And it’s all happening so fast that these energy-guzzling data centres have shattered forecast patterns of energy growth, accelerating demand for fossil fuels at just the wrong time, and requiring untold quantities of scarce, clean water for cooling.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. The computer industry has made great strides in reducing the energy required to process data. But then generative AI happened, demanding massive clusters of computing power that run hot and need powerful cooling technologies. A traditional enterprise rack of computing power, sufficient to run major corporations or browse Facebook, could get by on five to 10 kilowatts. By comparison, a rack of AI servers needs 30 to 100 kilowatts. But the real crunch comes from the timing of our new AI era. Where new power infrastructure generally takes five to 10 years to plan and build, AI has taken off in less than three.

Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted, or disappearing water sources. Without rapid transitions toward water-smart agriculture, water bankruptcy will spread rapidly.

– Global Water Bankruptcy report

The result: the rapid growth of AI data centres has created a debilitating free-for-all in crucial energy and water systems. Competition for electricity in some U.S. states has resulted in higher electricity prices, costly upgrading projects, and conflicts over new transmission lines. In West London, the allocation of power to a new cluster of data centres has created an electricity shortage that has delayed new housing and commercial projects by as much as 10 to years.

Many tech firms intended to power their new data centres with renewable energy, but existing wind and solar supplies can’t keep up with demand. So now Microsoft, once a clean-energy leader, is tapping natural gas to fuel its showpiece data centres in Wisconsin, and Meta will use gas-fired turbines at its Hyperion project in Louisiana. The Washington Post recently counted 220 new gas projects in the United States, largely driven by AI.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently announced what it called “landmark agreements” to expand the operation of three nuclear power plants and “boost the development of new advanced nuclear technology.”

Most tellingly, Microsoft is reviving Pennsylvania’s notorious Three Mile Island generating station – mothballed since its 1979 meltdown – to power its AI and cloud computing operations.

AI’s thirst trap

One way to reduce the energy needs of data centres is to use more water – which is 20 times more efficient than air at dissipating heat. But in the heated rivalry over AI, two-thirds of the U.S. data centres built since 2022 have been located in water-stressed areas such as Texas and Arizona. From Phoenix to the Netherlands, authorities are having increasing trouble balancing the needs of data centres, agriculture and new homeowners.

A recent investigation by The Guardian and SourceMaterial, a public-interest journalism project, found that Amazon, Microsoft and Google are operating 38 data centres in some of the world’s driest settings – including northern Spain and Maricopa County, Arizona – and plan to build 24 more. One Meta data centre in the drought-stricken community of Mesa, Arizona, consumes as much water as 10,000 homes.

While skeptics keep sounding the alarm over a potential AI bubble, Goldman Sachs predicts that investment in new data centres will grow 165% over the next five years. Data centres currently consume 1.5% of all energy on Earth, but by 2035 that share could triple.

A recent CBC report noted that one large AI training run can evaporate hundreds of thousands of litres of water. Unfortunately, data centres compete with people and wildlife for scarce water supplies because they need fresh, filtered water for cooling, and their equipment works best in low-humidity environments.

Even in Canada, water consumption matters. The Alberta government has announced its intention to woo new data centres, even though most of Alberta’s water comes from the seasonal Rocky Mountain snowpack.

Giant investments in data centres are giving renewables an opening to outcompete gas

The Wonder Valley data centre in Alberta would erase two decades of emission reductions

Companies are finding creative ways to use heat from data centres

Some tech companies worsen the situation by shrouding their data operations in mystery. Another recent SourceMaterial investigation found that Amazon globally uses 924 data centres – double most industry estimates. And Microsoft once promised local farmers that a new Netherlands data centre would draw less than 20 million litres of water a year. Dutch journalists later found that plant used 84 million litres in 2021 – even as locals were urged to limit their water use.

A new UN study reminds us that human intelligence has a bad track record of managing its water supply. The report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, says many societies are depleting their water systems, drawing not just from their rivers and lakes, but from longer-term, irreplaceable sources such as aquifers, glaciers and wetlands. “Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted, or disappearing water sources,” the report notes. “Without rapid transitions toward water-smart agriculture, water bankruptcy will spread rapidly.”

The authors hope their use of the term “bankruptcy” will provoke real change in water-management patterns. In particular, they encourage countries to reduce their dependence on “water-intensive” industries such as “water-hungry extractive industries and thirsty data centres.” Better, says the report, to embrace “water-dependent sectors, including knowledge-based services, manufacturing with low water footprints, and water-friendly renewable energy technologies.”

As confirmation, we posed a question to ChatGPT: “Which is more important: preserving water supplies, or cooling data centres?” Its response: “Both are important – but preserving water supplies is more fundamental, especially long-term. Water security underpins everything else – including technology infrastructure.”

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. He is based in Toronto.

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Engineers promise more dams and more tunnels to bring water from the Amazon side of the Andes – but the accelerated melting of Peru’s tropical glaciers puts even those megaprojects into question. 

Where modern engineering fails, can traditional know-how succeed? The answer is “Si.” A Peruvian non-profit called Aquafondo is rallying high-Andean communities – where ancient knowledge is still preserved – to use nature-based tactics to “sow” new supplies of water. Local people are restoring thousand-year-old trenches high in the mountains to redirect water flow into ancient, stone-lined canals, revitalized wetlands and, eventually, the underground aquifers that supply Lima. They’re also restoring grasslands and forests that increase the mountains’ ability to absorb moisture, reducing runoff and increasing the water supplies available to local communities. 

How meaningful can old ditches be? Studies by The Nature Conservancy in one community, San Pedro de Casta, found that restoring 20 kilometres of pre-Incan canals (known as “amunas”) boosted dry-season river volumes by 50%. Another study found that the cost of “sowing” the aquifers was just a third the cost of saving an equivalent amount of water behind a modern dam. Aquafondo now estimates that its community-based approach is adding more than 13 million square metres of water a year to Lima’s river basin – all while reinforcing traditional knowledge and creating new jobs in remote communities.  

