In our passion for spuds, humans have consecrated an area of the earth roughly equivalent to the size of Great Britain. From those vast tracts we produce 375 million tons of potatoes globally, which is something like the weight of every car in the United States put together. The world’s potatoes are collectively worth US$116 billion, and the market is booming. 

What makes a potato good? Sure, it’s flexible in the kitchen and can be mashed for ease, scalloped for excellence or grated for latkes. But best of all it can be cut into strips and fried in oil until it is both crispy and soft – an unparalleled comfort food, adored by vegans and omnivores alike. 

Everyone eats french fries. (Well, 98% of North Americans, at any rate.) As you read this, you’ve probably got a bag of frozen fries in your freezer, just waiting for you to dump them on a pan and bake them in the oven at 425°F for 20 to 25 minutes the next time you’re too tired to cook. 

In the kingdom of frozen french fries, only one producer could rightfully claim the throne: McCain Foods, a Canadian company founded in the small town of Florenceville, New Brunswick, and now in its 68th year. Today, it is active in 160 countries across four continents, and its annual sales of frozen potato products exceed $16 billion. A major supplier for McDonald’s, McCain claims to produce one out of every four french fries eaten in the world. 

But McCain has a problem. It’s the same problem that confronts us all, to a greater or lesser extent: climate change is imperilling how we get our food.

A crisis for agriculture

“When we first started on our journey as a company, we probably would have experienced a climate event once every 10 to 15 years,” Charlie Angelakos said on a video call in April. “What we’ve found, particularly in the last 10 years, is that climate issues started happening with our crops on a more frequent basis.” 

Angelakos is McCain’s vice president of global external affairs and sustainability, and he’s telling me about a study the company issued in 2018 to assess its vulnerability to the impacts of a rapidly changing climate. The results were startling. “It showed that if we were to stay on the same trajectory, we would have more and more climate disasters with our crops in the different growing regions around the world.”

Today, Angelakos says the company contends with three to five climate events every year across the 3,900 farms globally that supply its potatoes. By “events” he means crop killers: entire harvests destroyed by fire, flood or drought, as well as wild swings in yield from year to year. The company’s executives realized they needed to act quickly to secure their supply chain. The solution, they realized, was hiding in plain sight: a traditional form of farming that preceded industrial monoculture agriculture, protects against droughts and floods, and even offers better returns for farmers – aka, regenerative agriculture. 

It’s an assured supply strategy. How do you build a sustainable, resilient food supply chain for the future?

—Charlie Angelakos, VP of sustainability, McCain Foods

So the company embarked on a new mission to attain 100% regenerative agriculture across its farms by 2030. Currently, 71% of its farmers are at the onboarding level.

Other large corporations like Pepsi and Nestlé have announced commitments to regenerative agriculture in recent years, but those pledges have largely been framed in terms of meeting emission-reduction targets. For McCain, the logic is more immediately existential: the goal is to better cope with environmental and financial shocks. “It’s an assured supply strategy,” Angelakos says. “How do we build a sustainable, resilient food supply chain for the future?” 

Replenishing the soil

“Regenerative agriculture” is a $10 phrase that sounds too wholesome to be interesting – until you consider the stakes. Namely, the viability of a food system that keeps us fed at the expense of nature and our health. 

Basically, it’s the opposite of monoculture farming, which has sustained the earth’s exploding population for decades but relies heavily on herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and synthetic fertilizers. Regenerative agriculture strives to cut back and eliminate all those harmful chemical inputs, so the farms can function as healthy, self-sustaining ecosystems. In other words, it’s a method for turning dirt into soil, by bringing back the micro-organisms and other stuff that make plants happy.

Really, regenerative farming is just the old ways of doing things, says Harold Perry, a potato farmer in Alberta and a supplier for McCain and Frito-Lay. Perry’s family has been farming 6,000 acres near the town of Lethbridge since 1909, beginning with his great-grandfather John. Perry’s daughter is studying agronomy and will take over next, the fifth generation to raise crops on that land. 

Perry, who is 54, has been fascinated by the science of soil health for nearly three decades. He received a scholarship from Nuffield Canada in 2006 to travel internationally and meet other farmers using regenerative practices, and he’s well-versed in the research and language of plant biology. But for all the complexity of modern agronomy, the techniques for achieving healthy soil are fairly straightforward. “Our major thing is to keep the ground green at all times,” Perry says over the phone, referring to the practice of planting so-called cover crops such as buckwheat, clover and hairy vetch during times when regular cash crops are not being grown. Cover crops not only deposit more nutrients and organic material into the ground; they also protect the soil from damage from extreme heat. 

This basic principle of regenerative farming – often referred to as “armouring” the soil – is also one of the six key principles in McCain’s Regenerative Agriculture Framework, produced in partnership with the U.S. Soil Health Institute, which the company is using to guide its network of farmers through the program and measure their progress.

While most other food producers that carry the financial heft of McCain would use brokers, the company contracts directly with farmers, which allows it to more effectively implement new standards and practices. 

Another key tenet of regenerative farming is tilling the ground less or not at all, which the company calls “minimized soil disturbance.” There’s a mechanical straightforwardness to the logic to this practice: by avoiding tillage and allowing the roots from cover crops to break up the soil, it becomes less dense and compacted, so more water, nutrients and micro-organisms can soak down into it. 

In conventional agriculture, the soil can’t hold water nearly as well, so it’s more vulnerable to flooding. “When it rains a lot, a significant amount of soil is washing away from your field, and the top layer is very important because this is where there’s more nutrients and more organic matter,” says Claudia Goyer, a molecular biologist for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Flooding carries not only topsoil into the watershed, but fertilizer as well, where the fertilizer feeds algal blooms.

Surging adoption

Unlike many other solutions to society’s most pernicious problems, regenerative farming has one overwhelming advantage over conventional agriculture: it’s more profitable – as much as 75% to 80% more profitable, according to research by the Soil Health Institute. “Conventional systems are focused on yield, whereas regenerative systems are more focused on profit,” explains Salar Shemirani, CEO at the certification provider Regenified. “Yield can go down for a year or two during the transition, but you are using less inputs, less fuel, less labour.” Fewer costs means better returns. 

This is especially important as conventional farming can be a low- or no-profit business, and farmers lately have been forced to contend with historically high costs of doing business. The prices for fertilizer, seed and other inputs have all soared, while commodity prices for their products have plunged. In the United States, President Donald Trump’s universal trade war has made the situation even worse.  

Still, farmers can take a hit at the very outset of their transition. “We do know that in the early years there will be a slight dip in profitability for the farmer, and then over time, as yields increase, it does become a profitable endeavour,” Angelakos says.

McCain has partnerships with financial institutions in eight different countries to offer low-interest loans and other discounted financing options to help its farmers invest in things like cover crops and new equipment. 

Transitioning to regenerative practices can be an uphill struggle for other reasons too. “A lot of growers felt that it was forced on them,” Perry says. When big companies insist on new practices, it can feel like they’re saying that farmers don’t know what they’re doing, and this can be an impediment to adoption. 

It is essential that companies set up frameworks that lead to steep reductions in agrochemical use in their supply chain at an urgent pace.”

—Sarah Starman and Kendra Klein, Friends of the Earth

Still, because of its many upsides and few downsides, regenerative farming is rapidly gaining traction; stakeholders using the language of change curve models now say it has moved past the early adopter phase and entered the early majority phase. A market analysis by Grand View Research projects that regeneratively farmed products will see a compound annual growth rate of 15.7% from 2023 to 2030. 

