That means tackling two intertwined problems: ending extreme poverty and stopping climate change.

The first is daunting enough. As the Economist has pointed out, “a lot will have to go right” in order for the bank to achieve its goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030.

But stopping climate change and ending poverty at the same time is especially difficult, given that economic growth is directly linked to more carbon emissions.

This tension is not lost on World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, who spent part of yesterday morning speaking to students at Georgetown University as part of its Global Futures Initiative.

People living in poverty want the same benefits of economic growth as we do, said Kim. “We can’t ask poor people to forego electricity because the developed world has put too much carbon in the air,” he said.

The only way to stop climate change and end poverty at the same time is to end the relationship between economic growth and carbon emissions, he said. That means making it more expensive to burn carbon and less expensive to use renewable energy.

The World Bank has a five-point plan to make that happen:

1. Put a price on carbon.
2. Remove fossil fuel subsidies.
3. Improve energy efficiency and renewable energy use.
4. Focus on building low-carbon, resilient cities.
5. Encourage climate-smart agriculture.

The first two points are directly related to de-coupling economic growth from greenhouse gases.

Putting a price on carbon is the most straightforward path to getting political leaders and companies to weigh the true cost of emissions before they pollute the air. It is also the most politically acceptable option on the table, as nearly 40 countries already have plans to put a price on carbon, said Kim.

Ending fossil fuel subsidies, on the other hand, is more contentious. Many people argue that subsidies protect poor people, but Kim said the reality is that the bottom 40 per cent receives only 18 per cent of the value from these programs.

“Fossil fuel subsidies are not at all about protecting the poor. We have to find ways to get rid of them,” he said.

To that end, the World Bank is working with several countries to design programs that will help governments phase out subsidies, while protecting the poorest members of society from the inevitable rise in fuel prices. It will also help governments reinvest the money into programs that will benefit society.

The Egyptian government has already saved $7 billion by eliminating fossil fuel subsidies and will reinvest $3 billion of it in health and education, said Kim.

The rest of the World Bank’s plan – building resilient cities, investing in renewable energy and encouraging climate-smart agriculture – depends on financing that doesn’t exist yet on the scale that’s required.

It is crucial that governments secure this funding, not only because battling climate change is expensive, but also because it could determine the success of the climate talks in Paris later this year, said Kim.

Governments at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2011 committed to raising $100 billion for the Green Climate Fund. This money is meant to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change.

“We have to find creative ways to find that money because we don’t want that to be the reason we don’t get an agreement in Paris,” said Kim, adding that the bank is “laser-focused” on coming up with a robust financing plan.

Kim pointed to the massive growth in green bonds over the last year as evidence that creative funding solutions are possible.

The post A plan for the planet appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Shiva holds a bachelors degree in physics and a masters degree and PhD in the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics. After leaving her career in science in 1987, she founded a network of seed keepers and organic producers called Navdanya. In 1993, the network a central role in organizing a protest that brought together 500,000 farmers to challenge the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the precursor to the World Trade Organization.

That same year, Shiva received the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes referred to as the alternative Nobel Prize, for her role in placing women and the environment at the center of the international development debate. In 2010, she received the Sydney Peace Prize for her social justice work. Time, the Guardian, Forbes and Asia Week have all named her among the world’s most important activists.

These days, Shiva travels the world speaking about genetically modified (GM) food and the dangers of industrial agriculture. Or more positively, she advocates for organic, small-scale, fair trade farming.

Her views, never sugar-coated, tend to elicit strong feelings from people wherever she goes. A profile of Shiva in The New Yorker earlier this year highlighted the controversy of her public persona. GMO science is hotly contested to begin with. But some of Shiva’s foundational arguments also have holes in them, such as farmer suicide rates in India are rising with the use of Monsanto’s Bt cotton.

Mark Lynas, an anti-GMO activist turned pro-GMO advocate, said in the New Yorker article that he doesn’t think Shiva is lying on purpose. “But she is blinded by her ideology and her political beliefs. That is why she is so effective and so dangerous.”

Corporate Knights’ managing editor Jeremy Runnalls caught up with Lynas the same week as the New Yorker did. Runnalls asked him about his transformation from GMO opponent to supporter, and what a future with GMOs might look like.

Lynas and Shiva are firmly established on either side of a debate that is complicated not only by science, but is also wrapped up in politics, beliefs about nature and personal tastes for food. Nathanael Johnson for Grist perfectly positions Shiva’s message in the global discussion on GMOs and the environment more broadly: “Romantic environmentalists tend to get the big-picture problems right, while fudging the details. Rationalists nail the details, but sometimes become so immersed in the minutiae that they lose sight of the big picture.”

I found myself questioning some of the evidence in Shiva’s talk. But I also found myself nodding along with the crowd at her big-picture statements, feeling like I always do when someone nails complex issues so squarely on the head.

With that in mind, I sat down with Shiva in Toronto to get her perspective on business, trade and, of course, GMOs. What follows is an edited discussion between Shiva, Mariah Barrett and me.

