And now there’s a new element in the mix: the seaweed belt is changing shape. The most significant patch, known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, was first detected in 2011 and now measures as much as 8,800 kilometres long. It can be found from West Africa to the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. By the end of last year, it weighed 38 million metric tons, a 40% increase from its last record in 2022.

Why so much seaweed? There isn’t a single reason that scientists can point to, but rather a variety of shifting factors. “The climate is having a very significant effect on this bloom, but there are many underlying drivers of climate change,” Brian Lapointe, principal investigator at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University, told The New York Times in 2025: “everything from high temperature, extreme rainfall, droughts and rainfall events, and winds.” Meanwhile, a northern patch located in the Sargasso Sea, in the North Atlantic between Nova Scotia and Bermuda, has dwindled by some 90% since 2015, because of warmer water.

The Atlantic seaweed situation is evolving so rapidly that scientists have enlisted NASA to track the bloom from space. The sensitive instruments on their satellites can detect the sargassum signature as it moves across oceans, helping to predict where it is headed and which ecosystems might be more at risk of being overwhelmed by the vegetation.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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While it’s tempting to imagine the majestic Ents stalking Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings, this migration is the more subtle result of seeds dispersing by way of wind, animals and water. Indeed, the movement of tree species echoes other migratory patterns that are also influenced by a warming planet.  

The movement of trees is not new. Scientists have long tracked how these shifts occur, describing them as proof of the resilience of species. But they are happening more quickly because of temperature changes in the planet. One pattern observed is the move away from heat. Some move to higher altitudes, others to areas with more moisture. A new study published in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation paints a more nuanced picture, finding that both climate and anthropogenic factors have to do with tree movement. Between 2000 and 2020, 42% of treelines shifted upslope, while 25% shifted downslope. “The rate of treeline shifts was strongly influenced by anthropogenic disturbances,” the study found, in particular from fires.  

Unsurprisingly, trees are short on speed. They simply may not be able to migrate quickly enough to keep up with the pace of environmental changes. Some scientists are calling for “assisted migration” as a way to help smooth out the adaptation process. In Canada, the practice is taking root. The provinces of British Columbia and Alberta have extended seed transfer zones 200 metres higher for most species, and in B.C., planting of the western larch is now permitted outside of its previous range.  

Assisted migration is not without risks or controversy, and some scientists consider it another example of human meddling. New species may become invasive in a new ecosystem, or they may be ill-equipped to adapt to local soil conditions and sun exposure. “The idea that humans can help fill the gap between the ability of species to migrate and the rate of change in climate conditions is increasingly being considered and debated as a possible management option,” Canada’s Ministry of Natural Resources stated in a 2025 briefing note.  

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INDIA 

After the Bishrampur open-cast coal mine in India stopped producing coal in 2018, it was repurposed into a tourist destination for boating and cottage rentals.  

CANADA 

In Montreal, a quarry-turned-landfill was converted into an urban greenspace called Frédéric-Back Park, boasting fields of wildflowers and futuristic biogas-capturing wells.  

UNITED STATES 

Since closing in 2001, the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island was slowly transformed into Freshkills Park, New York City’s largest new park in 100 years.  

AUSTRALIA 

The old Western Five open-cut coal mine in Western Australia has been given a new life as Lake Kepwari, a 103-hectare recreational lake for boating and swimming.  

SENEGAL 

The Mbeubeuss landfill on the outskirts of Dakar is being overhauled for better material recovery, with a new eco-park in the works.  

GERMANY 

A disused ironworks in Duisburg has been creatively renovated into the Landschaftspark green space, with a diving centre, climbing gardens, and a giant tunnel slide.  

The post These former industrialized sites have found a greener new life appeared first on Corporate Knights.

New findings from the popular tourism website Booking.com released in April show that more people – nearly three-quarters – factor in extreme weather, in particular heat, when choosing where to visit. The findings are based on a survey of 32,500 people living in 35 countries or territories that include North and South America, Asia, Africa and Europe. Some 55% of the respondents said that certain destinations had become too hot to travel to when they wanted to visit them.  

The toll of recent dramatic summer heat waves in Europe is lodged in our memory. There were more than 47,000 heat-related deaths in Europe in 2023. Rising temperatures are the main engine behind the so-hot coolcation trend.

Hotter summers are also linked to other environmental consequences that are affecting tourism, such as wildfires, drought and water shortages. Parts of Europe are in the midst of historic wildfires this summer. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate in Spain and France, which has been described as one of the biggest evacuations since the Second World War. And another heat wave is expected to set in this week, making the work of tamping down the blaze all the more fraught. Officials in Europe are warning that the wildfire season could stretch into October and November. Wildfires are also raging in Canada, with nearly four million hectares burned so far this year.  