Gabe Brown, the well-known advocate for soil health and co-founder at Regenified, says that he’s seen more change, more commitments and more progress in the past two years than in the past 30 years combined. 

Among regenerative agriculture’s most notable fans is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently serving as the U.S. secretary of health and human services. His Make America Healthy Again plan lists “advancing regenerative and precision agriculture” among its top goals. The former environmental lawyer advocates for a “nutrition-based approach to disease prevention” that starts with soil health. Kennedy points the blame at “highly chemical, intensive processed foods.” 

But surging interest in regenerative farming has made it vulnerable to greenwashing. Bloomberg News warned in 2023 that Big Food’s regenerative agriculture push was running a greenwashing risk, due to the lack of established targets. A report by the investor network FAIRR found that among 79 agrifood companies worth US$3 trillion, most (50) had announced some kind of regenerative initiative with their suppliers, but few were measuring their progress and only four were actually supporting farmers financially to deploy regenerative practices. Lots of talk; not much meaningful action.  

Regenerative agriculture intrinsically means taking a holistic approach to farming, and industry greenwashing can generally be identified by its reductivity – especially by equating the whole methodology with the single practice of tilling less, while continuing to pour agrochemicals onto the soil.

A new report published in April by Sarah Starman, senior food and agriculture campaigner, and Kendra Klein, deputy director of science, at Friends of the Earth, found that “the vast majority (93%) of U.S. corn and soy acreage grown in no-till and minimum-till management systems relies on toxic pesticides that harm soil health and threaten human health.” 

Asked about McCain’s regenerative framework, the authors wrote in an email to Corporate Knights that the company had made a great start by explicitly lifting up agrochemical reduction as a pillar of its program and by using an accepted benchmarking system to effectively measure its progress. But key aspects of their approach could be improved: “McCain doesn’t share a specific timeline for moving growers in their supply chain beyond the first level, ‘Engaged.’ Given the devastating impacts of agrochemicals on biodiversity, climate, soil, and human health, it is essential that companies set up frameworks that lead to steep reductions in agrochemical use in their supply chain at an urgent pace, not leave the door open for a continuation of the status quo.” 

Despite its commitment to regenerative farming, McCain is not otherwise a leader on environmental, social and governance metrics. Sustainalytics gives McCain an “average” rating for its management of ESG material risk. McCain does not disclose enough information to be a contender for Corporate Knights’ Best 50 list of Canada’s most sustainable companies.

Making the case

As auspicious as the overall trend looks, conventional agriculture remains extremely entrenched, and most people don’t know or care about regenerative practices. “According to our most recent research, most people aren’t sure what regenerative agriculture is, or its potential in mitigating climate change,” Angelakos says. Fewer than one in 10 Canadians understand the concept of regenerative agriculture practices; 26% of Canadians had never heard about it. 

Still, the market indifference to regenerative agriculture could be taken as an indicator that McCain is being honest about its motives and serious about its transition. But they aren’t leaving consumers to find their own way. The company is working hard to promote the idea of regenerative agriculture, through ad campaigns, partnerships with influencers and a demonstration project with the Sustainable Markets Initiative in the United Kingdom to show the strong business case for regenerative farming. It even made an augmented-reality game, whereby a cartoon farm is projected onto a surface using your phone’s camera. Users gain points by growing potatoes and then investing in pollinators, crop cover, livestock and technology. 

But change happens on the ground, not on our phones. Our food system needs more biodiversity, not more industrial inputs. Fortunately, farms really do work best – and farmers do better – when nature takes the lead.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of countries in which McCain is active. 

Cover image: Harold Perry inspects fresh piles of compost and digestate at CKP farms near Coaldale, Alberta on May 23, 2025.

Mark Mann is a journalist in Montreal and the associate editor at Corporate Knights. 

Photography by Guillaume Nolet.

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“Achieving net zero by 2050 remains a widely adopted goal and critical ambition for many countries, companies, and international organizations,” the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) says [pdf] in its annual report released this week. But the report falls short of reaffirming the net-zero commitment the fund announced in 2022 while steadfastly refusing to abandon its fossil fuel investments.

Instead, CPPIB simply states that “the fulfillment of commitments made by governments, technological progress, fulfillment of corporate targets, changes in consumer and corporate behaviours, and development of global reporting standards and carbon markets will determine the pace of the transition to net zero.”

In the FAQ section of its Approach to Sustainability web page, CPPIB explains that “recent legal developments in Canada have introduced new considerations around how net-zero commitments are interpreted,” resulting in “increasing pressure to adopt standardized emissions metrics and interim targets, many of which don’t reflect the complexity of a global investment portfolio like ours.”

Those “rigid milestones could lead to investment decisions that are misaligned with our investment strategy,” CPPIB adds. “To avoid that risk – and to remain focused on delivering results, not managing legal uncertainty – we have made a considered decision to no longer maintain a net-zero by 2050 commitment.”

The FAQ material appears on a page where chief sustainability officer Richard Manley declares that “companies that effectively anticipate and manage material sustainability-related factors are better positioned to be more profitable and resilient over the long term.” A CPPIB spokesperson did not reply to an email requesting further detail on the announcement.

The news from CPPIB echoes the Royal Bank of Canada’s late-April decision to abandon its $500-billion sustainable finance pledge and stop public disclosures on its updated climate strategy, citing the new anti-greenwashing provisions in the Competition Act. At the time, legal and climate policy experts said the new rules shouldn’t be a problem for companies that were telling the truth about their climate performance – or that were working in good faith to meet their commitments, even if they ultimately fell short.

“Walking away from a climate commitment when asked to prove its credibility raises serious concerns about the integrity of that commitment in the first place,” Senator Rosa Galvez (ISG-Quebec), who worked to introduce and pass a Climate-Aligned Finance Act (CAFA) in the last Parliament, said at the time. “Moreover, by abandoning its claims, RBC has demonstrated that the provisions of the Competition Actthat intend to address greenwashing are in fact serving their purpose.”

Walking away from a climate commitment when asked to prove its credibility raises serious concerns about the integrity of that commitment in the first place.

– Senator Rosa Galvez

In a media release Wednesday, Toronto-based Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health said CPPIB’s investment and asset management decisions “have been misaligned with a credible net-zero strategy ever since it first made this commitment in 2022,” continuing to invest in fossil fuel expansion “in violation of credible science-based commitments and prudent due diligence” against climate risk.

“Net-zero commitments are not optional,” Shift Action wrote. “They have become essential tools to manage risk and maximize long-term financial returns for pension funds. Climate impacts are already reducing global GDP growth, threatening the stability of financial markets and disrupting lives and livelihoods in Canada and around the world,” pointing to a future where “pension funds like CPPIB are unlikely to generate the stable, future returns necessary to pay out their long-term obligations.”

Canadians under 40 who are now in the work force “won’t be eligible to receive their CPP benefits until after 2050,” the release adds. “What kind of a world are Canadians expected to retire into? How would CPPIB be able to sustain benefits in a world of climate breakdown?”

This article was first published by The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original story here.

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“There is an antidote to doom and despair,” the architect of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change posted. “It’s action on the ground, and it’s happening in all corners of the Earth.”

Now a decade since Christiana Figueres accomplished the Herculean task of getting 196 countries to put their differences aside and adopt the accord, the former United Nations climate chief and long-time Costa Rican diplomat remains deeply attuned to the emotional toll the climate crisis has taken on those advocating for action. “The pain of the climate communities is at an all-time high,” she tells Corporate Knights on a call from her coastal home in the Guanacaste province of northwestern Costa Rica. She knows their climate anxiety well. “I used to wake up every single morning with an alarm clock ringing in my gut, because scientists are screaming from the rooftops that we have deadlines right in front of us . . . and we all know we are running out of time.” 