The COP30 climate conference in Brazil recognized this success in November, where Aquafondo won the global “Local Adaptation Champions” award for nature-based solutions. “We have strengthened our unity, our identity and our capacity to adapt without losing our roots,” Aquafondo executive director Mariella Sánchez said after winning the award. “This is not only a nature-based solution. It is a solution grounded in memory, dignity and the leadership of our communities.” 

Rick Spence is editor-at-large at Corporate Knights.

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U.S. climate researcher Victoria Herrmann has a doctorate in geography and a specialization in polar studies, and she’s an official National Geographic “Explorer.” But when she worked on “America’s Eroding Edges,” a 2017 study of shoreline communities facing rising sea levels, she learned to shut up and just listen. Herrmann was the so-called expert on climate change, but the 350 community leaders interviewed for her study knew their communities best – and they pointed her toward local threats and crises she’d never studied in school.

The story Herrmann most likes to tell is of an activist in the U.S. territory of American Samoa, who showed her how climate change and culture are indelibly linked. He described how high seas, stronger winds and hotter temperatures were pushing more salt water onto agricultural land, reducing taro production. The starchy root vegetable is more than a staple food in Polynesia – it’s a cultural icon, a connection to the spirit, and a symbol of prosperity. To farmers in American Samoa, rising tides threaten not just their land and livelihood, but the meaning of their lives.

“Climate change, at its core, is a story about losing the things that make us who we are,” Herrmann told National Geographic, which helped fund the project. “The way we tell this story and find climate change solutions has to include our history and our culture and these intimate parts of us.”

The realization that the climate crisis is both a global phenomenon and a million different local disasters spurred Herrmann and National Geographic to form a new climate-adaptation initiative called Preserving Legacies: A Future for Our Past. Founded in 2022 in Washington, D.C., the project aims to help cultural heritage sites around the world – from the ninth-century Angkor temples of Cambodia to the 17th-century Spanish fortress of Cartagena, Colombia, and the wine cellars of France’s Champagne region – counter the destructive threats of climate change by devising their own place-based mitigation plans. (According to UNESCO, one in six cultural heritage sites is at risk of climate-related destruction.)

Preserving Legacies, which is sponsored by Canadian financial giant Manulife, isn’t in the business of telling its clients what to do. Taking a “train the trainers” approach, the initiative uses global climate models to create personalized threat analyses for each site to identify their likeliest risks from climate change, from flooding to crop failures to wildfires. It then offers these local “heritage custodians” a proven format for engaging local stakeholders – including Indigenous people, elders, artists, women and youth – in carefully assessing the risks and most optimal outcomes. In the end, each group prepares its own customized adaptation plan, building community and resilience throughout the process.

With Preserving Legacies active now in 35 countries, Herrmann hopes to extend the program to hundreds of cultural sites on every continent: “That is my big goal – that it reaches everyone.”

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. He is based in Toronto.

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Africa’s markets have been pressure-testing what the rest of the world mostly theorizes about: resilience through proximity. The vocabulary is “short food supply chains,” but the practice is older than policy and smarter than jargon: farmer to local aggregator or market to consumer or institution, with 1,000-kilometre detours and very few gatekeepers. A 2025 synthesis of 69 studies across 25 African countries comes to the same conclusion: short chains don’t just move food; they move power, especially when paired with simple digital tools. This isn’t about romanticizing open-air markets; it’s about bargaining power. The shorter the path, the less room for someone far away to set the terms.

“Cash in 24 hours changes everything,” a Kiambu farmer told me, leaning on his pickup as porters shouldered crates toward the scales. “You can buy inputs, pay workers, and you don’t panic-sell.” A platform operator in Nairobi put it even plainer: “We didn’t replace the market – we ride on it.” The digital skin: WhatsApp orders, simple inventory apps, business-to-business produce platforms and mobile money. These tools don’t erase the local chain. They speed it up and make it legible, compressing time between harvest and payment so volatility has less surface area to bite.

Follow the logic south to northern Tanzania and the system looks different but moves with the same cadence. In Arusha and Moshi, women-led stalls and microprocessors grind maize, smoke fish, blend spices and portion dairy for neighbourhood buyers and institutional kitchens. These aren’t side hustles clipped onto a formal chain; they are the chain that feeds cities. When a truck is late or a road washes out, “five handcarts fill the gap,” a market association leader said. “We don’t wait for permission.” Contingency plans aren’t found in a consultant’s diagram; it’s the woman who keeps a neighbour’s number and a spare cart in case the usual supplier’s son is sick.

Cash in 24 hours changes everything. You can buy inputs, pay workers, and you don’t panic-sell.

— Kiambu farmer

If you want to see why these short chains don’t just endure shocks but metabolize them, watch what happens when everyday demand becomes predictable. Across the region, government-led, home-grown school feeding has turned local purchasing into a weekday ritual rather than a promise: sub-Saharan Africa has added about 20 million children to national programs since 2022, with countries like Benin channelling public orders directly to nearby producers. A school places an order every weekday; upstream, farmers plant to that rhythm, transporters plan routes, microprocessors justify the small capital outlays that make the whole machine hum. A shaded sorting area here, a clean-water tap there, a used chiller bought on instalments. “That daily order turned our stall into a business,” a vendor told me in Moshi. “We hired two more women and finally bought a fridge that doesn’t die on Fridays.”

The objection, predictably, is scale. Where are the volumes? Hidden in plain sight. Day after day, these markets move hundreds of tonnes – some of it visible through platform dashboards, most of it still travelling by phone call and habit. Scale is not a monolith rolling down a highway; it’s accretion: another school on contract, another hotel switching to local suppliers, another ward installing clean water, another women’s group adding a fridge, another pickup joining the dawn queue.