Even before the grim season got underway, Norway was outright marketing its coolcation potential – noting its “lush, green forests” and “crisp, fresh air.” But other Nordic and northern countries have also become magnets.

A 2024 survey by Virtuoso, a luxury travel website, found that travel to northern Europe and Canada went up 44% that summer, while Italy, Greece and France dipped by half a percent. For the typically warmer locales in the northern hemisphere, data from the European Travel Commission show that while the summer months still are the favourite – with 25% of European travellers picking July and August to take a trip – September is a close second, at 22%. 

The coolcation is often billed as a more sustainable form of travel, because it takes the pressure off the typical hot spots and does not strain certain kinds of energy consumption, such as air conditioners. However, the distance travelled is another factor to consider in that calculation.  

The post The ‘coolcation’ takes root amid rising temperatures appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Eilish, who has sold the digital equivalent of 80 million albums, comes by her green credo honestly. Her mother, actress Maggie Baird, ran a no-meat, no-waste household, where paper towels and Christmas wrap were banned. (Baird now operates Support + Feed, a not-for-profit advocating for a global shift to plant-based food systems.) 

When she started touring, Eilish was horrified by Big Music’s indifference to sustainability. “You would not believe how wasteful this industry is,” Eilish told a CNN reporter last year. Speaking to organizations who wanted to work with her, she says, “You ask them what their plan is to be more eco-conscious, and nobody had a plan.” So she started demanding one.  

With less acclaim than her music has brought her, Eilish has become a Gen Z climate champion. She attended the 2022 Met Gala in a Gucci dress made from recycled materials, lectured Vogue magazine on climate disruption, required concert venues to provide free water-bottle filling stations, and offered vegetarian meals to concert staff. Her Overheated climate-action initiative produced a documentary on climate change, alongside an ongoing series of formal climate conferences.  

Eilish and Baird also teamed up with Reverb, a non-profit consultancy focused on greening concerts and festivals. Reverb’s environmental impact report demonstrates the results that spirited leadership can produce. Eilish’s 2024/2025 tour raised US$13.3 million for climate organizations, delivered 7.7 million plant-based meals (reducing food-related emission by half), and avoided 135,000 single-use water bottles. Since the biggest climate impact of arena shows is the transportation required for tens of thousands of fans, Eilish’s team worked with each venue, Google Maps and local transit to plot the greenest alternatives. Best of all, Reverb says, many venues have turned these new practices into ongoing operations.  

Unlike many climate crusaders, Eilish is bullish about the possibilities for change. “The main message I live by is that things don’t always have to be done the way they’ve always been done.” 

The post The Eilish environmental effect appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Since becoming president, Milei has set his sights on the country’s most valuable untapped resource: copper. With global demand for the critical mineral soaring, Milei sees a golden opportunity. So do global mining giants, like McEwen Copper Inc., owned by Canadian Rob McEwen, which possesses a major copper deposit in the northwestern province of San Juan.  

McEwen is now a central player in the copper rush currently underway in Argentina, one that stands to generate billions of dollars in annual export revenue for the country and to boost the global supply of a mineral that is essential to the energy transition. But while McEwen sees his Los Azules mine as an opportunity to showcase sustainability and best mining practice, many in Argentina see the country’s copper boom as a travesty of environmental justice and are predicting that it will end in bust.  

Opening Argentina’s copper reserves 

Vast deposits of copper are embedded in the Andes Mountains that form Argentina’s spine. It’s the same geological formation that has turned neighbouring Chile into the world’s largest copper producer and one of South America’s most stable economies. But Argentina, which has been mired in debt, financial crises and crippling inflation, has left most of its copper in the ground: exports dropped to nil in 2018 and have remained there ever since. 

Copper mining in Argentina has been hindered by political and economic instability, but also a unique piece of legislation. When it was enacted in 2010, the National Glacier Protection Law (Minimum Standards for the Preservation of Glaciers and the Periglacial Environmental Law in full) was considered a groundbreaking piece of environmental legislation. Declaring Argentina’s glaciers and periglacial zones – frozen grounds that often are saturated with subsurface ice – to be vital water reserves and therefore public assets, it made them subject to special protection. The law prioritized water security above all else: a compelling position in an increasingly drought-prone country that depends heavily on agriculture.  

In April, Argentina’s Congress voted to reform the law, downloading responsibility for glaciers and periglacial areas onto the country’s 24 provinces. Now it falls to provincial governments, rather than a federal scientific body – Argentina’s Institute for Snow, Ice and Environmental Sciences – to determine if an area is hydrologically “relevant.” Argentina’s mineral-rich provinces welcomed the change. But many Argentinians did not.  

“Now we have a crisis of representation,” says Juan Pablo Milana, a professor of geological science at the Universidad Nacional de San Juan, located in the capital city of San Juan province. “Congress is not representing the people. This law will not last for very long.”  