That “pre-traumatic stress disorder,” as she calls it, is only intensifying as administrations in the United States, Argentina and even the green poster child of Costa Rica brandish chainsaws to climate regulations, while Trump is “breaking the very bones of society.” And yet somehow, Figueres manages her trademark mix of “outrage and optimism” (which, by the way, is the name of her popular climate change podcast) from a much more Zen space. Now she’s working on sharing her secret to alchemizing our collective pain into personal and planetary resilience with thousands of climate leaders, at a time when they need it most. 

By the time Figueres took on the role of executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2010, she had been working as a diplomat, renewable-energy advocate and international climate negotiator for three decades. Figueres was in the thick of dealing with the pressures of preparing for the Paris Agreement in 2013 when “out of the clear blue sky” her 25-year marriage fell apart. Overwhelmed by grief, she was wracked with suicidal thoughts, until, she says, she discovered the teachings of Zen master and long-time peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. “It was really – I mean literally – a lifesaver for me.”

She remembers reading and re-reading his calligraphy that said “The tears of yesterday have become rain.” “Slowly I began to understand that I had a choice about the pain that was overwhelming me.” That pain could become the “chrysalis for learning and growth,” she explains – “the mud needed for a lotus to grow.”

Hanh was known as the “father of mindfulness” in the West, but to Figueres, he soon became her spiritual father, without whom, she says, the Paris Agreement may not have happened. For those keeping count, that gives Figueres two high-profile dads. Her birth father, José Figueres, was equally formative in shaping her brand of climate diplomacy: the coffee grower turned revolution leader served three elected terms as president of Costa Rica and is considered the founder of the Central American nation’s democracy.

Is the energy that I bring to myself, to others, to this work stemming from grief, pain and despair, or am I transitioning my energy to one that stems from love and care?

— Christiana Figueres, co-founder, Global Optimism, and former UN climate chief

Before the 95-year-old monk’s death in 2022, Figueres had begun working with the monastics at Plum Village, Hanh’s global community of mindfulness centres/Buddhist monasteries, to share his teachings, through week-long meditation retreats for leaders in the climate and biodiversity space and a seven-week online course for broader reach. During Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet (ZASP), the virtual course based on Hanh’s bestselling book of the same name, a dozen monks, nuns and Zen community leaders – including Figueres – led a cohort of 1,400 participants from 70 nations through a tumultuous fall season. 

ZASP students – myself among them – ranged from activists and scientists to sustainable business consultants and concerned citizens. We were shown a number of daily practices to ground our nervous systems, including mindful breathing and walking. But the teachings go beyond the usual mindfulness techniques that have burgeoned on meditation apps for the last decade. Daily talks and short meditations are designed to cultivate a deep reverence for and sense of interconnection or “interbeing” with the earth, an approach that was quintessential to Hanh, who was exiled from Vietnam for his activism during the war. At Plum Village, Europe’s largest Buddhist monastery, Hanh established his own brand of “engaged Buddhism” rooted in caring for the earth. It’s not just about quieting the mind; the course encourages us to slow down to cultivate the mindset, openness and understanding needed to work collaboratively to address the climate crisis.

Getting out of our judgment box

At the course’s first sharing group two days after the U.S. election, participants are guided to break off into groups of four and practise deep listening – listening without interrupting or commenting. Admittedly, it’s tough not to jump in and turn it into a venting session about Trump’s win. But as Figueres has reminded us in her weekly talks, with practice, deep listening is a gift we can give loved ones and a powerful technique that can transform our work in the world. 

“What I love about the deep-listening skill that we are taught is the fact that it takes us out of our judgment box,” Figueres says. “If I’m in a conversation with anyone, my default is to bring my own prejudices, but when you enter into a conversation from that space, you already enter a dead conversation.”

Figueres confesses that during the last stretch of negotiating the Paris Agreement, she had to check her judgments at the door in conversations with governments that she disagreed with “from the bottom of my gut.” 

“That’s where it got truly challenging for me, to be able to not react immediately but rather stay with my breathing, stay with my listening skills.” Instead of preaching at them, she decided to ask them each about their history, their concerns, their aspirations. Although every country started from a different place, their realities began to merge, she explains, when they each came to the realization that “those future aspirations boil down to a stable, safe planet” – without her needing to sermonize, she adds. “Once you touch the pain or the fear that is behind people’s words and actions, then you have a rich conversation that can move you forward.”

Today, she’s teaching the technique as an antidote not just to the polarization splintering societies, but also to the divisions within environmental communities that can, at times, descend into what she calls “circular firing squads.”

“How many times do we not agree with colleagues who are also doing the utmost to address climate change? So many activists, leaders, scientists, corporates, financial institutions, all of whom are working toward the same direction of decarbonizing the economy with a different view,” she says. “If we have the space within ourselves, the inner space to have these conversations from a sincere non-judgmental perspective, we actually are able to find common ground and move forward together.”

Damned if you’re doomed

Of course, Zen has its limits. All the compassionate listening and mindful breathing in the world won’t stop Trump’s administration from smashing environmental regulations and opening the floodgates to more drilling and tree-felling. What then? Remembering that the world is bigger than the United States is key, Figueres says, and that the clean energy transition is larger than one government. “Trump is not the be all and end all of everything.”

She says to look for tectonic shifts in leadership, from states, from other countries, and from companies. “The largest companies in the United States understand that this is going to be yet another four-year hiatus in efforts to decarbonize the global economy or the U.S. economy, but that four years is not eternity – it is four years,” says Figueres, who launched a coalition of CEOs, investors, mayors, governors, scientists and youth activists last June called Mission 2025, all inviting governments to ratchet up their climate action plans.

“These companies know that they actually have to plan much longer-term than four years, and they know that decarbonizing their products and services is the only path that they can follow because that is irreversible right now.”

Her work with Mission 2025 and Plum Village, along with her Outrage + Optimism podcast and other offshoots of her Global Optimism organization, all ultimately flow into the same river: Figueres is laser-focused on sparking mindset shifts, “radical collaborations” and new narratives that foster the urgent action needed on climate change. 

It’s all part of an effort to “change the narrative in the way that I’m sharing with you now for us all not to succumb to this doomism and think that the world has come to an end,” Figueres says. 

Admittedly, some days, she does find herself overwhelmed by pain and anger, knowing that millions of people are already losing their homelands, their livelihoods to climate change. “That moral injustice is unacceptable to me.” But as painful as it is for us to hear, for instance, a growing number of climate scientists warn that the Paris Agreement’s target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is already “deader than a doornail,” Figueres says that focusing on failure only distorts reality. “The challenge is that we humans are programmed for a negative bias; we’re wired for always being vigilant about the threats. We’re not wired to be vigilant about opportunities.”

And that, Figueres says, is our personal responsibility as climate advocates. “I don’t need to worry about not being informed of the threats. Those are a tsunami that comes at me all the time. I do need to put energy and intention on being much more mindful and conscious of positive things that are happening. That’s how I balance. And that actually is more representative of reality,” she adds, pointing to the momentum behind wind and solar energy and the rise of EVs.

No mud, no lotus

During the last week of teachings, as with every week, Figueres reminds the Zen students “why this all matters.” She challenges us to mirror the change we want to see in our work and in the world. 