BARRETT: Is there any hope for business? You talked about the health of the planet and making money as being interconnected. Do you think that there is a chance that if corporations start diverting their money away from GMOs and toxic agrochemicals and investing in all of the amazing ideas that you talked about in your speech, that they could create something better?

SHIVA: First, I separate businesses from corporations. Of course there’s a role for small business in the food system. Organic farmers by themselves cannot make the change; they need partnerships with small business. We also have a need for ecologically and socially responsible investment that doesn’t turn farmers into raw material producers for a poisonous industry. I watch farmers get into debt for growing cheap potatoes for Pepsi, so Lay’s chips. That’s not the kind of investment that will defend our health or our planet.

So, definitely, we need new partnerships. But they have to be based on a common commitment to the protection of the Earth, not as empty commitments to sustainability. I increasingly believe we need biodiversity of economies just as much as we need biodiversity of ecologies. The monoculture economy of five monopolies in every sector is what has become the threat. We need pluralism in the business sector.

RENDERS: Shiv Chopra said in his speech earlier tonight that food should not be traded. Do you agree with him?

SHIVA: When Shiv was talking about how food should not be traded, I think he was talking about the trade rules being set by corporations for international trade. Food and agriculture are too vital to life to be left to free trade agreements written by corporations. Localized systems generate more jobs, create better food and create more resilience – at every level, they’re better. That doesn’t mean you don’t trade in anything, otherwise you would have absolutely no spices from India, you wouldn’t get coffee from the coffee-growing areas. So, the principle is: only trade in that which you cannot grow locally and build local economies in that which you can.

And in international trade, don’t leave it to corporations to push farmers to distress and serve you bad, toxic food. Instead, make it fair trade, so that it’s fair at every level: fair to the Earth, fair to the producer, fair to the consumer. You know, I would even give them their profits if they could bring us better food. But they fail in the test of healthy food, they fail in the test of sustainability and they fail in the test of fairness and justice. Those are the criteria that any food system should go through.

RENDERS: The Canadian government recently finished up a consultation on a low-level presence policy that would allow low levels of non-approved GMOs to enter the country in grain shipments from other countries, as long as they’re approved by a scientific body in that country. So basically, Agriculture and Agri-food Canada is saying if the U.S. or another country has approved a GMO, then it should be okay for Canadians to eat in low levels. The Canadian government is also trying to make this an international standard that would be accepted by 15 other countries. This is a trade-based policy, not a health- or food-based policy. I’m wondering if you know about it and if you could comment on it.

SHIVA:  I don’t know about this particular policy, but I do know that the attempts of the Canada-Europe free trade agreement, as well as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, is to give a push to GMOs, in Europe particularly. Just two days ago, fortunately, the European parliament gave a very strict vote on GMOs.

The word across the world is, nobody wants GMOs. Europe doesn’t want it, Russia doesn’t want it, China doesn’t want it. In my own country [India], they try and push, but we use our democratic and legal systems to push back. Until today, they haven’t managed to plant any GM food crops. The more corporations try to push through so-called free trade agreements – where free trade means our right to bully you to eat GMOs – the more the movement will grow. Corporations are still working under the assumption that only they talk to governments. But in democracies, people are also supposed to talk to their governments.

BARRETT: You mentioned that fair trade is better at developing communities and brings 10 times more returns. Do you think that changing the way corporations perceive their profit models can actually change the corporation?

SHIVA: Elephants live in herds, but some elephants become rogue and leave the herd and then they become destructive. Some corporations have become like the rogue elephant; they are rogue corporations. Some could be brought back into the herd of the human community, but some will just have to go. If there’s no place for poisons in our food, then poison-makers have to go. There is no “half poison.” So, I think businesses need to change, and the business model needs to change.

It is also weird that corporate personhood is being used against real people and real people’s rights that are enshrined in constitutions. So there’s a change happening on both sides: a worse perversion against democracy, sustainability and justice by some corporations, and a search for shared values by others. And we hope the groups that are searching for shared values and the protection of people’s health are the ones that will be able to reshape the business empire.

The Q&A portion of this article was written with files from Mariah Barrett, who is the chief executive officer of Barrett Ray, an impact investment firm and consultancy group that helps businesses realize their community impact and profit potential through the creation of shared value. Follow her on Twitter @MariahBarrettTV. This article was updated on November 21, 2014.

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On Tuesday, European Members of Parliament voted to allow for national-level bans of GM crops, even if they have been approved for EU-wide use. The following day, Agriculture and Agri-food Canada (AAFC) announced a deal to sell $1 billion (CAD) worth of canola – one of Canada’s most genetically modified crop – to China.

It’s no secret that Europeans are not fans of GM food.  The European Food Safety Authority currently has to approve all new GM crops before they can be cultivated. So far, it has only approved two crops, one of which was challenged in court and never made it to the field.

Still, some European countries want to have the final say on what crops can be grown on their soil. France passed a law earlier this year, banning the cultivation of all GM crops, saying it poses a threat to the environment.