Save the glaciers 

Opposition to the legislative change was vocal and swift. By the end of April, two provinces – Santa Cruz and La Pampa – had filed injunctions to block its implementation, and three national organizations – Greenpeace, the Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers, and the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation – had banded together to declare the reform unconstitutional, gathering nearly a million signatures in support. 

Milana has served as a consultant on copper mining projects in Chile and has seen many turned down in the name of glacier protection. While Chile doesn’t rely on federal legislation, Milana says the non-profits that regulate water use are rigorous in their environmental assessments.  That rigour, he insists, is necessary. “If a country allows miners to destroy glaciers, they will,” Milana says, citing Canadian-owned Centerra’s Kumtor gold mine in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan as evidence. “Miners go for minerals. They don’t care what is beside, below or above them. They have no conscience.”  

A history of harms 

The mining industry’s poor reputation in Argentina can be attributed in large part to Toronto-based Barrick Mining Corp. Multiple cyanide spills at its Veladero gold mine in San Juan led to a suspension of operations in 2016, and its Pascua-Lama mine, which straddles the Chilean border, was fined repeatedly for environmental violations before being forced to close by Chilean authorities. Barrick has also led the mining industry’s charge against the National Glacier Protection Law; in 2019, Argentina’s Supreme Court dismissed Barrick’s claim that the legislation was unconstitutional.   

But now that the law has been softened, there is little to stop the 76 copper mining projects currently registered in Argentina from entering full gear. McEwen’s Los Azules property is one of the largest and most advanced of the crop. According to a feasibility study that was completed last October, the deposit, located in a remote mountain bowl at 3,500 metres elevation, could produce some 327 million pounds of copper cathode a year, with an after-tax “net present value” – a projection of total cash flow from the mine minus taxes and royalties – estimated at US$2.9 billion. But McEwen says this mine is as much about rebranding mining in Argentina, and the world, as it is about digging for copper. The driving question, he says over the phone from his Toronto office, is “How do we make a mine that will change the public’s perception of mining?”

McEwen’s status as a mining magnate is well established. His many successful ventures in gold mining earned him a spot in the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame in 2017. Two years later, his company Goldcorp, which he founded in 1983, sold to Newmont Mining in a deal valued at US$10 billion.  

McEwen’s also known to be something of a maverick. In 2000, he turned convention on its head when he solicited public input on an underperforming gold mine he had purchased near Thunder Bay, Ontario. Rather than jealously guarding the Red Lake mine’s geological data – as is standard practice – he published it online and offered sizable cash prizes for the best exploration suggestions. More than a thousand submissions came in: input that resulted in a 10-fold increase in the mine’s yield. It was crowdsourcing before its time. 

A different kind of mine 

Now McEwen wants to roll the dice in a different way. Even though an Argentine environmental non-profit has challenged the Los Azules project in the past for contravening the National Glacier Protection Law, McEwen is confident that the operation will affect no glaciers. More, he wants the project to be a model of sustainability. Opting for heap leaching – an extraction technology that uses considerably less water and energy than conventional copper processing – McEwen says the mine will produce no tailings and be powered by exclusively renewable energy. He has engaged prominent Sudbury-born architect Jason McLennan “to put some beauty on the landscape”: renderings for the workers’ accommodation show a futuristic terraced structure three football fields long, full of hanging gardens and encased in glass. McEwen is even considering putting in a hotel “to enhance transparency of the business.”  

And then there is copper’s end use. As the best conductor of all non-precious metals, the mineral is critical to electrification: a core component of wind turbines, solar panels and EV batteries. The International Energy Agency projects a 30% increase in demand by 2040, and its chief executive officer, Fatih Birol, has warned that shortfalls in supply could slow down the energy transition.  

“The world has woken up to the fact that minerals are needed to support modern society,” McEwen says. “All those things we didn’t want in our own backyard – now someone else has built them. Now places like China have a chokehold on supply.” 

But the argument leaves some in Argentina cold. For Leandro Gómez, investments and rights program coordinator for the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation – one of the three organizations contesting the reform to the National Glacier Protection Law – the explosion of copper mining in Argentina is a sad case of self-interested politics trumping environmental rights, and an example of local communities losing out in the race to decarbonize. “The current model of the energy transition does not include the interests of the Global South,” he says from Buenos Aires.  

Meanwhile, McEwen expects construction in Los Azules to begin next year and the first copper to be in production by 2030. 

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.  

The post A captain of mining tries to rehabilitate the industry appeared first on Corporate Knights.

On my cab ride to Canggu, a tourist town of about 9,000 residents, I noticed changes to the built environment from my previous stay: new villas rising over rice fields and freshly opened businesses priced for the several thousand nomads there at any given time, but out of reach of locals who might earn a few hundred dollars a month. As I settled into Bali, my perspective continued to shift. The exhaust-heavy traffic jams, beaches and sewers choked in plastic litter, and flaming garbage piles visible from my $16-a-night hotel window made me wonder if nomads like me had descended on a place that couldn’t contain us. 