“I’ve been reminding myself that yes, I do want policy changes at the level of governments and corporations, and I asked myself what policy changes am I operating with respect to my thoughts and actions? Yes, I do want to accelerate the energy transition, and therefore am I transitioning my own energy? Is the energy that I bring to myself, to others, to this work stemming from grief, pain and despair, or am I transitioning my energy to one that stems from love and care? Am I nurturing and caring for my own personal resilience so that I’m not in constant burnout mode?” 

Seven weeks into the course, my own energy feels more renewable, though some days just following breaking news can still feel like an emotional mudslide. But as Hanh would say, ‘No mud, no lotus.” 

“Lotus flowers only grow in ponds that have a muddy bottom,” Figueres tells students. “And that is the beautiful symbol of how we transform the mud in our life into lotus flowers. We can choose to be overwhelmed by all the mud ponds in our life, of which there are many, or we understand that every mud pond is precisely where the lotus flowers can grow and bloom.”

Adria Vasil is the managing editor of Corporate Knights and author of the bestselling Ecoholic book series.

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Natural assets (such as rivers, wetlands and forests) are neither traded nor routinely valued, yet they provide critical services like helping manage worsening floods, droughts and heat waves, as well as storing carbon to slow climate change. These services are financially valuable. For example, an Institute for Sustainable Finance report estimates that Canadian wetlands alone provide services worth approximately $225 billion annually, equivalent to around 8% of Canada’s gross domestic product.

However, over-consumption of open access, seemingly “free” services from natural assets can lead to continued and undocumented degradation of such assets, as comprehensively discussed by the Dasgupta Review in the U.K. and encapsulated in concepts like the “tragedy of the commons” and negative externalities.

Recognition of natural assets in public-sector financial statements is long overdue. A 2021 Intelligence Memo explored the urgent need to report on natural assets. That same year, senior executives and leaders from nearly 70 organizations signed a joint letter urging Canada’s Public Sector Accounting Board (PSAB) to work toward “getting nature on the balance sheet” of public sector entities. Today, the path to formally recognizing natural assets has become clearer.

This involves adopting internationally aligned standards to account explicitly for the value of natural assets. The International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board (IPSASB) has made significant progress on its multi-year natural resources project and is expected to publish a draft international standard this fall to propose criteria for recognizing “natural resource assets” in financial statements and requirements for note disclosures.

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Additionally, IPSASB has updated its international standard for the measurement of the financial value of assets, introducing “current operational value” as a method for quantifying the “service potential” of natural assets. This method can include the ecosystem services provided by natural assets.

In Canada, where 80% of the land is publicly owned, PSAB has indicated its intent to follow IPSASB’s guidance, making the adoption of a similar standard for Canada likely. This would allow the inclusion of natural assets that meet certain criteria in public-sector financial statements, rectifying their current exclusion.

Momentum is building in Canada ahead of official standards to provide the data necessary to more effectively measure the financial value of natural assets. Nationally, the Census of Environment – led by Statistics Canada – is actively compiling Canada’s natural capital accounts, with geospatial datasets already available for urban greenness and salt-marsh habitat. In 2023, specifications for natural asset inventories were published as a national standard of Canada.

At the local level, more than 150 local governments are already inventorying, assessing, valuing and managing their natural assets. Cities like Calgary and Mississauga and are making quantitative, albeit unaudited, disclosures related to natural assets in their financial statements. Yet these encouraging local-government approaches lack uniformity and encompass less than 5% of the total number of Canadian municipalities. National standards are essential to achieve consistency and broad-based adoption in the financial reporting of natural assets.

Important policy considerations will arise when (not if) Canada adopts public-sector accounting standards for natural assets that ensure transparent, consistent and routine reporting on their value.

Public sector recognition of natural assets will inevitably affect the private sector, particularly public–private interactions, such as land development, which often degrade and diminish the financial value of these assets. The valuation of natural assets may also affect how private sector entities consider managing “nature-related transition risks” – actions to protect or restore negative environmental impacts.

The work of the International Sustainability Standards Board, building on the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures, will be pivotal in setting sustainability standards that address nature-related risks from a financial materiality perspective. Accordingly, this work will need to consider the value of natural assets as they are formally recognized.

Also, it is essential to shape accounting policy for numerous lands with treaty rights through ongoing engagement with and learning from Indigenous Peoples.

The IPSASB is to be congratulated on its leadership in this crucial domain of valuing natural assets and ecosystem services. We eagerly await updates to Canada’s public-sector accounting standards.

Joanna Eyquem is managing director of climate-resilient infrastructure at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation. Peter van Dijk and James K. Stewart are senior fellows at the C.D. Howe Institute.

This piece originally appeared as a C.D. Howe Institute Intelligence Memo. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style.

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Fast fashion is one of the most polluting industries globally, often relying on synthetic fibres that have an ultimate origin in fossil fuels.

At the same time, the links between corporate fast-food entities and poor health and deteriorating environmental conditions is well established. Likewise, fast technology brands design for obsolescence to boost sales, requiring that more and more mineral wealth is extracted from the ground. Almost all of these activities require mining in some form along the supply chain.

Mining is also increasingly fast, with a focus on the creation of wealth for a select few and meeting global demand, not on the needs of local communities. Since the 1970s, global material footprint has quadrupled. While circular-economy strategies, such as recycling, can play a role in meeting the increasing demand for raw materials, mining cannot be completely offset by recycling alone.

The slow fashion and slow food movements are an antidote to overconsumption, promoting sustainability by emphasizing the value of quality, origin and production. New research suggests that a slow, small-scale mining movement could maintain supply, yield similar sustainability outcomes and provide a range of other benefits.

Out of this earth

The central premise of slow mining is to give control over production levels to those who work at the mine site itself. The concept recognizes that meeting global demands for raw materials requires local solutions and was evolved out of research into small-scale mining in Yukon, Canada. Additional research in Ghana has also shown how slow mining efforts led by small-scale miners can supply vital materials while also taking care of both local communities and environment.

Small-scale mining is the gradual harvest of a resource by a community (known as a rural collective economy) using more bespoke technologies (such as sluicing equipment) that miners are able to purchase – or build – and maintain themselves. Small-scale miners can also be owner-operators of their mines, where they have control over production rates to protect local communities and extend the life-of-mine for continued and secure steady income.

Small-scale mining activities are relatively common throughout the Yukon, where 108 active small- to medium-scale placer mines work to produce around 72,464 crude ounces of gold annually. By comparison, a single large-scale hard-rock gold mine can generate approximately 200,000 ounces annually in the same territory.

Yukon stands out as one of the few active small-scale mining industries in the Global North.

Artisanal and small-scale mining employ more than 40 million people in the Global South. “Slow” small-scale mining operations in Ghana have persisted despite shutdowns by a government that have favoured large, often multinational, mining enterprise under the banner of environmental protection.

Supportive structures

There are significant similarities and differences between the experiences of small-scale miners in Canada and Ghana. Notably, in both the Global North and the Global South, governance and regulation can hinder the existence of smaller mining enterprises.

Important regulatory frameworks, such as the Canadian National Instrument 43-101, are designed to protect markets, not communities or environments. This framework can make it difficult for small-scale mining enterprises to enter the sector. The dominant focus on large mining enterprises, tied to stock markets and globalization, overshadows the potential benefits of small-scale mining.

However, the Yukon government’s Placer Mining Act has helped to incubate and protect small-scale mining. Meanwhile, a floating pool of professionals who work with Yukon mining practitioners to develop place-based solutions that promote positive outcomes for mining practitioners and environment has helped the Yukon become a global leader in slow mining.