The world keeps searching for resilience in the language of grand designs and silver bullets. Africa’s city-region food systems have been building it in smaller, nearer, more democratic units. Keep the path short. Pay fast. Share the margin with the people who do the work. Give the system a reliable customer. And then, when the shipment doesn’t come, watch the market open anyway.

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

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Toby Heaps: Some people think the Inflation Reduction Act was a spectacular success. There are other views as well. What’s your take? Did the policy work?

Jigar Shah: I’m sure everybody is right. I think that we all have to be honest about the fact that the United States had chosen to allow its manufacturing sector to dwindle in a very big and material way, right from 30% of gross domestic product down to about 10% of GDP. I don’t think that what we were doing under the Inflation Reduction Act was going to be solely responsible for changing that trajectory.

I have a lot of friends who are doing very large, audacious things in the cleantech space, and every single one of them, without exception, when they hit a certain milestone, decided to build their manufacturing facility or their first-of-a-kind plant in Asia. A few of them decided to go to Europe or to India or to South America. In general, not a single one of them thought Tennessee or Georgia or Texas was the right place to scale up their plant.

That all changed over the last four years. We got every one of them to consider the United States, and I’d say close to 70% of them ended up choosing the United States after evaluating all of the situations. So from that perspective, we have made a material difference.

TH: That’s encouraging. In Canada, the current government led by Prime Minister Mark Carney has introduced a pack of investment incentives that, through the capital expensing of 100% and tax rebates, amount to about 50 cents on the dollar. So if you invest in most clean-economy investments, you’ll get back half that money in the same year. Do you think that is going to be enough for Canada to become a magnet?

JS: I would suggest that this is not really about numbers. I think that ultimately this is about the animal spirits of the cleantech sector. So the question is, are CEOs looking to Canada to build a facility? And I think right now, the answer is no.

And I don’t think Canada’s ever reached out to them and asked them to come to Canada. And the thing that bothers me the most – not just about Canada, but the U.K. or EU, Australia – is that they believe that the policies themselves are enough to attract companies. And I’m like, no, you need to make some phone calls. You need to reach out proactively to the top 400 companies and say, “Have you looked at Canada? Can I keep you on the phone for 45 minutes and explain it to you? Can I introduce you to a front-door person that will guide you through the entire Canadian process and introduce you to all of the three-letter acronyms and help you find the right programs?”

I’m focused on people who have raised at least $200 million of corporate capital. We’re not talking about the long tail of companies that have raised a seed round. We’re talking about people who’ve been able to get all their milestones reached, and now they’re at a very clear inflection point where they need public policy to be able to get to the next level.

TH: A lot of coverage in Corporate Knights magazine has focused on how the private sector and private capital can turbocharge this energy revolution. Do you think it’s capitalist Kool-Aid, this idea that the private sector is going to make up the bulk of the capital that gets deployed? Or do we really need the public sector to pony up, like they are now for the military spending?

JS: It’s an ongoing argument. I don’t know that I am smart enough to know what the conclusion is, but if you look at the solar, battery storage, critical minerals, EV sector in China, I would say that at least 70% of all the capital that China has put into that sector has been completely and utterly wasted right now. You may say, well, look at what they got for it: they have all this commanding market share and all this other stuff, right? But they haven’t ever raised their prices to the point where the profits of the winners are paying off the losses of the losers. China has no home runs. The question is, do you want to copy that exactly in the United States or Canada? My sense is no. So what do you want to do that’s different?

What we did in the United States was we said we’re going to be private-sector-led, government-enabled. We said the private sector has to vote with the $200 million worth of cash that they’ve given these companies, and then we’re going to match them with public-sector dollars that they need to get to the next stage, to really be able to get their costs down. And that worked really well. I would say the losses out of the U.S. system from the Inflation Reduction Act have been remarkably low. Let’s say we awarded 100 projects. Maybe 40 of them have failed, but of those 40, we’ve released almost no money because they had to meet certain milestones to get the money.

TH: You’re someone who doesn’t just focus on what’s already here but imagines what could be possible. Let’s say we’re sitting in our rocking chairs in 2050. What’s the prize? What could things look like?

JS: Well, I think we already see it. The beauty of our space is that every single thing worth talking about takes 50 years. We started seeing cellphones in the 1970s, but the technology didn’t really become powerful until the iPhone came out in 2007. Solar panels are the same.

When you look at where we are today, we’re in a place where there was disruption in Pakistan, in Nepal, in Ethiopia, and instead of choosing to move to diesel fuel, the entire country chose to move to solar and battery storage. So now, 20% of the entire grid in Pakistan has been transformed in three years into solar power.

You see the same potential in Canada or in the United States. Balcony solar means that you buy the solar panel from Home Depot, you unbox it, and you just stick it on your balcony, and then you plug it into the outside wall socket. And it’s super cost-effective, even in places that don’t get as much sun.

Now the question becomes what else is going to be cool? It is very obvious that everyone is moving to electric vehicles. Whether it’s 10% a year, or 25% or 50% a year, they’re all moving to electric vehicles. If you have 40 gigawatts of batteries, which is what we have already in the United States, and then you end up with 400 gigawatts of batteries [with the addition of EVs], which we will have here in the next few years – that backs up the entire U.S. grid during the spring and the fall. What do you need to unlock that? Vehicle-to-grid technologies. Why do people want to install those technologies? Because 15% of U.S. households already have backup gas or diesel generators, so they’ve already voted with their pocketbooks to pay for that.

Now if you have a car, and that car is a 125-kilowatt-hour battery, you can back up your whole house with that car. And once it’s backed up that way, well, now the utility can send it a signal saying, “We’re going to pay you 30 cents a kilowatt-hour, because otherwise we’ll have rolling blackouts because the natural gas plant that we were counting on failed, and so we’d like to pay you to basically save the grid.”