This same tension prevails in digital-nomad enclaves around the world, where remote workers and untethered entrepreneurs congregate, from Mexico City and Barcelona to Da Nang and Chiang Mai. Since the onset of the remote-work revolution spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, LinkedIn and Instagram are full of posts portraying digital nomadism as freedom in paradise, but there are environmental and social costs that come with this trend. 

Remote work has been supercharged by cost-of-living crises at home and open-door policies from countries that want to lure higher-income earners to their shores. By some estimates, there are up to 40 million people living and working this way: spreading their wings, and their waste. How much waste, exactly, is a mystery, given the relative newness of digital nomadism, the challenge in distinguishing effects of nomads versus tourists at large, and, more critically, that few remote workers stick around to see long-term effects. 

A force for good?  

Digital-nomad lifestyles tend to emphasize the present moment rather than the long term, not unlike how nations focus on the immediate economic benefits over the generational environmental impacts. Having worked abroad from a dozen countries, I know this first-hand. But this also is true of the countries that court us, and that focus more on the economic effects than environmental ones. Right now, about 50 countries offer digital-nomad visas for stays of a year or more, and even short-term visitors are prized for their impact on sales taxes, hospitality and other economic areas. In some communities, nomad spending becomes, as The Economist called their presence in Latin America, “a force for good.” The magazine reported that in Medellín, Colombia, digital nomads spend nearly $1,000 more per month than locals. In Bali, which has partnered with Airbnb to encourage digital nomadism, about 80% of its economic activity comes from tourists. Mexico City calculated the nomad contribution to tourist spending more precisely at 15% in 2021, or more than $532 million. 

Daniel Schlagwein, a professor at Chulalongkorn University and the University of Sydney, is a digital nomad based in Bangkok and has worked on digital-nomad strategies with the Thai government. He says the government views digital nomads more positively than other types of visitors, like “zero baht tourists,” who pass through on tour groups but don’t make a noticeable economic contribution. For local authorities, digital nomads are coveted because they leave money in communities and fade into the background, clacking away on laptops at Airbnbs or coworking spaces. 

In a Journal of Business Ethics paper Schlagwein co-wrote on digital nomads and emancipation, the environment didn’t come up frequently, although some nomads surveyed displayed what the authors called “self-reflective guilt” about it. One said that he and a group of nomads spent two years assisting with “a waste separation strategy for the villages and a decentralized waste management facility,” using their tech skills to give back to the community project. But another, based in the Bali community of Ubud, was less positive. “The number one thing that we could do for this economy and this island is to get off [and] leave,” a nomad called Sandra told the researchers. “I don’t want to leave, but we’re taxing the environment.” 

Effects on communities can be wide-ranging, from environmental waste to straining infrastructure and resources like groundwater. Pastoral landscapes and seascapes become lodging designed for Western tastes and budgets. Living costs for locals rise, elbowing them out of home communities and creating social tensions with their new, temporary, neighbours. 

Digital nomadism isn’t a formal movement, maybe in part because its practitioners tend to be disconnected from the community around them. To paraphrase a 2022 book review, digital nomads quit the sort of life where one collectively organizes or gets involved in politics in exchange for personal freedom. It can be isolating by design, as impermanence, language and cultural barriers converge. Digital nomads also often run in circles with each other, blithely unaware of the mundane realities of their present communities – like where the trash goes.  

Articles exploring the ethics of digital nomadism – from The Washington Post to personal blogs – set the bar low: not overstaying visas, supporting local businesses and obeying local laws. 

Emerging research suggests digital nomads want to be sustainable, too, but face hurdles. “While digital nomads show environmental awareness and adopt selective sustainable practices, their efforts remain fragmented and constrained by systemic factors such as long-haul travel reliance, market logics, local socioeconomic pressures and regulatory gaps,” researchers from Macau write. 

I met digital nomads who would go on “visa runs” where they would fly to another destination and sometimes return the same day. Aviation creates around 2.4% of global carbon emissions and is expected to grow in the coming decades. Given that digital nomadism is predicated on air travel, larger adoption would add to this impact. 

In my travels, I also noticed that a lot of digital nomads I met adopted wasteful forms of entrepreneurship – crypto and drop shipping and businesses that involve a lot of energy-sapping AI. Some of these nomads were doubling their waste footprint: creating it via digital nomadism and then again through their jobs, leaving the place behind and the rest unseen. 

But on both fronts, Schlagwein doesn’t see how it’s any worse than North American careerists. Traditional corporate jobs can involve a lot of travel. 