The resulting embrace of slow, small-scale mining has enabled rural communities to gradually adapt and grow with the industry. This approach enhances community resilience to boom-and-bust commodity life cycles, facilitates the development of integrated rural value chains and promotes local ownership and management, all of which can curb urban migration and create meaningful work.

Sustainable production-consumption ethos

The insights in small-scale mining from the Yukon have implications for a growing array of globally in-demand mineral and metal resources. Sustainability concepts in the mining industry have advanced toward holistic understanding, rooted in strong sustainability. Mining need not be an inherently colonial activity, and working with Indigenous people and incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing into the mine life cycle are key to overcoming sustainability challenges.

We need new mining business models anchored in local communities. Modern small-scale mining and switch-on/switch-off mining are being considered in Europe. Artisanal and small-scale mining in medium- and low-income nations produce a significant amount of critical minerals.

Who owns a mine is important, and research has shown that decentralized, locally owned mines positively correlate with high human development index outcomes and can help resist state-corporate mineral ownership.

In Canada, community-owned small-scale mining of critical minerals is economically and socially viable.

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Better alternatives

This comes at an important juncture in the expansion of raw material extraction activities that are needed to sustain the low-carbon transition but can potentially cause excessive stress to the natural environment and communities.

Slow mining illustrates how widespread global consumption is tied to the experience of mining communities, and the expectations of local stakeholders for sustainable livelihoods in sustainable environments.

Alongside slow fashion and slow food, slow mining demonstrates that the responsibility for better environmental and social outcomes lies with both a truly responsible mining industry, and a responsible culture of moderate consumption.

Cassia Johnson is a PhD candidate in earth and environmental sciences; Deborah Johnson is senior lecturer in politics and international relations; and Kathryn Moore is senior lecturer in critical and green technology metals, all at the University of Exeter.

This article first appeared in The Conversation; it has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here. 

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He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to take his place. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” he said in another statement. Not long after, Harris announced via the Biden campaign that she intends to run for president. “I am honored to have the president’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she said.

During his term, President Biden managed to shepherd a surprising number of major policies into law with a razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate. His crowning achievement is signing the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA — the biggest climate spending law in U.S. history, with the potential to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. In announcing his withdrawal, Biden called it “the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world.”

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But a growing body of evidence demonstrates women and gender-diverse people are disproportionately vulnerable to the changing climate and the consequences it brings.

Women are 14 times more likely to die in a climate change-related disaster than men. Women represent 80% of people displaced by extreme weather.

Although extreme weather events such as fires and floods might appear to affect everyone equally, the evidence shows crises exploit existing social faultlines. This means people who are already socially marginalised suffer exacerbated impacts.

What does this look like?

Women are acutely impacted by environmental crises because they experience pre-existing social and economic disadvantage. Another reason is they tend to take responsibility for caring for other vulnerable groups, such as children or older people.

In a meta-analysis of 130 studies, 68% found women were more impacted by climate-linked health issues than men. Maternal and perinatal health is particularly effected by climate change hazards such as extreme heat. So too is the health of older women.

Most disturbingly, studies across Australia and around the world have revealed gender-based violence consistently increases during and after disasters. Both the most recent National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children and the associated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Action Plan briefly recognise this. Even still, policymakers and service providers are yet to comprehensively grapple with what this means for women in an era of multiple and compounding disasters.

The impact of climate change on housing and living is also experienced in gendered ways. The Climate Council estimates that by 2030, 520,940 Australian properties, or one in every 25, will be “high-risk” and uninsurable. Rising costs of living, homelessness and under-insured housing are all affecting Australian women, who are particularly vulnerable to losing food security and shelter.

Over 2016–21, men’s homelessness increased by 1.6% while women’s increased by just over 10%. The Australian housing crisis is being exacerbated by the climate crisis, and these impacts are distinctly gendered.

Leadership drives results

Research demonstrates women and gender-diverse people bring crucial perspectives and leadership to tackling these problems. They’re not just helpless victims.

Evidence from across a range of sectors demonstrates gender-diverse leadership results in more effective and equitable approaches. Larger numbers of women in politics and policy-making results in stronger climate action policies, more ambitious climate targets and more pro-environmental legislation. Despite this, at the COP28 climate talks in 2023, only 15 out of 140 speakers were women. Only 38% of party delegation members were women.

Gender diversity in industry leadership also yields environmental benefits. Research by the World Economic Forum shows that a 1% increase in women managers in a company results in a 0.5% decrease in carbon emissions. Boards with higher gender diversity receive higher scores on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance measures and have fewer environmental lawsuits.

Companies with more than 30% women on their boards display better climate governance, climate innovation and sustainability performance. Yet, as of 2022, women hold just one in four executive leadership positions in ASX300 companies. At the current rate of progress, it will take a century for women to constitute 40% of chief executives among ASX200 companies.

Women and gender-diverse people are also in the minority in renewable energy industries. Only around 35% of the clean energy workforce is female. These women are predominantly in jobs such as office administration, accounting and cleaning, rather than trade-qualified or engineering roles.

In the recent federal budget, the government announced $55.6 million for a Building Women’s Careers Program. It also pledged $38.2 million to increase diversity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and industries. These are welcome developments.

But gender inclusion and equity need to be centred in major initiates like the Future Made in Australia Plan and the Net Zero Plan. This would help achieve urgent climate change mitigation targets and to ensure the associated economic benefits are genuinely inclusive.

Deep social change will be required to adequately address these issues. This is not just a matter of making space for more women to take up leadership positions, but requires grappling with the fact gendered social and economic inequality is caused by discriminatory gender attitudes, leaving women and gender-diverse people vulnerable to environmental impacts. Moreover, the kind of unpaid care work so often performed by women has been systematically undervalued, but is foundational to our economy, society and environment.

Fuelling disaster recovery

Women also have a key role to play in preparing for and recovering from climate-fuelled disasters.

Research shows women tend to take on emotional and relational roles within communities, sustaining networks of care at the local level. Community-level care is crucial to helping local communities stay strong in the face of increasing disasters, the impacts of which often exceed the capacity of emergency responders. Our disaster response policies and agencies need to recognise the often gendered nature of community resilience work and deliberately support this kind of “soft infrastructure”.

Climate and environmental issues do not affect us all equally. Women and gender-diverse people are acutely affected. We need targeted policy responses that recognise this vulnerability. In addition, women and gender-diverse people offer distinctive and much-needed leadership styles. These approaches are urgently required if we are to rapidly transition to a renewable economy.

The gendered impact of climate change is well-recognised at the international level, including by the United Nations. Australia has ambitions to host the COP31 global climate change conference with our Pacific neighbours in 2026. To be in the running, Australia needs to demonstrate it recognises and takes seriously the gendered nature of climate and environmental issues.

Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy works for Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia (WELA). WELA has just released a new report on Gender, Climate and Environmental Justice in Australia, funded by Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation and Equity Trustees.

This article was first published by The Conversation. Read the original story here. 

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For many ecosystems, fire plays a key role in supporting and maintaining biodiversity. For thousands of years, Indigenous people have purposefully used fire to shape the landscapes they inhabit. Indigenous fire practitioners have a deep knowledge of how specific types of fire can increase or decrease the abundance of species in a given area.

Our research team examined how Indigenous fire stewardship — the intergenerational teaching of fire knowledge and practices — affects biodiversity. We found that Indigenous fire stewardship increases biodiversity in almost all of Earth’s terrestrial biomes. Biodiversity keeps ecosystems more resilient to disturbances and provides immeasurable intrinsic, recreational and societal value.

Humans use fire as a tool

Our global review of research papers published over the past 100 years revealed that Indigenous fire stewardship affects a variety of life, including plants, crops, mushrooms, mammals, birds, reptiles and even microbes.