We’re in this situation where that technology works today, and when we’re in our rocking chairs in 2050, everyone will have them. They will be ubiquitous. And our children will say, “Well, duh, like, obviously.”

TH: When I talk to older utility guys, they kind of roll their eyes at the vehicle-to-grid idea and say, “Okay, well, tell me where that’s actually happening.”

JS: It’s happening at complete scale in the United Kingdom. It’s at a point where Octopus Energy is giving people free power on a regular basis to charge their electric vehicles. Because there’s a lot of excess wind and solar during certain times of the day. Remember, 90% of everything we need to do with the grid with electric vehicles can be done with managed charging, what they call V1G. Then there’s another 8% of what can be done with vehicle-to-home, where you never export back into the grid, you just take the home off-grid. So we could get 98% of the value without updating any of our standards that are in place now.

The 2026 Global 100 list puts speed in the spotlight

TH: Do you think geopolitically, has China sort of got themselves in a dominant spot that’s going to be pretty significant for this next century?

JS: China has clearly overplayed their hand. I think they don’t know it yet, but they have. Xi Jinping has been in power too long. And now he’s pissed off everybody. He’s pissed off India, Turkey, Malaysia, Vietnam – anyone who manufactures stuff, he’s pissed off all of them. So now the question becomes how long can they continue to lose money?

Remember, we have many more iterations of technology that you and I know about. Like, solar panels are not done, right? We got perovskites and other things that are coming in. Electric vehicles are not done. We have technologies in the queue that’ll double the energy density of lithium-ion batteries. We have no reason to share any of that technology with China now.

So when we decide not to share that technology with them and instead share it with India or Mexico or other places, we’ll see where it goes. Yes, it’s going to take us a solid 10-year effort to actually diversify the supply chain, which is exactly how long it took after the Arab oil embargo for us to diversify the supply chains for oil. We know how to do it. It’s a playbook. We’re executing on it now, and I think in 10 years’ time, we’re going to be quite a bit more diverse.

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

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According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, 76% of Canadian small-business owners plan to exit their businesses in the next decade, most of them to retire. Roughly 2-trillion dollars in business assets could change hands. But only 10% of these business owners have a succession plan. Some businesses will wind down, others will be sold to management or to a third party or be bought by private equity. The scale of the shift could significantly affect the country’s business landscape and have a lasting impact on Canadian workers and communities.

After spending 25 years building Paradigm, Chartier and his business partners want to ensure that the company continues to thrive after they retire. “We didn’t want to sell to a big company or to private equity. We were concerned about all the horror stories we’ve heard about losing corporate culture,” Chartier says. “We want the company to keep going and leave it in the hands of the people that helped us make it what it is.”

The company launched an employee share ownership program in 2021, but uptake was limited because its 30- and 40-something staff’s household budgets were tied up in mortgage payments and daycare costs. And a management buyout wasn’t in the cards.

So Chartier and his partners began exploring a transition to an employee ownership trust (EOT) model. The federal government had amended the Income Tax Act in 2024 to enable EOTs and announced a temporary $10 million capital gains tax exemption for qualifying business transfers between January 2024 and December 2026 to create an incentive for business owners.

An EOT is a model in which a trust holds a company’s shares for the benefit of its employees. The employees don’t buy shares from the company; instead, in a succession scenario, the trust finances the purchase from the owner and shareholders. The owner is paid back over time instead of all at once. And employee-owners receive profit-sharing, which enables them to build wealth and equity in the company they work for. Evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom, which have both promoted the model for some time, shows that EOTs increase productivity, resilience, entrepreneurship, and employee retention and wealth. Supporters of EOTs in Canada say encouraging the model here could also keep more companies in Canadian hands.

“It really made perfect sense for our company,” Chartier says. “It aligned with our philosophy of employee ownership, our business size and what we anticipated our value to be.” Paradigm fully transitioned into an EOT on January 1, 2026. “The tax exemption was a huge benefit and allowed us to close the gap between what we would’ve gotten on the market and what we were able to sell it to the trust for.”

Employee ownership trusts in Canada

Paradigm is one of a handful of EOTs in Canada. Friesens, a book printer based in Altona, Manitoba, was a pioneer in employee ownership in Canada and has been employee-owned since 2010. Grantbook, a strategic tech consultancy, was the first company to become an EOT under the current model in January 2025. In September 2025, Taproot Community Support Services, a 41-year-old B.C.-based company that employs 750 people, became Canada’s largest EOT.

Momentum has been building since the federal legislation took effect in 2024. Tiara Letourneau of Rewrite Capital, a firm that helps companies make the EOT transition, says that more than 80 businesses have approached her to explore the possibility. Transitions can take anywhere from one to two years, depending on the firm. Justine Janssen, interim executive director at Employee Ownership Canada (EOC), says they expect that the number of EOTs across Canada will rise to between 20 and 30 by the end of 2026. “What’s true now that wasn’t true when we started is that there’s a much bigger understanding in Canada about the importance of owning our assets and what that means for economic sovereignty and the overall wealth and strength of the nation,” Janssen says.

Letourneau believes there is urgency in keeping Canadian companies in Canadian hands and believes EOTS could encourage economic activity to flourish in local areas. “Who owns businesses matters,” she says. “If a huge number of our mid-market companies end up being just about the numbers, not about the people, the community or the services they provide, we’re going to change the landscape of what it feels like to be an employee, a consumer and a community member all across this country.”

Supporters of EOTs say the key to unlocking more transitions is to remove the time limit and cap on the tax exemption and to broaden eligibility and who can access those incentives. In the United Kingdom, which introduced EOTs in 2014 and offered a complete and unlimited capital gains tax exemption to business owners selling to an EOT until 2025, the number of employee-owned businesses grew to 2,470 by mid-2025. In the United States, where employee ownership has been a model since the 1970s and where business owners can access a capital gains tax deferral, there are more than 6,500 employee-owned businesses.

