will not be able to go back through. If a lot of the Amazon rainforest fully succeeds in becoming more savanna-like, then that’s not something that’s easily reversible.”

“There’s a point where things either become undoable time-wise because the thing has become extinct or the thing has disrepaired so extensively where it becomes economically unviable for us to go sustain it in the better state. [Seeing] that recontextualized a lot of things for me.”

Chi on climate vocabulary 

“I wanted to use a term that would capture what I was seeing in the data, all those disruptions. And the best word that I could come up with was ‘destabilization,’ because whether it’s warmer or cooler, you will be destabilized compared to your historical baseline. Whether it’s wetter or drier, you will be destabilized. Whether you’re now having thousand-year storm events every five years – which is kind of the zone that we’re getting into right now – or whether for you it’s a 100-year storm every three years, that is all still destabilized. And I wanted the term that would be accurate for all the spots on Earth and reflective of the numbers. Because I’m a scientist first, right? I want to make sure that we get the numbers right. And then I try to make the communication true to what the actual truth is, as opposed to what will elicit the least amount of action and emotional sentiment.”

Chi on climate change deniers

“The entire dialogue has been hijacked by the climate deniers. We’ve spent so much time trying to go and reason with people that have no interest in reason. Trying to go and solve climate change after convincing climate deniers is like trying to go build an aircraft with people who don’t believe in flight. You just don’t get anywhere.”

Chi on the ‘average’ trap 

“The easiest way for the scientific community to coordinate was to move toward averages. It’s relatively easy to agree on averages: You did a study. I did a study. We did a study. Let’s add all the data points together. We can find the centre of gravity here. We can find the averages.”

“Now the problem is that it’s the volatility that is the killing edge of climate, not the averages. What a half-a-degree increase might mean in a particular spot on Earth might mean six degrees hotter in the summer, five degrees colder. We should have been looking at things like standard deviation, variance, other sorts of volatility metrics. That would have given us a way more realistic sense of how soon it would be before we would have, for example, disruptive scales of wildfire. Because it was way sooner than most people thought when they were looking at the averages.”

Shilpa Tiwari is the founder of No Women No Spice and Isenzo Group.

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About 67 critical-minerals projects – which represent about half of all active mining proposals in Canada – are proposed, planned or under construction, according to a federal government inventory. Combined, they’ll need $72.4 billion in investment by 2034.

But as the federal government seeks capital from its allies to develop its mineral riches, some experts are advocating for a more cautious tack to working with the United States amid President Donald Trump’s continued aggressive stance toward allies and repeated musings about annexing Canada.

“From a long-term perspective . . . the best approach is to work together in development of a North American critical-minerals strategy,” says Lawrence Herman, a Toronto-based international trade lawyer and member of the Expert Group on Canada–U.S. Relations. “The challenge for Canada is the aggression of the Trump administration and its desire to control, in different ways, what happens in Canada with regard to critical minerals.”

Western countries are trying to lessen their dependence on China, which currently controls about 90% of refined production of rare-earth elements and 70% of rare-earths mining output, along with about half of the world’s reserves. Rare earths have applications in consumer electronics, advanced weapons systems and electric vehicles. China also has strong control over lithium, graphite and other niche minerals such as germanium and gallium, which have defence applications.

But a wave of new export control measures has exposed the significant vulnerabilities in Western supply chains. Amid deteriorating trade relations with the United States early last year, China instituted a special licence to export 12 rare-earth minerals and derivative products like magnets. Likewise, any product with at least 0.1% of its content coming from Chinese rare-earth metals will be restricted as of November 2026.

I think there’s a strong recognition by the U.S. that they do still need Canada for their critical minerals and mining projects.

– Photinie Koutsavlis, vice president, Mining Association of Canada

China’s dominance has also made it difficult for some Canadian mining projects to get off the ground, says Photinie Koutsavlis, vice president of economic affairs and climate change at the Mining Association of Canada. China can “flood the market with product,” depressing prices and making mine expansion or construction uneconomic.

Canada is on a deal-making spree

The G7 (Group of Seven) Critical Minerals Production Alliance, launched by Canada last summer to drum up public funding for mining and processing projects from allied countries, as well as private capital, has announced 56 investments to date. Canada and the United States have also collaborated directly on critical-minerals investments through their joint task force, established during the first Trump administration.