Nearly 80 per cent of the research papers we reviewed show a change in species composition as a result of fire stewardship. Land clearing, hunting and food resources — for example, increasing berry, mushroom or root crops — were the most frequently cited reasons for Indigenous fire stewardship.

Different Indigenous groups living in similar environments use different fire practices to achieve different goals. For example, some Indigenous groups from the western boreal, such as the Chipewyan Dene, rely on woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus) as a primary food source. Chipewyan Dene hunters note that fire is bad for woodland caribou, because caribou rely on lichens that only grow in old growth forests. Alternatively, the Tsa’tinne People from boreal Alberta depend on moose (Alces alces) and use fire often, because moose prefer the new foliage that flourishes in fire-disturbed forests.

Cultural burning — the use of fire to improve the health of the environment and people — is almost always done in the spring, winter or fall, during the wet season in the tropics or at night.

Indigenous fire stewardship blends intergenerational knowledge, beliefs and values with advanced methods of controlling several aspects of fire. Small, prescribed or cultural fires can recycle nutrients into the soil and support the growth of plant species used for food and medicine. Fire stewardship can also protect communities: in Tsilhqot’in territories (central British Columbia), fire is commonly applied in the spring and fall to reduce the risk of lightning fires that may harm communities in the summer months.

Landscapes shaped by fire

Many species and landscapes have been shaped by this long-standing relationship between humans and fire. For example, Garry oak ecosystems in B.C. flourished 7,500 years ago in a warmer climate. As the climate cooled, Garry oak ecosystems shrank from the landscape, persisting only in patches due to Indigenous fire stewardship.

Several species of raptors hunt prey that are flushed out of burning areas. Additionally, there are also many shade-intolerant plants that require fire to create gaps in the tree canopy so seedlings can establish themselves in sunny spots on the forest floor.

The majority of studies included in our research also reported an increase in the variety of habitats seen across a landscape, which is known as habitat heterogeneity. This patchwork quilt of habitats provides a wide variety of plants and animals with the resources and conditions they need to flourish, which further supports biodiversity.

Due to the nature of literature reviews, our research has not captured the full relationship between Indigenous burning and biodiversity. Indigenous Knowledge is often preserved outside academia, and some terms, such as biodiversity, were not commonly used in past research.

In addition, not all of Earth’s biomes are represented equally in the published literature, due to politics or remoteness. Some regions are not well represented because cultural burning was understudied in some biomes like the tundra or rainforest. However, emerging research and Indigenous Knowledge is demonstrating that cultural burning is a widespread practice, even in these regions.

The fire suppression that came with colonization disrupted beneficial fire practices in Canada and around the globe. For more than 100 years, both natural and cultural fires have been stifled through fire-fighting policies and Indigenous oppression.

Fire suppression has allowed dry and dead vegetation to accumulate. This, coupled with warmer and drier conditions linked to climate change, is leading to bigger and more severe wildfires. It also disrupts lightning and cultural fires from cleaning landscapes of vegetation affected by pests, diseases and invasive species.

Fire suppression has disrupted critical fire processes including Indigenous fire stewardship, a human-fire relationship that has existed for millennia. Indigenous peoples comprise only five per cent of the world’s population but protect approximately 85 per cent of the world’s biodiversity through stewardship of Indigenous-managed lands, including cultural burning.

If we hope to avoid another destructive wildfire-filled summer like 2021 it is time to adapt western fire management policies. Valuing, integrating and supporting Indigenous-led approaches to fire stewardship will help rebuild fire-resilient communities while conserving biodiversity.

Sara Wickham is a PhD candidate in historical ecology at the University of Waterloo; Andrew Trant is associate professor, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability, University of Waterloo; Emma Davis is a postdoctoral fellow, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability, University of Waterloo, and Kira Hoffman is a postdoctoral fellow, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Toronto-based Manifest Climate, formerly Mantle314,  was launched in 2015 as a consultancy by Toronto lawyer Laura Zizzo, who had previously founded Canada’s first law firm focused solely on climate change. In 2020, Manifest pivoted to become a tech start-up, developing AI-based software that automates and expands its consulting services by digitally scraping key data from clients’ financial filings and sustainability reports to ensure they meet growing demands for climate risk disclosure from regulators and investors alike.

Manifest wants to help clients better understand the financial risks they face related to the climate crisis and identify new opportunities in the shift to zero-carbon, all while improving their compliance around disclosure requirements.

In February, Manifest announced the completion of its first financing round: $6.5 million from a coalition of venture capitalists and high-net-worth individuals. That’s encouraging news not just for Manifest, but for all climate-related start-ups in Canada – and not just because Manifest had started out by hoping to raise only $5 million. According to stats from the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, Manifest’s $6.5-million “raise” is three times the size of the average Canadian seed round of $1.9 million.

And while Manifest did go looking for funds in Silicon Valley, its raise ended up being fully subscribed by Canadian investors – in just six weeks. “I hope our seed round will give inspiration to other Canadians working on climate challenges,” Zizzo says. “It shows there’s a lot of capital interested in this sector.”

Manifest’s growth could be good for the planet, too. Regulatory bodies are imposing more and more climate-disclosure rules on companies involved in the capital markets. Manifest’s software helps systematize that process, enabling banks, asset investors and public companies to understand their own climate and disclosure issues sooner – so they can communicate better to stakeholders, develop more effective mitigation strategies, and seize new business opportunities faster.

In a release, Toronto investor Daniel Klass – one of the first investors in the Freshii restaurant chain – explained why his private-equity firm, Klass Capital, invested in Zizzo’s plan. “Manifest has a solid management team, unique domain expertise and a long-term vision to create an impact. This aligns with our preference for longer-hold investments so we can support a business through scale as it grows.”

As of early March, Manifest was wrapping up its software trial projects with more than a dozen companies around the world and looking forward to signing its new platform’s first paying clients. Zizzo says the company’s new capital will help the firm hire more staff and redesign its platform to be sleeker and easier to use. “Software is always crude at the beginning,” she notes. “This investment will allow us to build a beautiful product and scale very quickly.”

Zizzo describes Manifest’s brand promise as “best-in-class disclosure.” But once global companies get through this new compliance transition, will Manifest’s role change? Zizzo doesn’t think so. “We’re trying to integrate climate thinking into companies’ decision-making,” she says. “That means rethinking all of our business approaches. This will be an ongoing challenge: I don’t think it’s ever going to be easy.”

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The International Energy Agency projects growing global demand for oil and gas for the next 25 years, Kenney said during a speech at the first policy convention for the United Conservative Party, which he hopes to lead to victory in a 2019 provincial election.

“If companies like HSBC decide to boycott our oil sands, our government will boycott them,” he added later. “It’s called a market decision.”

Except it wouldn’t be.

If Kenney wins next year’s provincial election, his efforts to insulate the industry from change will be a political decision. CEOs and politicians around the world are grappling with the need to transition to less-polluting fuels while also taking advantage of the growth opportunities presented by a low carbon economy. Some, like Kenney, are making less ambitious bets than others, predicting a steady business as usual approach for the industry at least for the next two decades.

But change appears to be coming fast to the sands.

In the months prior to his speech, several major financial institutions like HSBC distanced themselves from the sector. It was the first sign that the rise in investment funds that shun the most carbon-intensive companies was going to have some kind of impact on one of Canada’s biggest industries.

Will the trend gain steam? When would it get too big to ignore? Are big institutional investors walking away because they have a better read on the investment future, or are they trying to appease a passing fancy of ethically minded shareholders?