However, the future of EOTs – and of those dozens of interested Canadian companies – became more uncertain in November 2025 when the Liberal government presented a federal budget that did not extend the capital gains tax exemption beyond the end of 2026.

“I’ve been getting messages from owners who have been looking at the EOTs and who have to now put that on pause because they won’t be able to get [the transition] done in time,” says Jon Shell, chair of Social Capital Partners, a non-profit that has led the charge on encouraging EOTs in Canada. “Now we’re all holding our breath [until the April 2026 economic statement] because that will determine the path of employee ownership in Canada.”

Watchers have speculated about the reasons the government didn’t jump on what some consider an easy win that would cost taxpayers little and would have provided a good-news story for Canadian-owned businesses at a time when they’re in short supply. Maybe the issue got lost in the shuffle of the big-ticket items in the Liberals’ long-awaited budget. Maybe the Department of Finance opted to be fiscally prudent about reductions to tax revenue at a time of economic uncertainty. Or maybe the government chose to defer the decision until closer to the December 2026 end date. Whatever the reason, many fear that the lack of clarity will slow momentum at a time of significant transition for Canadian businesses.

“It has probably put sand in the gears of EOT conversions and will delay any early momentum there was towards EOTs, which I think is quite regrettable because it’s a no-brainer,” says former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, a proponent of EOTs. “It has all the parties’ support, and it aligns perfectly with the government’s strategy of strengthening the Canadian economy and retaining capital in Canada.”

How EOTs build wealth and engagement

Andrew Achoba has been working at Taproot Community Support Services for more than seven years, running family support programs in northern Alberta. When Taproot transitioned to an EOT in fall 2025, Achoba became a trustee. He and Taproot’s two other trustees represent the interests of the company’s 750 employee-owners, working with leadership to ensure the sound management of the company.

Achoba says he often gets questions from friends who can’t believe he became an employee-owner without having to make a financial investment. He believes EOTs are an important vehicle for employee wealth-building at a time of increasing economic precarity – especially for those earning hourly wages or in lower salary brackets. “We’re seeing the price of things go up and the affordability rate going down. Any extra money that can go to the individuals doing the hard work, I think, is important.”

A 2025 Harvard Business School report, The Possibilities of Worker Ownership, cited a 2017 finding from the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) that employee-owners in the United States reported 92% more wealth than people working in non-employee-owned businesses. In the United Kingdom, a report found that employee-owned businesses were 8% to 12% more productive than comparable businesses, and regional studies showed that EOTs are more stable in downturns and report fewer layoffs. There is also evidence that EOTs can encourage greater business skills development, deepen employees’ commitment to the business and expand entrepreneurship.

Achoba is seeing some changes firsthand. “We’re seeing a very high level of ownership among staff now. People are more responsible because they have a collective vision for the agency.”

Prior to becoming an EOT, Taproot was owned by a small group of about 30 shareholders, many of them former employees who had retired and wanted to sell their shares. CEO Michael Fotheringham says leadership explored several models, including selling to a third party, a management buyout and expanding its ESOP model beyond the current owners. The EOT model was the simplest option and the one most aligned with the company’s values. The capital gains tax exemption was a key factor in the company’s decision to move forward.

In Taproot’s model, every employee has an equal ownership share in the company. “Now, when I meet with my employees, they’re my owners, so I have this built-in check and balance every day,” Fotheringham says. “That changes some of the traditional dynamics that I think need to change anyway. It‘s a democratization of the workplace, so to speak.”

At a time when all eyes are on how Canada will respond to economic and political headwinds it faces, proponents of EOTs hope that leaders will consider the potential of employee ownership and the importance of small- and medium-sized businesses to building individual, community and national economic strength and vibrancy.

“I don’t want us to wake up in Canada a decade from now and find that we’ve watched a hollowing out of what’s left of our industrial heartland because we were unwilling to be creative and ambitious about solutions like this,” Kenney says.

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At almost the same time, thousands of kilometres away, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station failed in ways that still reverberate. Safety systems that were supposed to be independent failed together, leading to fuel melting and hydrogen explosions that destroyed four reactor units and released radioactivity to the air and ocean. It took months to stabilize the damaged reactors and bring them to a cold shutdown, and site remediation will continue for decades. The cascading consequences crippled Japan’s nuclear sector and generated economic, social and environmental damage far beyond the plant fence line. The cost of the accident is incalculable but runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars. It ruined the Tokyo Electric Power Company.

The contrast is not just about two technologies; it is about two ways of structuring risk. The Rugby turbine failure remained a localized engineering incident, largely managed internally by the project owner and manufacturer. Fukushima produced losses at least five orders of magnitude larger than a single windturbine crash, and it did so in a way that pushed financial burdens across the Japanese state, its taxpayers and future generations.

Energy systems like the one in Fukushima, built around a small number of very large, colocated units, running near full output with critical safety functions sharing common failure modes, and overseen by a regulatory culture that discounts lowprobability, highimpact events, is not just vulnerable. It is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Biomimicry – the practice of learning from and emulating nature’s strategies – offers a vocabulary for understanding why. Nature has had billions of years to experiment under uncertainty. Complex living systems endure not because they avoid shocks, but because they are built to absorb them. In healthy ecosystems, risk is not eliminated; it is distributed, diversified, buffered and constantly managed. Redundancy, modularity, diversity, continuous feedback and slack capacity are not poetic metaphors but survival rules. Those same rules can be applied directly to how energy systems are planned, financed and operated.

Nature has had billions of years to experiment under uncertainty. Complex living systems endure not because they avoid shocks, but because they are built to absorb them. 