The Council of the European Union tried to find a compromise by allowing countries to negotiate with specific companies if they wanted to ban a crop. But MEPs voted on Tuesday to bypass this requirement, citing fears of contamination and scientific uncertainty.

The Canadian government said in an e-mail statement that it “opposes this decision, which is not based on sound science.” And some Europeans would agree. Twenty-one of Europe’s most prominent plant scientists wrote an open letter last month warning MEPs to stop blocking GM research on “political” grounds or risk producing sub-par science.

But whether a country supports GM crops or not, contamination poses a real risk to agricultural trade. Once a crop is authorized for commercial use, trace amounts of that crop can turn up in grain, food or feed shipments that are imported into countries where that GM crop is not authorized. This is called low-level presence (LLP), and the Canadian government recognizes it as a growing problem.

“With the increased commercialization of GM crops around the world, the likelihood of LLP entering Canada is expected to increase,” AAFC says on its website.

If an unapproved GMO is detected in a shipment, it can result in product recalls, legal actions and import bans that can have economic consequences for farmers and the food industry, sometimes lasting for years. The Canadian flaxseed industry is still recovering from a contamination incident in 2009. Triffid, a GM variety of the seed, was bred in Saskatchewan in the 1990s but was never commercialized. Traces of the product found its way into shipments to Europe, and Canadian farmers lost access to their largest export market. Efforts are still underway to develop a completely Triffid-free flax variety.

This is why AAFC has proposed a policy that will allow trace amounts of non-approved GM crops to appear in food and grain shipments without penalty. AAFC figures that if another country has approved a GM product using a rigorous scientific process, then it should be okay for Canadians to eat in small amounts. Health Canada says on its website that it supports AAFC in this matter.

But this plan won’t make international trade any easier unless other countries follow Canada’s lead, which is why the Canadian government has established the Global LLP Initiative (GLI), which includes 15 countries committed to developing a policy to minimize trade disruptions caused by GMO contamination.

Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz told the Manitoba Co-operator last November that he was optimistic such a policy would catch on, saying he would “like to see it in place before [he] retires.

At one point, it looked like Canada was working on an LLP agreement with the E.U. The preliminary text of the Canadian-European Union Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) “notes the importance of promoting efficient science-based approval processes, cooperating on [LLP], and minimizing adverse trade impacts of regulatory practices.”

The message from MEPs on Tuesday was loud and clear: no international trade deal is going to get GM foods onto European plates. The national-level ban still needs to be approved by European parliament, but Reuters reported on Tuesday that the European Commission is “confident the law could be in place in 2015.”

In order to achieve its goal, Canada needs to find trade partners that share its views on relaxing GMO policies, and that is exactly what Gerry Ritz is doing. On Wednesday, AAFC declared his trade mission to China a success, saying Ritz “helped deepen the long-standing ties and bilateral relations that will advance the interests of Canadian agricultural producers, processors and exporters.”

A Businessweek article from earlier this year explored the growing demand for high-quality food among China’s urban elite, highlighting a company that delivers organic fruits and vegetables to almost 100,000 customers. Tony Zhang’s flagship Nanhui farm has grown 20 to 50 per cent a year since 2009, and generates as much as $24 million a year in revenue.

Still, Canada will actively engage the Chinese government in a discussion on allowing low-levels of non-approved GMOs in their food imports, AAFC said in an e-mail statement.

And it seems they may have found an sympathetic ear in the Chinese government, which plans to “speed up innovation and application of biotechnology breeding in agriculture….[and] foster a large and strong modern seed industry.” It is also working against negative publicity of GMOs via television, newspapers and internet campaigns, and aiming to create “a social atmosphere which is beneficial for the healthy development of the genetically-modified industry,” the agriculture ministry said in a statement to Reuters in September.

AAFC’s website praises Ritz for his efforts increase market access for Canadian farmers, saying it “has again strengthened Canada’s position as a strategic partner in China’s rapidly modernizing agriculture industry.”

But what it proves more than anything is that when one door closes another inevitably opens.

This article was updated at 4:30 pm on November 14, 2014.

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Only one other province, Nova Scotia, saw an increase in fatalities last year.

“To know that it’s that high, I’m shocked,” said Bill Stewart, a business representative for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local No. 955 in Alberta.

In total, Alberta saw 188 workplace deaths across all of its industries, according to new data compiled by the Association of Workers Compensation Boards of Canada. But construction was by far the most dangerous, accounting for 76 deaths. Manufacturing and government services followed with 27 and 23 deaths, respectively. Mining, quarrying and oil well-related jobs resulted in 17 deaths last year.

The number of construction work fatalities fell in every other province, except in Nova Scotia, which remained steady with three reported deaths. The national trend was also downward in mining, quarrying, oil wells and government services, making Alberta an anomaly when it comes to fatalities in those industries.

Newfoundland and Alberta also had the highest number of worker deaths on a population-adjusted basis out of all of the provinces (excluding the territories). While Ontario had the highest number of fatalities of all the provinces, on a population-adjusted basis it had one of the lowest rates.