The United States launched its own critical-minerals buyers club, called Project Vault. The US$12-billion critical-minerals stockpile will establish price floors for various minerals and would give allied countries access to the stores in the event of shortages. To date, Washington has struck deals with more than 50 countries. Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand attended an initial meeting, but Canada has so far been noncommittal about its participation.

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Shaz Merwat, director of energy policy at RBC Thought Leadership, sees Project Vault as a strong potential market for Canadian critical minerals and notes that strategic deals under that umbrella would guarantee that Canadian minerals flow into U.S. rules of origin for batteries and electric vehicles. But in a February research paper, Merwat acknowledged that deeper minerals-supply-chain enmeshment with the United States could mean that “Canadian minerals face U.S. export licensing and defence procurement priorities that serve American industrial policy first.”

Herman raises the same concern about equity stakes the U.S. government took in October in two Canadian junior mining companies, Trilogy Metals and Lithium Americas. While both companies have their projects outside Canada, the deals could expose Canada to U.S. government action “that may not always be consistent with Canadian interests,” he says.

Despite tariffs and trade tensions, Koutsavlis says the United States remains an ally and Canada’s biggest trade partner. The mining sector also falls within the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), and its products haven’t been hit with any tariffs. “I think there’s a strong recognition by the U.S. that they do still need Canada for their critical minerals and mining projects,” she says.

Shoring up supplies

Canada has announced it will create its own critical-minerals stockpile for defence purposes. Elizabeth Steyn, associate dean of graduate and professional programs in the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law, says the government could sign long-term contracts with miners to create its own public stockpile, or pay companies to keep a large stock of their commodities on site. But she says it should focus primarily on stockpiling minerals that it’s vulnerable to losing access to, including those that Canada doesn’t produce.

Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, in a February speech to the Economic Club of Canada, suggested that Canada could use a domestic stockpile of critical minerals as leverage in trade negotiations with the United States; in exchange for access to the stockpile, the United States would need to lift tariffs on Canadian goods.

Having a guaranteed government buyer would also help to de-risk projects for miners and their investors, Koutsavlis says, but stockpiling alone is not a sufficient strategy. She says the government needs to fund infrastructure to remote projects and provide more support for processing and refining. Many critical minerals are not produced at the mine but recovered as co-products through smelting and refining. But Canada’s processing capacity has declined in the past decade. Koutsavlis says a host of factors have played a role: mines with attached processing facilities reached their end of life, and declining mining output generally reduced feedstock that stand-alone smelters and refiners had access to, forcing them to seek out supply elsewhere. With China able to offer processing on the cheap, Western processors have resorted to paying for feedstock to keep their facilities operating.

Merwat says he sees the potential for Canada to create integrated “mineral corridors,” where multiple mines in a region could feed into one processing facility – such as in Sudbury’s nickel belt or the lithium deposits around Thunder Bay, Ontario – and offer economies of scale.

But that should be accompanied by price floors, similar to what the United States offers, and limits on importing feedstock from China, which would help improve the economics for Western “pure-play” refiners that are otherwise at a competitive disadvantage because, unlike larger mining and energy companies, they aren’t diversified. Otherwise, Merwat says, with public market players largely unwilling to get involved in these more risky projects, Western supply chains will remain vulnerable.

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The Local Power program is “a significant opportunity for the U.K.’s community energy and crowdfunding sectors,” says Lisa Ashford, co-CEO of Ethex, an ethical crowdfunding platform, in an email statement. The policy framework and government support “should help to unlock a larger pipeline of investable local power projects, creating more opportunities for communities to directly invest in renewable energy in their own areas.”

Ethex has pledged to work with Great British Energy (the agency responsible for implementing the Local Power Plan) to bring local communities, individual investors and institutional capital together ​​to help leverage ​the billion-pound grant and loan program ​promised by the government.

“However, we want to emphasize that public funding should complement retail investment, not replace it,” Ashford says, adding that public funding can act as “catalytic capital to get more projects off the ground, reduce risk and co-exist with community and retail finance.”

What is investment crowdfunding?

The purpose of the Local Power Plan is to build community energy projects financed with public funding and crowdfunding, a strategy that proponents see as a way to democratize the capital markets. Distinguished from reward- or donation-based crowdfunding, investment-type crowdfunding is offered with the expectation of financial returns through interest, dividends or rising share values.

In some cases, investment crowdfunding is done through community bonds or innovative investment savings accounts as a way for local people to finance a non-profit or civic project. In others, it can enable investors to buy an equity share in a private company, usually as a start-up but sometimes in a more advanced growth stage.