For a decarbonized power system, this means grids and portfolios that can lose parts without losing the whole; that can reconfigure under stress; that favour many small, distributed investments over a few gigantic, centralized bets; and that can learn and adapt quickly from minor failures rather than waiting for rare, systemwide disasters. It also means staying within biophysical boundaries – emissions budgets, land and water limits, ecological constraints – that make life and prosperity possible in the first place. In that sense, the distinction between nuclear and renewables is not just about carbon intensity or levellized cost; it is about whether a technology encourages risk to be concentrated or distributed.

Nuclear power, by virtue of its scale, complexity, slow learning curves, security requirements and tailrisk profile (or rare disasters), tends naturally to become centralized. It also has a very low tolerance for failure. Wind and solar, with their modular hardware, high unit counts and rapid learning cycles, tend to embed values of decentralization, resilience and acceptance of small, noncatastrophic failures as a price of innovation.

If the goal is resilience and affordability in an era of climate chaos, then energy systems can no longer be imagined as just a string of independent megaprojects. Nature shows us how to structure risk so that failures are local, bounded and recoverable. Yet our most sophisticated infrastructures still concentrate risk in a handful of giant nodes. Energy technologies can be more or less safe, but the deeper question is whether the systems we build behave more like living ecosystems or more like brittle machines.

A living system is diversified, adaptive, repairable and resilient. That is the kind of grid we need now, and it is the one that becomes possible when engineers, planners, regulators and investors start taking their cues from nature.

Ralph Torrie is director of research at Corporate Knights. 

The post Rethinking risk in the age of climate chaos  appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The Laura Maersk says a lot about her country of origin. Denmark, the Nordic nation of some six million people, is a leader in clean technology, emission reductions and the energy transition. It is home to an extraordinary number of sector-leading companies whose sustainability performance soars above global standards. And as much of Europe and the world walk back or water down their climate ambitions, Denmark just keeps steaming ahead, a shining example of how sustainability and economic competitiveness can go hand in hand.

The most recent edition of the Climate Change Performance Index, which assesses countries’ efforts to meet Paris Agreement goals, gives Denmark the top ranking of all jurisdictions it surveys: 63 countries plus the European Union. The index looks at greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, renewable energy and climate policy. Denmark’s climate minister, Lars Aagaard, hammered this home when he announced, at COP30 in Brazil last November, that his country was setting itself one of the most ambitious emissions targets in the world: an 82% reduction from 1990 levels by 2035, blowing past the EU’s broad goal of something between 66.3% and 72.5% by that same year. Canada, by comparison, has pledged to reduce emissions by 45% and 50% of 2005 levels by 2035. These aren’t just grand aspirations from Denmark: it is currently on track to meet its 2030 emissions goal and seems within reach of climate neutrality by 2045, five years before the EU.

So how does Denmark do it? What combination of factors has enabled the country to reduce emissions, excel in clean technology, cultivate broad public support for ambitious climate and sustainability policy while, at the same time, maintaining the fourth-highest gross domestic product per capita in Europe? “There’s a saying in Danish: ‘If two Danes meet, they shake hands. If three Danes meet, they form an association,’” says Gert Tinggaard Svendsen, a professor of political science at Aarhus University and an expert in social capital and climate policy. Svendsen believes that Denmark’s ability to problem-solve quickly and to rally around the collective good is rooted in something quite intangible.

Social trust – faith in the words and deeds of other people – runs exceptionally high in Denmark: when surveyed, 75% of Danes claim to trust others, well above the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average. Svendsen traces the attribute back to the seafaring Vikings of the early medieval period, who plied the world’s oceans in search of trading opportunities. Largely illiterate, they cemented deals with handshakes: an informal way of doing things that rewarded honesty and “created a norm for good behaviour,” as Svendsen puts it. He sees that same pragmatism and bedrock of social trust as the basis of Denmark’s energy transition, citing as an example the astonishing transformation of the island of Samsø. Facing a rising tide of out-migration and unemployment, the 4,000 residents of this small island off the Jutland peninsula decided, in 1997, to go all in on renewable energy. Through the installation of 11 onshore and 10 offshore wind turbines, four biomass-fuelled district-heating plants and solar panels, a wholescale reduction in energy consumption, and conversion to electric vehicles, the island was able to run entirely off renewables by 2007: a first in the world.

Key to the success of this project, and Denmark’s energy transition more broadly, has been the prioritization of local ownership and direct economic participation. On Samsø, the rule was if you could see a windmill from your home, you had the right to invest in it. Turbines, once viewed as visual blights, were suddenly retirement plans. This shift in mindset has been key to the Danish energy transition. In 1996, when Copenhagen’s municipal energy utility launched what was, at the time, the world’s largest offshore wind farm project, it invited locals to participate. The 8,650 members of the Middelgrunden Wind Turbine Cooperative raised half the project’s construction costs and continue to own half the project. It’s a prime example of the Danish public–private partnership, aligning government policy with private capital and community ownership. Wind energy in Denmark, which now accounts for 60% of the country’s electricity – the highest per capita generation in the world – has been built on the model; since 2009, Danish law has mandated that 20% of all new projects be community-owned.

There’s a saying in Danish: ‘If two Danes meet, they shake hands. If three Danes meet, they form an association.

— Gert Tinggaard Svendsen, a professor of political science at Aarhus University

Local ownership means that the benefits of renewables are directly felt, and this has engendered a sense of civic pride in Danes, who view the energy transition less as a mandated concession to planetary limits than an exciting opportunity. Copenhagen’s new power plant, which converts municipal waste to both heat and electricity, takes pride of place on the city’s waterfront. Designed by the Danish architectural Bjarke Ingels Group, the eye-catching building, which opened in 2017, features a ski hill on its sloping roof and a climbing wall on its aluminum facade: a model of what Ingels calls “hedonistic sustainability.”