Alberta and Newfoundland were also the only provinces to report an increase in time-loss injury claims, which on a national basis fell in 2013 to 241,934.

[highcharts chart=’5689′ performer=’ALL’ measurement=’Number of worker fatalities per 100,000 people’ order_field=’Number of worker fatalities per 100,000 people’ order=’DESC’]

What’s going on? One can only speculate, but experts agree that an influx of new workers, brought on by the oil sands boom, is a perfect recipe for workplace injuries and fatalities.

Alberta had the highest employment rate in the country at 69.3 per cent last September, which was significantly higher than the national average at 61.6 per cent. The labour force increased by 5,000 people in that month alone.

Steward said this increase in employment means that employers requiring skilled trades are having a hard time finding experienced workers.

New workers are also more likely to get hurt or die on the job, with most fatalities happening within the first two weeks, said Peter Sturm of Sturm Consulting, a Toronto-based company that specializes in health, safety and risk consulting.

Many of these new hires are likely “green,” added Stewart, referring to the green hand sticker that many workers in Alberta are required to wear on both sides of their hardhats for their first three months on the job.

Established by the Canadian Petroleum Council in 2001, the Green Hands program aims to reduce injuries among new and inexperienced workers by clearly identifying them so that co-workers do not make potentially dangerous assumptions about their experience or skills. The program can also be used for workers returning after time away from their jobs to signal that they may not be familiar with new safety policies or technologies.

More experienced workers can volunteer to wear a gold hand on their hardhats to identify themselves as workers who have knowledge of the company’s safety program and to whom “green hands” can turn to for advice.

Peer-to-peer mentorship is one of the most important aspects of workplace safety, said Sturm. It creates an environment where more experienced workers have a responsibility to make newer workers understand the hazards, and where newer workers can ask for advice, he said.

Another important part of workplace safety on construction sites is having a pre-shift meeting where supervisors explain the hazards on the site that day, said Sturm. These “tail box” meetings are important to have every day because things can change quickly on a construction site. A floor could have been added or workers could be doing a completely different task from the day before, he said.

“There is an awful lot of new people coming into the workforce [in Alberta] that don’t have a background in construction or mining. And, quite frankly, we have to watch out for them,” said Stewart.

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A report released yesterday by Transparency International shows that “the world’s companies disclose little or no financial details about their operations outside their home country.” The organization will also publish an open letter on Monday to G20 leaders, who are meeting in Brisbane, Australia next week, outlining the steps that leaders should take to stop public money from crossing borders illegally.

In light of the Luxembourg scandal, Transparency International is also asking E.U. finance ministers, meeting in Brussels tomorrow, to look at country-by-country tax disclosure laws that will show citizens how much companies pay their governments.

The U.S. and E.U. have already passed laws that will require extractive companies to report how much they pay governments at home and abroad for access to their resources on a country-by-country basis. The E.U. rules will be implemented by July 2015 and the Securities and Exchange Commission will discuss its second set of rules in March 2015. Canada tabled a similar bill last week.

While all of these laws are a step toward holding companies and governments accountable for the money that belongs in public coffers, it leaves out the most important question: are companies, particularly extractive companies, paying enough in the first place?

Research that I conducted with colleagues at Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF) last year showed that oil and gas companies have a history of using various accounting sleights of hand to purposely underpay their royalties under leases on federal and Native American land.

Lawsuits settled by the Department of Justice and audits conducted by the Office of Natural Resources between 1990 and 2013 have resulted in over $730 million (U.S.) in settlements under the False Claims Act, over $53 million (U.S.) in civil penalties and over $2.2 billion in audits and checks that showed companies underpaid royalties on federal and Native American leases. This is money that could be used to pay for local schools, infrastructure, water conservation and other projects.

Tax transparency laws would not necessarily pick up on this lost money because as Lance Astrella, a lawyer who specializes in representing private lease-holders in royalty disputes with oil and gas companies explained to TRF, “It’s very difficult to determine whether [an oil] company is paying the right amount of royalties because so much of the business happens behind closed doors and is not included in the lease agreement.”

A lawsuit filed in 1996 by Eugene Wright, a Texas wildcatter who sued more than a dozen oil and gas companies for contract fraud on behalf of the U.S. government, highlights 19 different schemes that companies allegedly use to avoid their royalty obligations, none of which would come under scrutiny in any of the transparency laws currently being discussed.

This is a big deal because as Isabel Munilla, senior policy advisor at Oxfam American explained to TRF, “If this is happening in the U.S, where we have a strong legal and regulatory system, which should in theory reduce the incentives for this type of behaviour, it’s very likely to be happening around the world, especially in places with much weaker governance systems.”

Markus Meinzer, a senior analyst at the Tax Justice Network, a UK-based research and advocacy group, said “it is a no brainer in the 21^st century to demand corporations to provide detailed disclosure of their activities that will allow citizens and journalist and campaigners to look at the data and independently assess and compare that data.”