Digital nomadism could even prove less polluting than some of these gigs. And potentially wasteful tech is being deployed across the corporate sector, by much worse resource drainers than single nomads. OpenAI says 92% of Fortune 500 companies, some of the world’s largest, are using its data-centre-reliant products like ChatGPT. Schlagwein adds that unlike some workers who move frequently, there is a post-material approach to consumption common to digital nomads, which leads to their buying less furniture and consumer goods, that should be considered in their environmental footprints. 

Quitting one’s commute is always a positive step for reducing emissions. A study from researchers in Bangladesh identified digital nomadism as environmentally friendly because remote work “[helps] to lower office-related energy consumption and reduce the need for commuting.” For instance, the average car generates 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, though a couple of long-haul flights can make up the deficit quickly. 

Schlagwein notes that digital nomads also tend to be “time-limited” to their international mobility days “that are more backpacker-style, primarily travelling and secondarily working.” Eventually, as nomads tire of constantly changing lifestyles, find a preferred location, take on a partner or have kids, they become more sedentary (like Schlagwein staying in Bangkok) or simply return home (like me). Either way, they eventually cut down on travel. 

Escaping the vacuum 

Now that I’m back in Canada, I’m actively monitoring my footprint more than I did in my digital-nomad days. It’s easier when you’re in one place, particularly with relatively advanced recycling and waste management. Rather than think in the moment, as I did as a nomad, I now think more in terms of the grand scheme of my life. While my digital-nomad era might have been a blight on my carbon footprint, my lifetime impact can be mitigated.   

In his view, and no doubt for a lot of nomads, a critical trade-off is the ability of digital nomads “to live a life of their choosing, versus the environmental impact.” People do this with consumer choices like fast fashion or fundamental life decisions like choosing to have kids. We live in a world where we should all be measuring decisions against the environmental impact, though it doesn’t mean the answer is abstinence. 

As digital nomads learn to define their ethical frameworks, it’s necessary that each of us engage with the challenge of our footprint and choose a lifestyle that is consistent with avoiding climate catastrophe. This includes letting “self-reflective guilt” help shape our consumption habits on the road. Nomads can no longer act like we exist in a vacuum outside of the communities that so generously host us, and that deal with the effects of our travels long after we’re gone. 

Rob Csernyik is a freelance journalist specializing in business and investigative reporting. 

The post The cost of paradise  appeared first on Corporate Knights.

There’s no tangible evidence that caribou have memory the way humans have memory, but researchers, such as biologist Anne Gunn, have observed tundra caribou change migration routes based on past experiences. If a route is too icy and foraging is difficult, for instance, older female caribou – who lead the herd – may remember a different, less icy path they used a previous year.  

“The average cow lives, say, 15 years, and she will have learned [routes] from her mother, because when she was a yearling, she will have followed her mother, who would have followed her mother,” Gunn says. “So there’s collective memory. They learn from each other.” 

As the barren-ground caribou population declines – with the Bathurst herd in particular thinning out by 98% – the risk of caribou losing their collective memory increases. The key to retaining that memory, beyond ensuring the population doesn’t go extinct, is making sure those migration routes stay accessible to caribou, Gunn says. But infrastructure initiatives in the Canadian Arctic, such as the proposed 400-kilometre all-season road from the Northwest Territories to Nunavut, are poised to cut through a significant portion of caribou migration range, blocking the routes these animals have crossed for millennia. 

“We know that caribou, especially barren-ground migratory caribou, really do not like crossing roads,” says Elie Gurarie, professor of wildlife ecology at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York.  

Researchers have a good sense of how caribou might react to the all-season road based on their behaviour on smaller roads linking the Diavik and Ekati diamond mines in the Northwest Territories to Yellowknife. These mining roads are not open to the public, with traffic increasing seasonally along with mining activity. 

Data from GPS-collared caribou – collected by the Northwest Territories’ Department of Environment and Climate Change – have recorded caribou crowding along the sides of these roads when traffic is active, unable to cross and roam their natural range. “Caribou are just remarkably successful in the Arctic,” Gurarie says. “The environment is really harsh and not very protected. I think the key to that success is that collective memory, their sociality and their freedom to move.”  

Barren-ground caribou have extremely variable migratory routes, so it’s not as simple as making sure one path is free for them to use. They need a lot of space to roam. When it came to the diamond mine roads, one solution, Gunn says, was to close these roads for a few hours each day during the high migratory season.  

The proposed all-season road, however, is much bigger than the mining roads. It’s part of the $40-billion Arctic Economic and Security Corridor linking mines, military operations and communities under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s nation-building projects list, which allows it to be fast-tracked through the approval process. A portion of the road, called the Grays Bay Road and Port project, cuts right through the dwindling Bathurst herd’s migratory range.   

If we don’t look after the herd well enough when they’re declining, and we lose most or all of a herd, all that collective memory of the landscape is lost.