Alberta’s potential green future lies somewhere in the answers to these questions.

As Kenney vows to protect the oil sands and, in his opinion, Alberta, from criticism as a matter of economic survival, some industry players and experts say it is well past time to start taking a greener future seriously. With so many variables in play, Alberta should be having a straight and honest debate about taking a different path now, they say.

“Business as usual is not an option,” said Annette Verschuren, a board member of oil sands heavyweight Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., or CNRL. While removing emissions from Alberta’s economy won’t happen overnight, she said, “there has to be a logical movement towards displacing or changing out these jobs over time.”

The oil sands are an economic behemoth that has almost always had its environmental impacts in the spotlight.

Occupying three distinct regions across northern Alberta, the sands produced 2.7 million barrels of crude a day in 2017, about 64 per cent of total Canadian production. Around 149,300 people work in the province’s oil and gas production market, which includes conventional oil sources.

The oil sands are extracted either by mining, which represents about 45 per cent of production, or in situ, which involves injecting steam into the ground to push the petroleum out. Mining requires opening large tracts of the Earth’s surface to remove the sands, which the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers says takes place over an area about 900-square kilometres. To make crude oil, the product has to be heavily processed and often diluted to ease transportation. An engineering feat, the work that goes into making oil from the sands demands a lot of energy, which puts the sector in the crosshairs of local and international environmental groups.

While the condemnation has always been plentiful, a new breed of critic began to emerge in recent years as climate change, caused by human beings increasing the amount of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, climbed to the top of global concerns.

Keeping the worst ravages of climate change at bay would mean keeping fossil fuels in the ground, the criticism went. Projects that would otherwise be considered economical could become “stranded assets” – to use a term made popular by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney – because of the gradual increase in emissions rules and growing concern for climate change.

Many major financial institutions have since agreed.

In October 2017, French bank BNP Paribas, which had assets under management (AUM) of €560 billion, said it would no longer do business with companies focused on the tar sands, another term for oil sands. The vow, which included promises to support cleaner energy companies, also swore the company off oil sands pipelines.

Two months later, AXA, a global insurer with €759 billion in AUM, announced plans to divest from its portfolio €700 million in oil sands producers and pipelines. It also said it would stop insuring oil sands projects.

In April, London-based global bank HSBC announced it would not provide financial services for new oil sands mining and in situ projects, a move that earned a rebuke from Kenney and oil sands producer Suncor, which promptly cut ties with the major bank. Suncor and HSBC had announced new work together as recently as November 2017 when HSBC Securities helped manage a Suncor financing arrangement.

As interest in oil sands divestment grows, investment funds that exclude or minimize fossil fuels have also increased in number.

Europe’s largest asset manager, Amundi, currently holds US$5 billion in “decarbonized portfolios,” a growing figure, according to the group. Canada’s second largest pension fund, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, has promised to increase low carbon investments to $24 billion by 2020, just two years from now.

Around 1,000 institutional investors with US$6.24 trillion in assets are currently committed to divesting from fossil fuels, according to Arabella Advisors, a U.S. group that tracks divestment.

A major incentive for financial institutions to pull polluting companies out of their portfolios is because the exposure of certain assets to the impacts of climate change and new cleaner technologies will shrink their value over time.

The impact of the shift to low carbon investing will be felt by companies in natural resources and energy production, and companies will have a range of reactions, BlackRock Canada managing director Marcia Moffat told a recent Toronto conference.

“There will be companies who are recognizing that there is a larger natural incentive to a more carbon resilient economy and they are investing for that future,” said Moffat, whose group has $111.7 billion in AUM in Canada.

“They’re spending a greater proportion of their capital expenditures and their R&D on moving toward that future of a carbon resilient economy than perhaps others.”

Growth in the oil sands sector isn’t projected to be as high as it has been in the past, Scotia Capital oil and gas analyst Jason Bouvier said, creating an incentive for companies to explore new business models.

Since the early 2000s, the industry was often adding 220,000 barrels a day to production each year, Bouvier said. The industry will likely see growth in the 50,000 to 60,000 barrel range for the foreseeable future, he said.

Companies can boast of some major projects coming into operation in 2018, such as Suncor’s Fort Hills facility, but those were planned many years ago. Significant new major projects aren’t expected in the near term, Bouvier said.

The oil sands haven’t been waiting for a shove from mostly European banks to clean up.

Low oil prices have forced energy companies around the world to become much more efficient in recent years, according to analysts and executives interviewed for this story. Some firms, such as Royal Dutch Shell, forecast prices to stay low for a long time.

The oil sands have also had to deal with domestic political pressure, namely the arrival of provincial and national carbon pricing.

In 2012, oil sands companies representing 90 per cent of production set up COSIA, an organization that allows them to share proprietary information and collaborate on pollution-reducing projects.

The companies have put $1.4 billion into 981 projects over the past six years, but measuring the amount of emissions the projects have reduced is outside COSIA’s mandate, chief executive Dan Wicklum said.

“If, when, how those companies implement the technologies is frankly an independent business decision,” Wicklum said. COSIA is more of a hub where the companies meet to decide what ideas they’ll try out, he said.

COSIA does measure the number of times a company decides to use a technology developed through the hub, a figure that currently stands at around 400, Wicklum said.

One key player at COSIA is CNRL, a large oil sands company with a market cap of $45.6 billion as of mid-October. It owns two major oil sands mines and upgraders north of Fort McMurray.

The Calgary company is trying lots of approaches to bring down emissions: capturing and storing carbon dioxide during production, storing carbon dioxide into mine tailings and making mining operations more compact and more mobile.

Some of that work is paying off, the company said. CNRL has seen a 24 per cent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions at its Horizon Oil Sands facility over the past five years and 10 per cent since 2016, said its vice-president of technology and innovation, Joy Romero.

But the figure to pay closer attention to is the emissions intensity of a barrel of oil, which indicates how much in greenhouse gases is released per barrel of oil. As environmental regulations and climate-aware financiers bare down on the oil sands, this is the statistic that shows how the industry stacks up against global competitors.

Currently, the oil sands are a little under five per cent over the emissions intensity average for global crude oil, Romero said, and getting better. “We’re on a very clear path to be below that average as a group for oil sands,” she said.

That’s a matter of debate. A team of two dozen scientists published a comparison of oil production greenhouse gas intensity from across 90 countries in the journal Science in August. The average intensity across the countries was 10.3 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per megajoule. Canada – which placed fourth highest in emissions intensity behind Algeria, Venezuela and Cameroon – had an intensity of 17.6 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per megajoule.

There are different ways to measure emissions intensity. The scientists only looked at emissions from extraction to upgrading and refining because they wanted a clearer comparison of how clean different energy producers are. Companies like CNRL use a wells-to-wheels comparison, which looks at how polluting a crude would be from the moment it’s extracted to the second its fumes come out of a tailpipe.

A September report by energy analysts IHS Markit, which, like the researchers who published in Science, looked at emissions from extraction and production but not combustion, found the oil sands’ intensity could fall 16 to 23 per cent by 2030.

The Pembina Institute, an Albertan energy and environment think-tank, uses an analysis that includes combustion. It argues companies will have a harder time making progress than they claim.

“It’s true that they’re working very hard, but most of the technologies that are coming through are technologies that will bring only marginal gains in (emission reductions),” Pembina senior analyst Benjamin Israel said.

Game-changing new methods will most likely apply to new oil sands operations, while the National Energy Board predicts most future growth will come from expansions of existing facilities, where dramatic shifts are harder to put in place, Israel said.

he industry has other options besides making a cleaner barrel of oil.