As Markus said, it is a “no brainer” that companies should have to answer difficult questions about their operations at home and abroad. We just need to make sure we are asking the right questions.

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The report identified over 850 risks using water management data collected from 174 companies listed on the FTSE Global 500 Equity Index. While 42 per cent of the Global 500 companies failed to report, 82 per cent of respondents have set water-reduction targets and 90 per cent have integrated water stewardship strategies across all of their companies.

Two-thirds of the businesses surveyed said they faced water-related risks and 68 per cent said these risks pose “a substantive risk to their businesses.” And there is no shortage of examples to show their concerns are justified.

Barrick Gold, a Canadian mining company, shelved its $5 billion (U.S.) Pascua-Lama mine in October 2013 over the Chilean government’s concerns about local groundwater pollution. Rio Tinto divested its 19 per cent share from the Pebble Mine copper and gold project in Alaska after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency used the Clean Water Act to protect salmon fisheries. And BHP Billiton has invested almost $2 billion (U.S.) in a desalination plant to provide adequate water for its copper mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

These large-scale risks highlight the challenges companies must address when they choose to operate in environmentally delicate areas. But the report also exposes the risks that companies face if they want to sell their products to people living in emerging markets – some of the fastest growing, but most water-scarce places on the planet.

Unilever is a $50 billion company that sells its products to 2 billion consumers each day in 190 countries, most of which are in emerging markets. The company relies on water to grow the crops it needs to create its products, which are represented by well-known brands, such as Dove, Sunlight, Knorr and Lipton.

But consumers also need access to water to use their products, which account for more than 90 per cent of domestic water use, from washing dishes to cleaning hair, skin and clothes.

“Consumers experiencing water scarcity in developing countries are making trade-offs about which tasks will get their scarce ration of water. This is putting the growth of our products at risk,” the company said in its response to the CDP survey.

To deal with this problem, Unilever has designed products for developing markets that use less water, such as a water-efficient fabric condition called Comfort One Rinse that cuts the number of rinsing buckets from three to one, a spokesperson for the company said in an e-mail.

Unilever has also found business opportunity amid water scarcity by developing an in-home water purifier called Pureit that provides safe drinking water without the need for electricity. The product has been used by 45 million people around the world since 2005, said the company’s spokesperson.

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An analysis by Munich RE, a German reinsurance company, shows that floods have become a major source of property loss over the last 20 years, but insurance companies are picking up less of the bill. A report by Ceres, published last week, shows that this is a trend worldwide for all types of property damage.

The good news is that the Canadian insurance industry is already working with federal, provincial and municipal governments to close this gap in coverage before it becomes an even bigger problem.

The worry is that government subsidies for flood protection will underprice risk and send the wrong message to homeowners.  The key is to figure out a way to make flood insurance affordable without giving people the impression that it is ok to live in flood plains. Our neighbours across the border are providing a poignant lesson in what not to do, but the perfect national flood plan still evades us.

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Why Canadians can’t get covered

Canadians have never had access to overland flood insurance because, until recently, it was only a risk for a small percentage of people who lived near water. This means the costs were not shared widely enough to make it affordable, said Leonard Sharman, senior advisor for media relations at The Co-Operators, a Canadian insurance co-operative. This logic harkens back to the days when home insurance was called “fire insurance” because fire was the biggest threat to your home, he said.

A report by the Insurance Bureau of Canada shows that extreme weather has surpassed fire as the leading cause of property damage, with payouts more than doubling every five to ten years since the 1980s.  For the past four years, payouts for extreme weather have been above $1 billion per year with a record-breaking $3.2 billion in 2013, mostly due to flooding in Alberta and the Greater Toronto Area. Further studies warn that rapid sea-level rise caused by climate change could result in three-times more flooding in the coastal areas.

If your home is flooded in Canada, the federal and provincial governments will likely pick up the bill, although they are not obliged to do so.  The frequency and severity of loss since 2013 showed the government and the insurance industry that something needed to change, said Sharon Ludlow, President, Aviva Insurance Company of Canada.

Finance minister Jim Flaherty announced in the 2014-2015 federal budget that the government would work with the insurance industry, provinces and territories to “explore options for a national approach to residential flood insurance.”

This is a messy task that will require all levels of government, insurance companies and homeowners to work together, said Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, a not-for-profit research institute funded by the property and casualty insurance industry.

While it has become obvious that having no national flood insurance plan is a problem in Canada, providing government-subsidized flood insurance policies is equally if not more problematic, McGillivray said. “It’s aid wrapped in the guise of a flood insurance program.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) gives millions of American insurance policies that are about half the price of insurance company rates, but massive property losses over the last decade left the agency $24 billion in debt in 2012.

In 2013, Congress passed the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, which allowed FEMA to align its rates with those of insurance companies. In some cases, home insurance rates went up thousands of dollars, causing a backlash from homeowners. Congress immediately started back-pedaling by drafting a new bill to delay the implementation of the act until after the National Academy of Sciences could spend two years studying the issue.