In either case, the investment is typically locked up for a considerable period – usually five years or more – to prevent participating investors from exiting before the project or company matures to a stage in which investors can get their money out.

​​Capital crowd-surge – and slump​​​

Historically, private investments have been restricted to wealthy sophisticated investors or institutions like pensions and venture capital. Starting in 2014, the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority began to amend the rules, reducing restrictions and setting specific conditions for crowdfunding purchases. Since then, the domestic market has grown considerably​​. In​​​ ​2024 (the most recent figures), the value of the total U.K. crowdfunding market was US$1.06 billion, including loans and bonds, equity and even donation-type offerings.

​​While loans and bonds are gaining ground, m​​​​​arket growth has tapered off in recent years in the equity segment of investment crowdfunding, which involves buying shares in private firms. In the United Kingdom in 2021, there were 569 equity crowdfunding offers that together raised a total of £773 million. By 2024, this had fallen to 297 deals worth £324 million (about US$414 million in 2024 dollars).

​​​Investment markets of all kinds bubbled in 2021 as hundreds of thousands of individual investors – bored and at home during COVID lockdowns – experimented with new ways to make (and lose) money. Along with meme stocks and crypto ownership, equity crowdfunding soared in 2021 and 2022, buoyed by low interest rates, rising global investment markets and established crowdfunding platforms like Crowdcube and Seedrs (later taken over by U.S.-based Republic).

Since then, rising interest rates, growing international conflicts and the chaos of the Trump administration have made investors more cautious. Inevitable losses from fledgling start-ups and long capital lockup periods also dampened some investor enthusiasm for equity crowdfunding.

​​The ‘hybrid model’ for green growth​ ​​

In contrast, investment-type crowdfunding in environmental, socially responsible and ethical offerings has grown steadily, although incrementally. Social enterprise bonds and share offerings have carried less risk than equity shares in start-up and growth companies. It’s customary for renewable-energy projects, for example, to come with reliable income streams or civic infrastructure projects to be backed by municipal borrowing guarantees. Ethex, Abundance and Triodos UK ethical crowdfunding are among the online platforms specializing in this market and are poised to benefit from the £1 billion Local Power strategy.

As well, crowdfunding platforms focusing on the energy transition are expected to benefit from ​an expected annual growth rate of U.K. climate tech of 21% between now and 2030, although this growth won’t happen directly from the Local Power program.​​​​​​ ​ ​Globally, a​ 2024 report by RMI (formerly Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute) states that US$2 trillion will be needed globally to finance the industrial, transportation and infrastructural changes needed to shift the global energy system from fossil fuels to electricity.

The RMI report says this opens new opportunities for crowdfunding, which are already appearing in the United Kingdom, where climate tech is attracting attention from individuals as well as venture and private equity investors. British climate-tech transportation company Sunswap raised £17.3 million in 2024 (US$21.8 million in 2024 dollars), partly from crowdfund investors and partly from venture capitalists. The company has developed a ​​​​groundbreaking ​refrigeration unit for trucks powered by a separate battery and solar ​unit to reduce ​fuel costs and ​carbon dioxide emissions from transport trucks. The Republic crowdfund platform hosted the offer along with support from institutional investors such as Shell Ventures, an arm of the Shell oil and gas giant.

Antoine Beine, co-founder of the France-based climate tech crowdfunding network Keenest, says this so-called hybrid model (including both crowdfund and institutional investors) is becoming the norm in the United Kingdom and Europe. “This is where a democratic dimension of investment may emerge within the private sector, not simply for capital access, but in embedding transparency and public scrutiny around issues such as sovereignty, climate transition, privacy, and ethical practices,” he says in an email.

Ethex’s Ashford says that one of the exciting opportunities offered by the Local Power Plan is the prospect to pool government funding with crowdfunding capital. “If implemented effectively, the Local Power Plan could mark a step change in community power investment by combining public support with people-powered finance to accelerate a more democratic energy transition.”

The government’s aim in the Local Power Plan is to build 1,000 community energy projects. In the process, it could also help to deliver a jolt of popular democracy into the United Kingdom’s capital markets.

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now the Responsible Investment Association).