Sustainability has become Denmark’s brand. Since 2019, its foreign ministry has explicitly put green diplomacy at the centre of its foreign, trade and development policy. As current holder of the Council of the European Union presidency, Denmark has been framing the energy transition – and dissociation from Russian oil – as a security imperative. It also continues to nudge international organizations toward greater climate ambition.

Which brings us back to the Laura Maersk, the methanol-fuelled container ship. As the sixth-largest shipping nation in the world, Denmark has been pushing the International Maritime Organization to adopt regulations that will make global shipping, which currently accounts for some 2% to 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, net-zero by 2050. Laura’s launch reflected Denmark’s determination to meet this goal. It also highlights a feature of Danish corporate culture that has made the country’s private sector more committed to sustainability than most.

Like several of Denmark’s most successful companies, Maersk is owned by a foundation. According to Steen Thomsen, professor of corporate governance at the Copenhagen Business School, 1,400 such enterprise foundations are registered in Denmark, among them roughly 20 multinationals, including Maersk (officially A.P. Møller-Maersk), brewer Carlsberg, pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk and water pump manufacturer Grundfos. In an inverse of the North American model – where companies set up foundations to run arm’s-length philanthropic projects in their names – Danish enterprise foundations run their companies, by holding a majority of their shares, voting rights or both. (Enterprise foundations exist outside of Denmark as well – Ikea in Sweden, Bosch in Germany, Rolex in Switzerland, Tata in India to name a few – but Denmark is home to the highest concentration.)

As Thomsen explains, enterprise foundations are, by their very nature, inclined to invest more in research, be better employers and perform more responsibly on environmental and social fronts than their publicly owned peers. “The foundation has a dual purpose: to be a good long-term owner and to practise some form of philanthropy,” Thomsen says. “It can’t be schizophrenic. It can’t very well exploit its labour force, then turn around and donate to poverty reduction.”

The prevalence of enterprise foundations in Denmark has shaped its economy in fundamental ways. For one, it has meant that the country’s 1% has been less tempted to participate in extravagant personal (and carbon-intensive) consumption – private jets, fancy cars, holiday homes and the like – and more likely to invest in a family enterprise or foundation that will outlive them. (Thomsen says the enterprise foundation model is, in large part, a function of Denmark’s historically high wealth taxes.) It has also meant that Danish companies have been more committed to long-term, collective gain than most – from Carlsberg founder J.C. Jacobsen’s sharing of the discovery of yeast purification with brewers across Europe in 1883, through Maersk’s more recent investment in the research and development of technologies to accelerate shipping decarbonization.

The Danish model may be difficult to reproduce elsewhere, but it does serve as inspiration, as evidence of what can be made possible. When the Laura Maersk first launched, there was some grumbling about the future of decarbonized shipping, given the limited supply of green methanol. Last May, a joint Danish–Japanese consortium cut the ribbon on the world’s first commercial-scale green methanol plant in southern Denmark. Among the customers for its methanol, which is produced with renewable energy and carbon dioxide captured from waste incineration and biogas plants, as opposed to fossil fuels, are Novo Nordisk for its insulin injection pens and Lego for its plastic blocks. Laura was also at the plant’s opening, waiting to tank up.

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.  

The post The secret to Denmark’s clean energy excellence appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Adding insult to injury, Trump has moved to roll back funding for the industry, tried to halt new wind projects (a federal judge later vacated the pause), and delayed $25 billion worth of already-approved offshore wind projects that were set to provide electricity to millions of households. “Windmills,” Trump said in August, “we’re just not going to allow them. They are ruining the country.”

It is in this adverse context that the seven wind companies on Corporate Knights’ Global 100 ranking are operating, and it is worth noting that nearly all continued to grow their wind installations around the world through 2025.

ERG achieves balanced growth

The top-ranked company this year was ERG, an Italian power generator based in Genoa. Founded in 1938, the company bought up oil refineries through the middle of the last century. In the early 2000s, ERG launched a renewables arm, rapidly grew that side of the business, and finally sold off the last of its fossil fuel assets in 2024 to become a “pure play” wind and solar operator. According to its 2024 sustainability report, about 92% of the company’s energy output comes from wind power; the other 8% comes from solar.

Italy’s ERG proves you can trade oil for renewables and win

Despite offloading its oil and gas facilities, ERG’s power output increased about 25% between 2022 and 2024, from 4,460 gigawatt-hours to 5,992. “ERG not only weathered the downside, but they were also able to increase the amount of electricity they generated and sold,” notes Michael Yow, the director of rankings for Corporate Knights. “It’s a pretty impressive management feat.”

ERG has pursued a strategy of regional diversification, building and buying wind assets in nine European countries and in the United States, where it acquired a 75% stake in a 224.4 megawatt wind farm in Iowa and a 92.4 megawatt solar plant in Illinois in 2023.

Before Trump, the United States was a good place to undertake wind projects. The World Wind Energy Association reports that the country added 2.1 gigawatts of wind-power capacity in the first half of 2025, trailing only India and China. The added capacity came mainly from project pipelines secured under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and much of this growth is threatened by policy changes under the Trump administration. Analysis from Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association (ACP) found that ”regulatory uncertainty drove turbine orders down 50% in the first half of 2025.”

The 2026 Global 100 list puts speed in the spotlight

The unpredictability in the United States has prompted ERG to take a more cautious approach. The company’s strategy now focuses on acquiring working assets with existing power purchase agreements and projects already financed through tax credits. More broadly, ERG describes its growth plan as “value over volume,” concentrating on countries where it already operates and upgrading existing installations with better equipment.

“Since 2021, ERG has nearly doubled its asset portfolio, growing from approximately 2.1 gigawatts to nearly four gigawatts of installed capacity,” CEO Paolo Merli says. “This result was achieved through a balanced mix of organic developments and acquisitions.”