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Back to nature

A national conversation about flood insurance gets to the heart of our fears about climate change: that this problem may force some of us to change our lifestyles, and even leave behind our homes and communities.

Staten Islanders in New York City know this fear better than anyone. Two years after Superstorm Sandy hit the northeast coast of the United States, they now are deciding whether or not to sell their homes to New York State, which wants to use the shoreline as a buffer for extreme weather. The state has earmarked about $200 million to buy-out homeowners in three Staten Island neighbourhoods, which make up about 550 acres of property.

“We are going to demolish the homes,” said Barbara Brancaccio, a spokeswoman for Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Office of Storm Recovery told NPR on Wednesday. “Essentially, they go back to nature,” she said.

Some people may argue that it is damaging to move communities out of flood plains, but it’s equally damaging to let their homes flood year after year and expect tax payers who live elsewhere in the country to prick up the tab, said McGillivray.

Aside from moving to a less flood-prone area, the only thing homeowners can do to protect their livelihoods is make sure they have fortified their homes to deal with floods and make sure they understand their risks, said McGillivray.

“A person may be able to say honestly that they did not know they were in a flood plain, but that only works once,” he said.

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Last week, the Canadian government tabled a bill that would require oil, gas and mining companies listed on Canadian stock exchanges to disclose how much they pay governments for access to their resources. And while that law still has a long way to go before it becomes an operational rule, it is a step toward creating a clearer picture of how much money is changing hands between Canadian corporations and politicians, at home and abroad.

A report released today by the Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE) is another step toward corporate transparency; but more than anything, the report shows that we don’t know nearly enough about political spending, said Kevin Thomas, director of shareholder engagement at SHARE, which provides research and education on responsible investment for institutional investors.

Canada has relatively strict campaign finance laws that prevent individuals from contributing more than $1,200 per year and prohibits corporations from making any political contributions whatsoever.  However, there is significant room for companies and individuals to support other organisations involved in politically charged activity that can affect public perception, said Nicholas Kyonka, chief executive officer of Canadians for Responsible Advocacy, an advocacy watchdog in Ottawa.

“It depends on what kind of activity you’re trying to get to the heart of. If you want to find out how much they’re spending on lobbying that’s different from how much they’re spending on changing public perception,” he added.

To that end, SHARE is undertaking a three-year project that will explore the influence that Canadian corporations have on public policy debates and decision-making, both at home and across the border. SHARE also aims to start a discussion with investors and companies about what kinds of disclosure – mandatory or voluntary – would be appropriate.

The initial report, “Are Canadian companies spending to influence the US political process,” focuses on the U.S. because data across the border is more complete, said Thomas.  It shows that companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) spent over $15 million in the first three quarters of 2014 on lobbying U.S. politicians, but the same data is not available in Canada because federal and provincial registries do not require this information.

“There is a mountain of information that we don’t know about and the relatively small amount of information that we do have is barely even the tip of the iceberg, said Kyonka. This is a problem because Canadians should be aware of who is shaping their country, and the best way to gain that knowledge is almost always to follow the money, he said.

SHARE says investors also need this information to decide whether or not a company’s political activity is consistent with their own long-term interests, and whether the company is vulnerable to reputational risks, said Thomas.

For example, a pension fund may invest in insurance companies that are facing losses from weather events. If the fund also invests in an oil company that is lobbying against climate change regulation, it would not be well served by that kind of political activity. Shareholders also need to consider the reputational risk that can arise when a company lobbies on the wrong side of an issue, such as climate change, he added.

Companies have a great deal of insight to offer politicians in terms of creating effective policies and avoiding unintended consequences, said Thomas. They should have a voice at the table with decision-makers, we just need to know what they are saying, he added.

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The proposed Canadian legislation applies to oil, gas and mining companies with at least $20 million in assets and $40 million in revenue or employ an average of least 250 employees. It targets companies that are listed on Canadian stock exchanges or had assets in Canada during one of their two most recent financial years.

The mining industry is supportive of the law, even going so far as to submit their own set of recommendations last January. They hope that if people can see how much money they give to governments, they can increase their social capital and redirect public grievances at political leaders rather than mining companies.

Oxfam Canada is also praising the federal government for championing a global transparency standard that, it says, could help millions of people living in poverty demand their fair share of wealth from resource extraction.

But, amid all of this applause, let’s keep in mind that the United States was the first country to pass a payment disclosure law in 2010 and it still hasn’t implemented a rule. This should serve as a warning that there is lots of room for the oil and gas industry to undermine a law in the time it takes to write a rule.

The American example

President Obama signed Section 1504 of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into public law in 2010 and sent it to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to implement a rule. The SEC wrote a strong rule in August 2012 that required companies to disclose payments to all levels of government for each of their projects. But the American Petroleum Institute challenged the rule in court only two months later, saying it placed an undue burden on the industry and would negatively affect competition.

In July 2013, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sent the rule back to the SEC to either a write a new rule or provide a better justification for the first one. The SEC will discuss the rule again in March 2015, and until then, one can only speculate whether lobbying by the oil and gas industry has been successful, or not.