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Bile duct cancer⁠ is rare, with only about 600 cases diagnosed in Canada each year. But in this town, located downstream from the Alberta oil sands, O’Connor was seeing rates that were far higher than expected. The mostly Indigenous population relies heavily on hunting, trapping and fishing for food, and they’d told O’Connor about changes they’d seen – a rainbow colour appearing on the surface of Lake Athabasca, a dwindling fish population and ducks that appeared unwell, he recalls. “It dawned on me: this is a community that’s suffering as a result of what’s happening upstream.”

O’Connor publicly called for investigations. In response, three physicians with Health Canada filed complaints against him with the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons, saying O’Connor was causing “undue alarm.” He was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing.

The provincial health authority and other groups carried out small studies over the next eight years, but the results were not definitive. Research on how environmental factors affect health can be difficult to do and requires substantial time and detailed, accurate data. That’s been an ongoing challenge in Alberta. And so the question remains: what exactly are the health risks for a community that sits close to major oil and gas infrastructure?

Twenty years after O’Connor first raised concerns, physicians, environmental advocates and community members in Alberta are still calling for more definitive monitoring and investigations into the health and environmental effects of Alberta’s oil and gas industry, not just in Fort Chipewyan but across the province. They say that this kind of research is long overdue and should be initiated now, as Danielle Smith’s government weighs its next steps with what to do with Alberta’s aging oil and gas infrastructure – the old wells, pipes and other dated infrastructure, often referred to as mature assets. Many of these lie in rural regions far from the oil sands and Fort Chipewyan, but also where there is less close monitoring.

The Alberta government published a report last year with recommendations about what to do with the province’s mature assets. The Smith government is expected to take more formal action based on the report later this year. But the report doesn’t call for closer monitoring of non-producing wells – a gap that has industry watchers and community advocates worried.

Amanda Bryant, a climate policy expert and manager of the Pembina Institute’s oil and gas program, says that vital information is being missed. She says the province should be collecting in-depth health and environmental data from all areas with non-producing wells. She wants that information to be collected and made available for analysis. The Alberta Energy Regulator and provincial health authorities do collect data, but not enough, she says. “I would be skeptical that we currently have enough data to be making the judgment that these wells are not posing a health risk. The research that there is shows that there is cause for concern, that there are potential health impacts.”

Better health research is “part of protecting the public, the public interest and the public good,” she adds.

Leaking legacies

Alberta is home to 275,000 marginal, inactive or decommissioned but unreclaimed well bores or surface locations, according to the government’s mature-asset strategy report. Many remain in a state of ambiguity: they no longer produce oil or gas – or else produce so little that they’ve outlived their economic value – but have not been declared inactive, because there’s no economic incentive to do so. Other wells have been decommissioned but have not undergone the required cleanup and restoration to meet the province’s standard.

For years, Alberta has followed the “polluter pays” principle: the party that causes environmental damage is responsible for bearing the costs of cleanup, remediation and compensation. But many companies responsible for abandoned wells have gone out of business. For those wells, the responsibility falls to the Orphan Well Association, a non-profit organization funded by industry levies. Every year, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) prescribes the amount for the levy, using a formula to calculate how much each company is required to contribute.

For the 2025/2026 fiscal year, the AER set a levy of $144.45 million. This falls far short of what’s needed for cleanup in Alberta. The Orphan Well Association estimates that the total cost to clean up the sites it manages is $1.12 billion.

In the meantime, wells that are no longer producing but not yet cleaned up remain as they were, and not being as closely monitored as environmental groups would like. The AER maintains public records on location and regulatory status of wells but does not regularly monitor their condition over time. In comparison, active wells undergo regular evaluations for methane leaks and other pollutants, which have been linked to asthma, cancer and cardiovascular issues. Non-producing wells are not without risk. A recent study from researchers at McGill University, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology⁠, looked at non-producing wells across Canada and found that methane emissions appear to be seven times higher than government estimates.

This doesn’t surprise Paul Belanger, an environmental engineer who worked in the oil and gas industry in Alberta for more than a decade. He is now the science adviser to Keepers of the Water, an Indigenous-led collective formed in 2006 to protect the Arctic Ocean Drainage Basin, the massive land areas whose waterways drain toward the Arctic Ocean. Belanger is concerned by the number of non-producing wells and small pipes throughout Alberta that are not being monitored. “What we’ve got now is abandoned wells in remote areas that look, to me, like they’re going to be ignored forever,” he says. “There’ll never be the money. We don’t have enough whistleblowers or sentinels out there to report every site.”