— Anne Gunn, biologist

But there are three ways the impact of the road on caribou can be mitigated, Gurarie says. The government could collaborate with researchers and local Indigenous wildlife monitoring groups – including the North Slave Métis Alliance, Tlicho Ekwǫ̀ Nàxoèhdee K’è and Yellowknives Dene First Nation – to map a route least intrusive on the caribou range. The road itself could be designed to make crossings easier, such as with lower embankments, so that the animals don’t have to climb anything to make it through. And the roads could be closed for dedicated periods when migration activity is highest.  

With the project still in its infancy, the fate of the caribou can still be changed. As their natural habitat becomes ever more fragmented – spurred by industrial operations and a warming climate that affects the vegetation they need – caribou populations, and the memory they rely on, are on a precipice.  

 “If we don’t look after the herd well enough when they’re declining, and we lose most or all of a herd, all that collective memory of the landscape is lost,” Gunn says. “But the herds are still there, and there are still knowledgeable individuals among the caribou there. So, not letting a herd go extinct is really important.” 

Ayesha Habib is a Vancouver-based journalist. 

The post How researchers are working to preserve caribou collective memory and migratory routes appeared first on Corporate Knights.

We all remember that initial shock in 2020, when our systems of trade and transport – previously understood as untouchable, and nearly always reliable – were thrust into disarray. Suddenly it mattered more where our purchases originated from, and what materials they were generated from. Travelling abroad became more difficult, if not outright impossible. Planes were grounded all over the world, and the return to “normal” seemed like a distant dream.

And it all unfurled while we were collectively confronting an unknown and deadly virus.

We adapted, and as a result of this tremendous upheaval, certain good ideas gained widespread traction: embracing a better work–life balance, baking sourdough bread and making the most of the region where you live. It became the age of the “staycation.”

Now, in the summer of 2026, we’re witnessing the return of some of the markers of those disease-ridden summers. The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has triggered a massive fuel shortage. Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, has called it “the greatest global energy security threat in history.”

Some 13,000 flights were cancelled in May alone. The implications have been felt around the world. In Europe, governments have called on citizens to limit their car trips, while European airports, including Paris’s Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam’s Schiphol, have seen some of the highest flight-cancellation rates globally. In Asia, which was the recipient of 90% of the oil coming through the strait, fuel shortages have meant that families have no fuel with which to cook, let alone travel. Canadian airlines have discontinued flight routes, with several airlines cancelling nearly all U.S.-bound flights. The Middle East and South America are also grappling with the fallout.

Even before the fuel crisis, Canadians were choosing to stay closer to home. Political tensions with the United States, historically their preferred travel destination, and a weak Canadian dollar are among the factors cited in a recent Léger poll that found that 67% of Canadian travellers planned to keep it domestic.

This shift lines up well with the conditions required for an increased interest in sustainable, nature-focused vacations, according to a research paper in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism co-written by Michelle Rutty, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo. The findings, based on a survey of 753 Canadians during the pandemic, indicated that Canadians showed a preference for sustainable, regenerative tourism (including staycations) for post-pandemic travel, due to changes in their motivations, values and behaviours.

Current conditions will make many hesitate to book a trip, Rutty says. “It’s important to note that Canadians won’t stop travelling, but rather [will] change the way they travel,” she adds, and will instead consider more local destinations.

This shifting approach to vacations is already being reflected in numbers from parks throughout Canada. BC Parks registered a 60% increase in reservations for the May long weekend this year. Banff National Park notched a record-breaking 4.5 million visitors in the fiscal year 2025/2026. In Quebec, the most recent data available show a 25.3% increase in natural parks visits, reaching 9.4 million in 2023/2024, while total Ontario Parks visits surged to 12.4 million in 2024.

The increased interest in outdoor adventures has led to upgrades in park facilities across the country. In 2025, the Ontario government committed nearly $60 million to add up to 300 new campsites and improve 800 campsites by providing electricity. BC Parks has changed its booking system, which now allows visitors to book just three months in advance instead of four. In Quebec in May, provincial cycling organization Vélo Québec released a new digital platform to encourage more “bike-cations” using the province’s many interconnected bike routes.

Jax Jacobsen is a Montreal-based journalist who specializes in mining, business and climate.

The post The return of the staycation appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The perennially besieged airline industry responded by cancelling thousands of flights, cutting in-flight passenger services and threatening to impose fuel surcharges on tickets. The European Union also announced it would seek to “optimize” jet fuel distribution among member states and look for alternative supply.

You’d think this geopolitical convulsion might mark the long-promised inflection point for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), a class of biodiesel additives seen by some as a way of weaning air travel from its reliance on fossil fuels. “Iran really is a ‘sharpen the markets’ case for domestic-waste-based SAF,” says Chris Cooper, CEO of XCF Global, a Reno, Nevada–based producer. The war, he adds, “[exposes] the fragility of the fossil crude inputs and supply. We’re fighting with other countries just to produce a product that brings more conflict to the global economy.”