Canadians should take note of this because, as Oxfam Canada rightly pointed out, the tabling of legislation “is only the first step in developing Canada’s disclosure requirements.” Even if it passes a law supporting payment transparency, it will still need to settle important details, such as what the definition of a “project” will be and what the reporting standards will look like.

These are important details that can determine how useful the information is to the people living near oil, gas and mining projects. The more information people have, the easier it will be for them to hold their governments accountable for resource revenue. And likewise, any attempts to anonymize or exempt companies from disclosing will “rob citizens of the economic benefits of natural resource wealth,” said Claire Woodside Director of Publish What You Pay Canada, the global network of organizations pushing for payment disclosure last July.

And the Canadian oil and gas industry is not as supportive of a strong rule as the Canadian mining industry is. The Globe and Mail reported last week that “the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers supports the principle of transparency, but has concerns about how it may be implemented.”

Talisman Energy Inc., a Canadian oil and gas company, is openly calling for a weaker rule. The company said in a letter to Natural Resources Canada in May that it does “not believe that trying to draft Canadian rules so that they are ‘equivalent with the most severe set of rules currently proposed is of any service to Canadian companies.’”

The letter goes further, pointing out that “the EU Accounting Directive was drafted to align with the then-existing Dodd Frank 1504 rules in order to establish a global reporting standard. Those Dodd Frank rules were subsequently vacated. If Canada drafts its revenue transparency rules to align with the EU Accounting Directive…it is ignoring the lessons learned in the U.S.”

Talisman and I are making the same point: even when you think you have a law in the bag, things can change very quickly.  So let’s not ignore the lesson learned in the U.S. and make sure that we don’t let a perfectly good transparency law get undermined by weak rules and red tape.

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Olga Bautista lives in such a neighbourhood – Southeast Side Chicago – with her husband and two children. The outspoken community organizer is now running for city council with the hope that she can revitalize the neighbourhood and replace these dirty industries with sustainable jobs.

Bautista is behind the Southeast Chicago Coalition to Ban Petcoke, an organization that is trying to rid the neighbourhood of petroleum coke (also known as petcoke), a by-product of refining oil. British Petroleum (BP) spent $4.2 billion last year to quadruple the amount of crude oil its refinery in Whiting, Indiana can process from Canada’s oil sands. The refinery ships its petcoke to southeast Chicago to be stored in massive piles at two locations owned by Koch Industries Inc.

The community has been fighting BP, Koch Industries, the City of Chicago and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) for over a year, saying the oily substance is blowing around the neighborhood and possibly endangering their health. The coalition has yet to see a moratorium on petcoke, but Bautista’s stamina and dedication could win her a seat on Chicago’s city council, making her an even stronger force to be reckoned with.

What follows is an edited version of a conversation with Bautista about her concerns and hopes for her community.

CK: Could you start by telling me about your community, Southeast Chicago, and why we should pay attention to it?

BAUTISTA: The neighbourhood used to be a hub for steel industry, and there used to be a lot of jobs associated with that. The neighbourhood had a downtown, almost like a main strip, with a theatre and shopping and all kinds of other things. Since the 1970s, when the steel mills started closing, the neighbourhood has been in a collective depression. More Mexican families have moved into the neighborhood and a lot of bilingual families. That’s how my family is, too.

The BP refinery is a few miles away in Whiting, Indiana. It’s very close. We’re seeing large amounts of petcoke being stored and coming through on trains, barges, trucks.

CK: When did the issue with the Petcoke begin and how did it change the neighbourhood?

BAUTISTA: Last year, around August, my neighbor Kate Koval was volunteering with the Southeast Environmental Task Force. They had gone on a boat tour and discovered petcoke in the water; it caused the swirls that you see when there’s gas or oil in the water. They were able to document it by taking pictures. So we started to learn about it and Google it. We found articles about the Koch brothers in Detroit and the petcoke piles there, and that people were concerned about this in other parts of the country.

CK: What does it look like in your neighbourhood when the petcoke gets swept up into the air? What effect does the petcoke have on your daily lives?

BAUTISTA: During that time when Kate first started volunteering, they were doing some maneuvering of the petcoke and upgrading the site, so all of the petcoke from one site was moved to another. The piles were so huge and the weather was dry and windy, so there was a perfect storm. My friend’s mom was celebrating her 60^th birthday outdoors and the petcoke got all over the food; it got everywhere. They had to throw all of the food away and go inside. There was also a little league game at a nearby field and they called the game because it looked like the neighbourhood was on fire. It was dark black. It looked like smoke, but people couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It was just everywhere.

Since then, we haven’t had any situations quite like that. The petcoke has been stored in smaller piles, and we had a really rainy summer and fall this year, so it has helped to settle the dust. But we’re concerned that we can’t always bank on the conditions to stay as they are right now. What worries us is that regulations and ordinances have been proposed and adopted by the city of Chicago based on the fact that people haven’t been calling as much to make complaints. For us, it’s a problem that they’re using that as a way to gauge what’s going on with the petcoke in the community because we have also found petcoke is being stored on that actual river. At one time, there can be 30-40 barges full to the brim of petcoke on the river.