Over the past year, a provincially funded office called Alberta Innovates, which has an annual budget of $286 million that it spends on spurring the creation of new industries, looked at new potential ways to make money from bitumen, the petroleum ingredient found in the oil sands. Alberta has 165 million barrels of bitumen in the ground as of 2016, with unofficial estimates climbing as high as two trillion barrels.

The study, known as Bitumen Beyond Combustion, gave a reasonably positive outlook for bitumen-based materials that are expected to see demand growth over the period until 2030, a time when demand for crude oil will grow at a slower rate than it has over the past decade.

Chief among those materials are carbon fibres derived from bitumen. Carbon fibre is a fast-growing product that is both strong and light. Currently, the industry is growing at a compound annual growth rate of more than 10 per cent.

Already in use in products like cars, the bitumen study found that future growth would be underpinned on carbon fibres replacing steel, cement and wood – and that bitumen-made carbon fibres could also find a market by being mixed with those materials.

If carbon fibres took just one per cent of the global steel market by 2030, that would require 3 million barrels of bitumen a day, the study found.

Most carbon fibre today isn’t made from bitumen, but the research showed that it’s possible. The missing piece for prospective businesses lies in transforming bitumen into a material that can readily be used in carbon fibre manufacturing, said Ed Brost, an associate at the Bowman Centre for Sustainable Energy in Sarnia, Ontario, who contributed to the study.

Oil sands are heavier than other types of crude because of the bitumen, also called asphalt or pitch, in the average barrel. That’s a disadvantage in a world that’s regulating energy production for carbon emissions, but a huge advantage in carbon fibre production because it would be the key material in a manufacturing process, Brost said.

Another avenue could be asphalt for roads. The market, currently US$50 billion in value globally, is expected to grow 4.1 per cent until 2030, the Bitumen Beyond Combustion report said.

The oil sands already produce road asphalt for western Canada. The trouble with expanding into new markets is that it needs to be kept very hot for transport, as high as 150 degrees Celsius. But if the process of turning the material into pellets can be made cheaper, oil sands-sourced asphalt would fulfil large demand in China, said Nathan Ashcroft, an engineer with Stantec who worked on the study.

“That’s something that can be achieved much, much quicker (than carbon fibre),” Ashcroft said. “The infrastructure, the rail cars, are out there, the global pull, the pricing mechanisms – people are building roads all over the world everyday.”

Getting oil sands-derived asphalt onto international markets in five years is within reach, he said. Markets for carbon fibres mixed with other materials like concrete, which offer an opening for bitumen as a feedstock, will become widespread within the 10- to 20-year timeframe, said engineer Axel Meisen, who also worked on the study.

The Bitumen Beyond Combustion project also recommended the oil sands take advantage of massive projected growth in vanadium, which is used in batteries, and try and find a way into the market for plastics, which is set to grow to a trillion dollars by 2030.

“Based on the size of the prize, we should be investing five times what we are,” Alberta Innovates board member Gordon Lambert said. “Time is not our friend.”

The project is entering its most crucial stage over the fall. Alberta Innovates will give $2 million over two years to projects that can take some of the possibilities described in the report and bring them closer to commercialization.

The key to surviving in a carbon-constrained economy, according to Lambert, is to think about commodities differently than in the past.  Companies need to be focused on finding many different uses for a commodity at once rather than rely on one process.

“More value creation is the definition of success, not just bigger production volumes,” Lambert said.

Aside from the Bitumen Beyond Combustion program, the Alberta government announced in December 2017 that it would spend $1.4-billion over seven years to support low carbon innovation in the oil sands and elsewhere in the provincial economy.

il companies around the world are also investing in low carbon energy, an area whose profits oil sands companies could find enticing.

Currently, global oil and gas majors own less than two per cent of the world’s wind and solar photovoltaic facilities, consultancy Wood Mackenzie says. But the case to jump in further is increasingly compelling, with solar costs estimated to fall by 60 per cent between 2015 and 2025 and wind falling by 50 per cent over that same period, the group says.

TransAlta Renewables may be Canada’s best-known fossil fuel-to-renewables transition story. Originally a part of storied Alberta utility TransAlta, the renewables branch was spun-out in 2013 and has performed startlingly well since. The company has tripled in value since its IPO and now has a market capitalization of $2.7 billion, almost a third larger than TransAlta, which owns 64 per cent of the rising star.

Enbridge, once known for its major oil and gas pipelines, has ventured in and out of renewables in recent years. But in 2017 the company bought natural gas distributor Spectra Energy for $37 billion, forcing it to focus on reducing debt. The company defended the recent sale of wind farm assets, saying its deepening position in natural gas – cleaner than oil but still a contributor to climate change – demonstrates its commitment to a low carbon transition.

Globally, European firms Neste and Orsted are showing there are profits in going head-long into renewables.

Neste, once strictly an oil and gas refiner from Finland, now earns 25 per cent of its annual US$11.7 billion in revenues from refining biofuels, which are made from plants rather than petroleum. The company has generated a return of 328 per cent over five years in September 2018, outpacing the S&P Global Oil index – an energy industry benchmark with 120 oil and gas firms listed – which had a return of 7.25 per cent.

The company is aiming to go even further, with sales of renewable diesel increasing from 25 per cent of total sales in 2017 to 50 per cent by 2020.

Orsted is a former Danish oil, gas and coal company that has grown increasingly bullish on renewables, offshore wind in particular. Orsted invested 21 per cent of its cash into renewables in 2006 and puts 83 per cent of it into clean power today. Over the same period, it has doubled its operating profit to $4.58 billion and quadrupled its return on capital employed, the company says.

Shell Canada, which owns 10 per cent of the Athabasca oil sands mine, sees a growing business model built on renewables, as do Neste and Orsted, but it isn’t moving to change quite as fast.

“If you want to be serious about meeting a less than two degree (Celsius) warming target, you’ve got to do a lot of these new energies and put electricity as the main source of power for all sorts of things – vehicles, power generation, you name it,” Shell Canada president and country chair Michael Crothers said, citing a target in the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change.

That process will take decades, Crothers said.

Royal Dutch Shell, Shell Canada’s parent company, bought stakes in European wind power and electricity companies over the past 18 months. The global conglomerate is still figuring how best to structure itself as it takes positions in both new and traditional energy sources, Crothers said.

“We’re not quite sure yet,” he said. “We’re still wrestling with that.”

Large oil sands companies like Shell and CNRL say they’re putting enough money into the research they’ll need to profit in a low carbon economy – for now.

The price of oil and the oil sands’ projected growth will likely influence that amount. But Bouvier, the Scotia Capital analyst, said investors have preferred the oil sands send money back to them rather than boost R&D.

But, “I would still hear them out if they had an idea that was well-costed,” Bouvier said.

The next few years looks like business as usual, he said.

Which means Alberta – and Canada – don’t have an easy replacement for the oil sands’ large contribution in jobs and GDP, said Verschuren, the CNRL board member.

On flights between Toronto and her native Cape Breton, she often speaks to Nova Scotians who work in the oil sands. Closing the oil sands – the type of thing Kenney the would-be premier rails against – would bring disaster to their livelihoods, she said.

Verschuren also has roots in the Netherlands, where she also visits, and has found conservation and efficiency are much more deeply held values there than in North America. That makes bridging the gap between economic growth and environmental sustainability much easier.

She isn’t sure how those values could take root in Canada, but said climate change leaves Canadians little choice: “We all need a wake-up call to change the way we’re using energy and change the way we respect energy.”

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