Yet the reality is that SAF – despite years of research and development and policy stimulus on both sides of the Atlantic – has failed to establish itself as a bona fide low-carbon additive to one of the highest-emitting fossil fuels. There has been a conspicuous silence on the part of aviation players that, not so long ago, enthusiastically promoted SAF as a pathway to reduce the sector’s carbon consumption and meet its climate goals. Neither Air Canada nor the Greater Toronto Airports Authority responded to requests for comment on their own adoption timelines. Nova Sustainable Fuels, the company behind a planned multibillion-dollar SAF plant in Nova Scotia, won’t talk. And Delta yanked references to SAF from its sustainability reports a month into the war, Bloomberg reported.

All this circumspection is telling. If SAF can really decarbonize the aviation industry, why are the proponents staying quiet in the midst of the worst fossil fuel crisis since the 1970s?

Mixed signals

Among all transportation modes, aviation has been the most resistant to the adoption of alternative fuels, despite years of efforts to develop jet fuel substitutes. About 5% of fuel for road transport comes from low-carbon sources, such as biofuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Aviation has seen the highest growth in fuel demand; however, SAF still accounts for only 0.7% of all jet fuel production, with European carriers among the main users.

Not so long ago, the prospect of fostering an SAF market and supply chain generated all kinds of official and policy enthusiasm, such as the “SAF Grand Challenge Roadmap” concocted in 2022 by the U.S. departments of Energy, Transportation and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency. The European Union last year even mandated that all jet fuel supplied at European airports contain 2% SAF, with that benchmark rising to 70% by 2050.

The Trump administration has gutted climate policy, yet the waning of enthusiasm for SAF predates his election. In 2024, the International Air Transport Association bemoaned the “disappointingly slow growth” in SAF production, despite all the mid-pandemic progressive hype. “Governments are sending mixed signals to oil companies, which continue to receive subsidies for their exploration and production of fossil oil and gas,” the association’s director general, Willie Walsh, said at the time. “Investors in new-generation fuel producers seem to be waiting for guarantees of easy money before going full throttle.”

The regulatory nudges didn’t seem to be working. “Several countries have put policies and regulations in place to increase SAF use, such as SAF mandates in the European Union and the United Kingdom,” the International Energy Agency noted in a 2025 report. “In the accelerated case, the global SAF share climbs to 15% by 2035.” However, the operative term here is “accelerated,” which makes it more of a fond wish than a takeoff trajectory.

In the United States, some of the SAF-related tax credit from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act survived Trump’s backsliding. But the new credit tends to favour biodiesel, says Andy Navarrete, a researcher for the International Council on Clean Transportation, so SAF production remains limited.

Technical holdups

The delays in SAF adoption are also a direct result of the difficulty in ensuring that the chemistry behind these formulations is both reliable and resilient. “We identified very early on that aviation was going to be a particularly difficult sector to decarbonize,” says renewable-energy expert Warren Mabee, a Canada Research Chair at Queen’s University. Jet fuel, he says, has to remain stable under extreme temperatures and pressure changes to ensure that planes don’t suddenly experience a loss of power in mid-air.

Emerging SAF technologies that rely on cellulosic materials, like corn husks and other types of agricultural residues, or certain forms of municipal solid waste, promise lower carbon emissions but have not yet reached full commercial viability, Navarrete says. “There is a good amount of that material that’s available, but it’s not easy to convert into a liquid fuel.”

So for now, the adoption continues to be dogged by the same sorts of hard questions that orbit around other types of biofuels – namely, the source and quality of the feedstock. The EU discourages the use of waste cooking oils because of limited supply, even though such feedstocks, on average, promise an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional jet fuel and are considered to be the least expensive feedstock. “SAFs that use crops as feedstock may not reduce life-cycle [greenhouse gas] emissions at all,” Navarrete adds. “When land is cleared and repurposed for agriculture, carbon stored in the soil and vegetation can be released.”

The EU, in turn, has pushed producers to disclose the full life cycle of their production methods.

Sustainable aviation fuel made from virgin oilseeds like canola, Mabee points out, also tends to be insufficiently dense in terms of chemical makeup, rendering it less suitable for power-hungry jet engines. “This is one of the things about these fuels, they’re not chemically identical to what goes into today’s jet fuels,” he says. “But it has to be similar enough that the engines respond the same way, because there’s really no room for error in these fuels.”

Alternatives to the alternative

Some investors are looking at new alternatives to the old alternatives, such as waste biomass from forestry or municipal solid waste. Nova Sustainable Fuels, based in Halifax, late last year won conditional approval for a large-scale SAF and renewable methanol processing plant powered by wind and solar energy. The facility is to be located in Goldboro, N.S., and will run on a diet of sawmill waste and underbrush from forest management operations, with the resulting SAF exported overseas.