CK: You have done a significant amount of community organizing in your area. How did that begin?

BAUTISTA: Kate Koval hosted a handful of meetings at home and invited people from the Southeast Environmental Task Force, the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), and Josh Mogerman [who works for the NRDC] to come down and explain why the situation has gotten to where it is. Josh explained that the upgrades at the BP refinery were made to be able to process heavier tar sands oil, and so we started to learn about it and started to post a lot on the community Facebook page. Our vocabulary changed during this process. The people who were coming together around the issue, decided to start the Southeast Chicago Coalition to Ban Petcoke so that we could have a united community response to what was happening.

CK: Take me through what happened in that first year of your fight against petcoke.

BAUTISTA: Kate Koval and Mari Barboza, two organizers, went house-to-house in the Wolf Park neighbourhood closest to the where the petcoke is being stored and gave out fliers and invited people to a community meeting at the neighbourhood park. A lot of people came to that first meeting; the press was there, the alderman was there, the IEPA was there, and the community had a lot of questions about the petcoke. The IEPA and the alderman were shocked that an emergency injunction and a cease and desist were being talked about.

We learned at that first meeting that the IEPA had been doing regular inspections at the site and this really upset the people who were at the meeting. They were shocked that regular inspections were taking place and this crisis had fallen through the cracks. After that, there was an article in the Chicago Tribune about the petcoke and the IEPA hosted a town hall meeting in the neighbourhood. We gave out fliers for that second town hall meeting and we packed the room. It was pretty much standing room only. People showed up with signs and we were asking for an emergency injunction until a thorough investigation had been completed, but they wouldn’t do it. We are still calling for the same thing. Eventually, city council proposed regulations that would keep the companies here but required them to enclose their operations.

CK: What does it mean to you that you have so many waste industries in your neighbourhood, a largely minority community?

BAUTISTA: Whether they planned it that way or not, the fact is that it’s mostly minorities, working class, and it’s not in an area where the Koch brothers would live, or the mayor, Rham Emannuel. So for us, it’s definitely insulting because this is a very working class neighbourhood. These are teachers, nurses, police officers, firemen, and people who work in the service industry. This is the backbone of the city. It just feels to us that these companies are much better protected than the people who actually make the city operate and work.

CK: You’ve begun a campaign to run for city council. Tell me about your revitalization plan to bring sustainable jobs to the community.

BAUTISTA: Along the lakefront, there is a site of an old steel mill that is being redeveloped at this moment and the idea is to build luxury condos there. The plan is to build a green building; it’s going to be LEED construction, there are thoughts to do offshore windmills, solar panels, rooftop gardens. All of these things sound really wonderful. We want those things for the people who live here now. Not for people who are going to be moving in 30-40 years from now.

We don’t want this kind of industry that pollutes and provides very few jobs for the community. We are interested in workforce development training like they have in Sustainable South Bronx, a green organization in the Bronx. They do 15–20 week trainings where people learn how to retrofit houses and small businesses to make them more energy efficient. They even went to the extent of getting banks to help finance these programs for low-income families. And they also paint roofs this silver colour so it keeps it warm in the winter and cool in the summer. They do rooftop gardening.

When I was in New York City, I toured Sustainable South Bronx and met two women who had gone through the program. These are moms who are excited to do this kind of work. They are climbing onto rooftops, doing the painting. Another part of the training – a big chunk of it – is vocabulary, where people learn terms like environmental racism at the same time as they are learning how to conserve energy. And I think it is crucial to have both of those aspects in training.

CK: If elected, what would your neighbourhood look like if you could achieve anything during your term?

BAUTISTA: The first thing I would do is participatory budgeting. Each ward gets $1.3 million. Those are monies that are used for things that the community needs. What they do in other parts of the city is have a fair where people present their projects and then the best ones are chosen. There is a vote within the ward to decide which of the projects are going to get funded. As long as someone can prove they live in the ward and are 16 years or older, it doesn’t matter if they have legal status or if they have committed a felony. This would be first thing I do because who is going to tell us what is going to improve our lives? Nobody. We know what’s going to make our lives better. We need programs on how to prevent foreclosures or how to finance getting a solar panel on our houses, even beautifying the neighbourhood to have more community gardens, to remediate land so that we can use it to grow our food.

CK: So what would your neighborhood look like if all of this happens?

BAUTISTA: We would have a neighborhood that is meeting the human needs of the people who are living here, where people aren’t hungry and have access to food and public transportation. We would also want to meet needs for recreation. I talked about a lot of the problems in southeast Chicago, but we also have a beautiful lakefront. We don’t have access to the river; it is exclusively for industry. It’s very difficult to canoe or kayak. It’s dangerous because there is so much activity with these huge barges coming through. We don’t have access and we want it. Living next to the river should be an amenity to the community, not to the industry.

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