Belanger believes that saltwater spills at old well sites is an under-recognized threat in Alberta. As wells age, they produce significantly more water than oil, which leads to corrosion and contaminants leaching into the surrounding soil and groundwater. “As we’re sitting here, 30,000 wells are corroding. Rust never sleeps,” Belanger says. “I think that risk is just growing every month.”

The cost of uncertainty

Non-producing wells and the associated health and environmental risks have not been well studied in Canada. There’s fairly limited research into the health effects of oil and gas infrastructure overall. These studies are expensive and time-consuming, require meticulously kept datasets, and are beset with the challenge of distinguishing correlation from cause. On top of that, this is a politically and economically sensitive subject, particularly in Alberta, whose economy depends heavily on the oil and gas industry.

The lack of a strong evidence base is no reason to assume that things are not harmful, says Stephen Wilton, associate professor and cardiologist at the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, where he is also co-director for planetary health. “In my mind, there’s enough evidence that we should be concerned,” he says. “One of the principles of public health is this ‘precautionary principle’: if you think there’s enough evidence of some harm and it’s plausible, then you should be taking precautions to avoid it.”

There is some evidence of harm. In one of the most significant studies to date in Canada, a 2021 report published in the journal Frontiers in Oncology showed a significant correlation between living in an area of dense oil and gas infrastructure in Alberta and the incidence of solid tumour cancers. The study is believed to be the first in Canada to look at cancer risk related to both active and inactive wells. The analysis showed that living close to one to three orphan sites was associated with an increased risk of solid tumours. The study showed correlation, not causation – that’s a huge limitation. Even so, the results raise the question of why. The authors concluded that it could be due to a lack of appropriate remediation or not being actively maintained by any proprietor, which could lead to increased environmental contamination.

What we’ve got now is abandoned wells in remote areas that look, to me, like they’re going to be ignored forever. There’ll never be the money. We don’t have enough whistleblowers or sentinels out there to report every site.

— Paul Belanger, environmental engineer

Other studies have shown that Alberta residents who live near oil and gas operations other than non-producing wells experience adverse health outcomes. In one report, published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2020, Calgary researchers found that people who lived within 10 kilometres of at least one fracking site were more likely to have children born small for their gestational age and have major congenital anomalies. In another study published last year, investigators found that 13% of Albertans live within 1.5 kilometres of an active well and 3% within 1.3 kilometres of a flare – and they have a 9% to 21% higher risk of experiencing cardiovascular or respiratory issues than people in the rest of the province. The closer a person lived to an oil or gas well, the greater their risk of these conditions, investigators found.

The study’s lead author is Martin Lavoie, a research scientist and data analyst at FluxLab, a leading methane measurement and technology development group at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. Lavoie says that he was surprised by the challenge of getting reliable data on the location of oil and gas wells. “Sometimes the oil and gas industry doesn’t know exactly where is the well,” he says. “So imagine when you try to make the connection between [someone’s health] and a gas well, but you don’t know where is the gas well? Maybe it’s here. Maybe it’s 100 metres further south or west.”

Lavoie says that more accurate data would help researchers make better evaluations of things like methane emissions and health risks. “One of the recommendations to the regulator is just keep better track of what’s going on,” he says. “It’s one thing having the data, which we appreciate very much. But if the data is not accurate or could be more accurate, that’s a different issue.”

So far, most of the research looking at the health and environmental effects of non-producing wells has been done in the United States. In one study published in the journal ACS Omega, researchers reported harmful volatile organic compounds, including the carcinogen benzene, leaking from 48 abandoned wells in Pennsylvania. “In Canada, really surprisingly, we don’t have many studies on health related to the oil and gas industry,” Lavoie says.

Canadian researchers and community advocates want that to change.

In Fort Chipewyan, it is finally starting to change, but only after yet another crisis. In 2022 and 2023, Imperial Oil and the Alberta Energy Regulator failed to let communities know that wastewater containing arsenic, hydrocarbons and other pollutants was seeping into the watershed from Kearl Lake project outside of Fort McMurray.

The following year, the federal government announced nearly $12 million in funding over 10 years for a Fort Chipewyan Health Study. The community-led study, with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the Mikisew Cree First Nation and the Fort Chipewyan Métis Nation, will examine the impacts of the oil sands on community members’ health. It’s the first large-scale study of this kind in Canada.

Christina Frangou is a long-time health journalist based in Calgary, Alberta.