While the company hasn’t formally released the size of the investment, recent media reports estimate that it will cost $4 to $6 billion, with the bulk of the financing coming from Octopus Energy, a leading British renewable-energy supplier with operations around the world. Despite the size of the project (situated on 313 hectares of private and public land) and its positioning as a future mainspring of Nova Scotia’s green energy sector, Octopus didn’t respond to requests for comment, while Nova declined to schedule an interview.

XCF, the Reno firm, has an annual production capacity of 38 million gallons of SAF on a 10-acre site and is expanding its Nevada plant as well as building two others in Australia, thanks in part to new incentives adopted by that country’s national government. Cooper, an oil industry veteran, says XCF uses waste oils created by the ethanol industry, as well as by soybean processing. “We produced the product through our refinery, and then we sold all of the production back to [the oil refiner] Phillips 66,” he says. XCF’s current off-take agreement is with BGN, an energy trader based in Houston.

The most established player in this space is the Finnish energy giant Neste, which generated €19 billion in revenues last year and earned profits of nearly €1.5 billion. The company has plants in Finland, the Netherlands, California and Singapore and is the world’s largest producer of biodiesel. SAF, which is just one of Neste’s products, is processed using waste materials such as residual biomass and cooking oil.

According to its 2025 annual report, Neste’s global SAF production capability is 1.5 million tons per annum, which will grow to 2.2 million tons per year by 2027 after the expansion of its Rotterdam facility. (The company, which is partially owned by the Finnish government, makes most of the world’s SAF.) “We have seen very positive developments recently within the U.S. and in Europe regarding renewable fuel policies,” a Neste spokesperson said in a statement to Corporate Knights. “They provide a solid outlook for years ahead. Renewables provide an alternative for fossil markets that are heavily Middle East–dependent, therefore governments should see renewables as a means to increase energy supply security.”

Perhaps the most promising policy can be found in the United Kingdom, Navarrete says. There, regulators have mandated a minimum ratio of SAF for all jets. But over time, a progressively smaller proportion of the SAF can come from spent cooking oils. As well, the government has fixed a price floor for producers, an approach they also used to drive wind power investment. A combination of a mandate and a price guarantee provides demand-side and supply-side incentives for SAF refiners looking to invest in newer technologies that offer scalable production – without gobbling up valuable agricultural land. “We don’t have anything similar to that in the US,” he says.

Asking the right question

For the foreseeable future, there’s no technology competition for SAF, notwithstanding a very limited number of experiments with battery-powered small planes, such as Harbour Air’s “e-plane,” a refurbished six-seat de Havilland Beaver, which flies around B.C.’s lower mainland. If a large aviation manufacturer like Airbus or Boeing decided to develop a battery-powered passenger jet, it would likely take well over two decades to design, engineer, test and certify such a vehicle, Mabee says. “The commercial biofuels are the only real option on the table.”

Besides the lingering technical difficulties associated with blending biodiesel into jet fuel, the SAF industry’s main problem is that the price differential is too great; the financial incentives, too thin. Mabee learned this implacable fact while working with farmers on the potential for biodiesel. “Farmers will tend to deviate towards the market that’s going to give them a lot of value,” he says. “I can tell you that with biofuels, the value-add is not necessarily there. They can generally make more money selling their product for food than they can for fuel.” Which is just as well, given how ethanol distorted U.S. corn farming.

Indeed, when the International Council on Clean Transportation a month prior to the Iran war tallied up the cost of SAF compared to conventional jet fuel, the price differential was bracing. A litre of SAF cost about eight times more than a litre of jet fuel, and a range of EU-adopted regulatory subsidies reduced the gap by less than a half.

XCF’s Chris Cooper says that state and federal tax and carbon offset credits, both to biofuel refiners as well as to suppliers of the feedstock, have been instrumental in making a business case for its product. (In Canada, Mark Carney’s Liberal government last year launched a consultation about amending federal clean-fuel regulations so they stay abreast of what’s on offer for biofuel producers in the United States.) But, Cooper adds, the most salient selling point is that SAF offers essentially a hedge against the price volatility caused, in part, by geopolitical conflict. “What we’re actually providing the airlines is a bit of stability when these prices are moving.”

Should climate-forward governments be stoking a fuel that’s stuck in neutral? To answer that question, it’s worth noting the largesse that fossil fuels enjoy. As the International Energy Agency has noted, the world spent $600 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2023. The calculus around SAF, in other words, might finally change if the price of jet fuel wasn’t being kept artificially low.

“The danger is that the environmental element gets lost in the shuffle,” Navarrete warns. “If [policymakers] start to see SAF as a good on its own, without thinking about the sustainability implications, then we might be shooting ourselves in the foot.” 

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

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