Plenty of runway for growth

Of all the wind companies on the Global 100 list, Ørsted (#9) has been most affected by the difficult market in the United States, where setbacks on U.S. projects forced it to cut about 2,000 jobs, or a quarter of its workforce, and focus on European projects. Wind companies like Ørsted that primarily develop offshore projects have struggled more than onshore wind developers because installing turbines in coastal waters requires a specialized global supply chain that’s more vulnerable to bottlenecks and disruptions. As one of the cheapest ways to produce power, onshore wind is an easier sell, though offshore enjoys its own advantages, like more reliable wind speeds.

There are signs the industry is experiencing a rebound, however. The United Kingdom has recently concluded a record-breaking auction for long-term price contracts for electricity from offshore wind, enabling the construction of 8.4 gigawatts of new capacity. That’s enough to power the equivalent of more than 12 million homes, according to statements by the U.K. government, which also said the agreed prices were 40% lower than the cost of building and operating a new gas power plant. “It’s good to see that we’re back on track, and we’re seeing substantial allocations coming through again, which is what the industry really needed,” says Jonathan Cole, CEO of offshore wind developer Corio Generation.

China has far outpaced other markets in adding wind capacity, installing 51.4 gigawatts of wind capacity in the first half of 2025. Other Asian markets like South Korea, the Philippines and Japan have introduced new frameworks for permitting offshore wind projects. Suzlon Energy, a wind turbine manufacturer based in India, is new to this year’s ranking and took 10th spot. The company reported 74% revenue growth in the last quarter of 2025. On January 27, Suzlon announced it had won a major order from ArcelorMittal for 248.85 megawatts of wind energy to make low-carbon steel at its facilities in India. This is the wind-turbine manufacturer’s fourth such order for decarbonizing steel production over the past 12 months.

Even in the United States, four of the five offshore wind projects that were hit by federal stop-work orders in December have since been unpaused and the efforts to block them overturned in federal courts. So far in 2026, the logic of wind development is proving more durable than last year’s “vibe shift” against renewables.

Tristan Bronca is a magazine writer and editor based in Newmarket, Ontario.

With files by Mark Mann.

The post Offshore wind turns the corner on a turbulent year appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Since I was a teenager, this has been my favourite quote. It hits home with the message that everything we do matters, and that, like the butterfly effect, you never know what mighty waves will rise from tiny ripples.

My second favourite quote served as the unofficial slogan for Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, borrowed from George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’”

My third: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

These three quotes capture why the Global 100 exists: to amplify the ripples, to show what is possible, and to ensure the sound is heard.

The journey started 25 years ago when I knocked on the door of sustainability research pioneer Michael Jantzi (founder of what became Morningstar Sustainalytics) to see if he would help us produce our first ranking of Canada’s best corporate citizens. He agreed, and as a token of gratitude – after we published the ranking in Canada’s largest business newspaper – I gave him a framed copy with a plaque that read “You measure, we publish, they change.”

In 2005, we launched the Global 100 in partnership with Innovest Strategic Value Advisors (which later became MSCI ESG), founded by the visionary genius Matthew Kiernan. By necessity – and because of the sorry state of disclosure – those early rankings violated almost every tenet of a meaningful benchmark, except one. While they did rely on opaque black-box methodologies measuring supposedly hundreds of indicators, there was a shared purity of intention among our early collaborators: identify the 100 large companies from around the world, across sectors, doing the most to move the needle toward a more sustainable world where people can thrive in tandem with the planet.

By 2010, we brought the research in-house and made the methodology 100% transparent. This became a core tenet of our approach and a litmus test whereby anyone could replicate our results. As Don Lindsay, former CEO of Teck Resources, put it, “We like the Global 100 because it is clear why we are in or out and what we need to do.”

Disclosure limitations initially constrained us to measuring operational aspects of companies like emissions, taxes paid and board diversity. While these things all matter, the vagaries of voluntary disclosure meant we were often penalizing the best reporters, and on a bigger-picture scale we were missing what mattered most: the portion of a company’s core business that actually moves the world in a more sustainable direction.

In 2018, we came up with a rules-based industry-by-industry definition of sustainability and introduced the clean revenue indicator that measured what portion of a company’s revenue was sustainable. This evolved into sustainable revenues, then sustainable investment and aligned compensation.

The 2026 Global 100 list puts speed in the spotlight

This year, after passing 27 red-flag basic exclusionary hurdles (including board diversity and taxes paid), the Global 100 ranking is now 100% based on the portion of a business that makes the world more sustainable. We’re not abandoning operational impact – rather we’re doubling down on a more powerful measure. Much of the operational impact we once struggled to measure is now captured in our publicly available Corporate Knights Sustainable Economy Taxonomy, which clearly defines what is sustainable in each industry and is updated with further texture each year.

For more than two decades, we have stayed the course in our quest to help companies embrace the sustainability revolution. All along the way, we have been guided by three core principles:

1. Pure intention. This is our north star.
2. Focus on what matters most. Less is often more.
3. Radical transparency. This way, others can trust but verify our work.

Guided by our principles, we made the tough decision to let go of roughly 25 key performance indicators to focus on just four metrics: the portion of revenues and investment that are sustainable, how fast sustainable revenues are growing, and what percent of CEO compensation is linked to sustainability.

Since the founding of the Global 100 ranking, we have invested countless hours collecting data on all those different metrics, trying to get the angel in the detail right and defending the indicators in our ranking formula. The decision to simplify and refocus the ranking on our core mission did feel in part like a loss, but it puts us in a better place to weed out noise and tap into the signal to serve our core purpose of highlighting the business beacons for a more sustainable world.

We’re honoured to present this year’s Global 100 companies. These organizations show what kind of world is possible, sending out fast-growing ripples that give us a chance to rise to meet the mighty challenges of our time.

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

The post Publisher’s Note: Doubling down on impact appeared first on Corporate Knights.