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In early 2025, European lawmakers drastically minimized the scope and scale of corporate sustainability disclosure requirements – cutting by up to 90% the share of companies that are required to report. Then, in December, European Parliament members delayed a law that would help reduce deforestation and forest degradation around the world. That same month, another law that was set to ban production of new combustion-engine cars in Europe by 2035 was watered down. In every case, global competitiveness was among the main reasons cited for the scale-back. 

But oscillating between climate leadership and regulatory retreat could also mean that Europe loses its place as a climate pioneer and an industrial power. “If Europe continues with this deregulation drive,” says Andreas Rasche, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, “the climate rules for European businesses will be written elsewhere in the world.” 

Simplification vs. deregulation 

Opponents of the European Union’s ambitious policies say they have overly complicated reporting structures and impose too much bureaucratic red tape. 

Rasche says that, in theory, regulatory simplification is a good idea, but “the problem comes in where simplification itself is politicized and is turned into an unjustified deregulation.” 

Fewer reporting requirements tend to mean lower costs, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into competitiveness. “The logic is that you increase competitiveness [by] reducing costs with compliance,” explains Hanna Ahlström, senior adviser and sustainability business developer at Æra, a consultancy firm in Oslo. But even if costs are cut and a company’s profitability increases, it doesn’t necessarily make a company more competitive, Ahlström says. For that to be the case, “the money [saved] needs to be reinvested in ways that makes the company competitive, and not all firms will do this.” 

While investing in new technologies is something that can help make a business more competitive long-term, the EU’s policy inconsistencies have also made businesses more hesitant to act. 

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For instance, Yara International, a fertilizer company, said in January that if the EU suspends its carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which came into effect on January 1, they will have to rethink a major low-carbon ammonia project in the United States. CBAM, which has so far avoided suspension, taxes EU companies importing steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizers, hydrogen and electricity based on the origin of the import. Yara CEO Svein Tore Holsether told Reuters that CBAM helped improve the business case for low-carbon ammonia products, but that regulatory uncertainty makes it difficult to bank on more expensive low-carbon investments.   

Businesses that make the first moves tend to also reap economic benefits as trailblazers, says Marcin Menkes, an associate professor at the Warsaw School of Economics and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. But when geopolitical turbulence is met with inconsistent behaviour on the part of the EU, it stifles not only innovation but also competitiveness, he argues. In order to make investments, companies bet on new rules and regulations being implemented. Uncertainty might incentivize businesses to be cautious instead. 

Even if a new approach, product or technology has an environmental benefit, if the rules change the business will incur the costs of being a first mover. “We must protect those businesses that boldly try to experiment, to deploy new environmental technology, technology solutions, without surprising them with different . . . regulatory approaches,” Menkes says. 

Regulation can mean opportunity, too 

When EU regulations stay in place, like CBAM has so far, there are business opportunities for companies willing to invest in compliance to gain access to the EU’s single market of approximately 450 million people. 

Canada, which ranks fourth in aluminum and 16th in steel production, could seize the opportunity to become a bigger player in the European market. Canadian aluminum and steel are largely produced by hydroelectricity, giving Canada one of the lowest carbon footprints among the world’s major producers. “Given the dependency on U.S. markets and the tariffs in place,” says Michael Lenaghan, associate director at Anthesis, a U.K.-based consultancy firm, “CBAM couldn’t have come at a better time for Canada and for steel and aluminum.” 

With the Canadian government looking to diversify trade, there is now an opportunity to become a major player under the CBAM regime, Lenaghan says. Currently, the EU imports most of its steel and aluminum from China, India and Turkey, he says. When comparing the emissions values to Canadian production, it’s significant: Canadian emissions are “between 50% and 70% lower across these materials, and that translates into a significant cost savings for EU importers when they’re looking at where to buy.”  

Lenaghan says that he doesn’t think that Canadian producers are fully tuned into CBAM yet. But it’s not every day that your competitiveness over other exporters is altered so drastically. “That’s what CBAM is doing,” Lenaghan says. 

It’s also an illustration that ambitious EU climate policies can co-exist with profits and competitiveness in a global market. “For me,” Copenhagen Business School’s Rasche says, “ambitious climate policy and competitiveness is not a contradiction.” It depends on the time frame. If competitiveness is looked at in the short term, there will be cost savings. Rasche, however, believes that competitiveness should be seen as a long-term horizon: “For that, you need an ambitious climate policy, and you need to decarbonize.”  

Ashley Perl is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Stockholm.  

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