Interest in Canada is growing by major European investors as they shift assets out of the United States to flee the chaos of the Trump administration. European investors also want data on corporate climate emissions, risks and policies to satisfy stringent sustainability reporting rules there, and demand for environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment funds.

Unfortunately, Canada is poorly positioned to meet Europe’s requirements for climate information. Policy work to align Canadian corporate disclosure rules with global climate reporting guidelines was halted in April 2025. Regulators said the time wasn’t right to impose new disclosure regulations given the uncertainty of rapidly changing economic and geopolitical conditions.

In response, researchers at the Institute for Sustainable Finance (ISF) at Queen’s University in Kingston have mounted a major initiative to study this disclosure gap. The project points to a firm conclusion: the absence of mandatory climate disclosure is hurting the country’s financial independence.

In a study published in early June, From U.S. Dependence to Global Capital: The Role of Climate Disclosure, ISF researchers examined changes in foreign investment in 206 Canadian companies after the United States announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs in early 2025. They also compared how much investment changed between firms without formal climate disclosures and companies reporting under the globally recognized Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).

Results surprising

TCFD-reporting firms experienced a 24.6% higher increase in foreign holdings over non-reporting companies after the Liberation Day tariffs.

“I was really surprised how strong the results were comparing the Canadian companies that disclose climate risk and the companies that don’t,” says Yrjo Koskinen, a finance professor at the University of Calgary and research director at ISF.

The 24.6% differential “is a strong, strong result,” he says in an interview. European investors accounted for almost all of the difference between TCFD-reporting firms and non-TCFD companies. “It shows that climate disclosures are very important for European institutional investors.” (The differential is based on a model of capital measures controlling for factors such as firm size and sector and market-wide trends. It helps to better isolate the TCFD reporting effect.)

The ISF discussed the results of this study along with other research at a roundtable event on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 15 attended by representatives of business, the investment industry and academics. The roundtable was moderated by Daniel Tisch, chief executive officer of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce.

Evidence presented at the roundtable showed that the benefits of mandatory climate disclosure outweigh corporate costs, according to a briefing note on the discussion. Stronger disclosure is associated with better liquidity of company shares, a lower risk of share price crashes, more efficient risk pricing and stronger access to foreign capital.

Given that 40 jurisdictions are currently using or moving toward the global disclosure guidelines of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), Canada “is increasingly out of step with major markets,” the briefing note states.

Several roundtable participants also argued that publicly available ISSB disclosures will become more important as artificial intelligence models become more prevalent in ESG and financial analysis.

An illustration of how AI is being used in ESG analysis was revealed earlier this year when Norges Bank disclosed that it uses Anthropic’s Claude AI model to continually screen for ethical and reputation risks of companies in Norway’s $2-trillion pension fund.

“Standardized disclosure will become even more strategically important as AI increasingly shapes investment analysis,” the ISF briefing note states. “In that environment, weak, inconsistent or fragmented Canadian analysis could place Canadian issuers at a growing disadvantage in AI-assisted capital markets.”

Regulators continue to be opposed

Despite the growing body of evidence for mandatory reporting, the Canadian Securities Administrators – the network of provincial securities commissions – is adamant that its pause will continue. “The pause remains in effect until otherwise signaled by the CSA,” a spokesperson writes in an email to Corporate Knights.

One of the barriers to mandatory climate reporting in Canada is the power of the oil and gas industry, which has opposed mandatory reporting on climate scenario analysis and end-use emissions. Corporate reporting issues are also complicated by the recent oil-pipeline and carbon-capture agreement between Alberta and the federal government. By significantly raising oil-sands production without assurance of long-term demand or guaranteed carbon dioxide reduction, the agreement raises the industry’s climate risks.

The Alberta Securities Commission has expressed skepticism about mandatory climate reporting, saying disclosure costs are high for small companies, disclosure increases liability concerns, and mandatory reporting could hurt the industry’s competitiveness with the United States. Since the Canadian Securities Administrators is a network of provincial securities commissions, large provinces like Alberta can veto changes.

In a commentary published in the Toronto Star, Koskinen and Tisch responded to the Alberta Securities Commission’s concerns. They argue that mandatory climate reporting should be phased in, starting with large companies that are responsible for the majority of Canada’s carbon dioxide emissions. They also argue that the focus should be on “straightforward and impactful” information, such as direct Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions.

Interest grows as investment summit approaches

The ISF research initiative comes at an important moment in policymaking as the government prepares for an international institutional investment summit in Toronto in September.

European institutional investors are expected to form a large contingent of the asset managers, investment funds and pension plans invited by Prime Minister Mark Carney. Climate change is expected to be top of mind among the European representatives after Europe’s record-breaking hot temperatures this spring and summer. They’ll be looking for companies that have low emissions and negligible climate risk, especially if they are involved in climate transition sectors, such as clean power, environmental industries, green steel and critical minerals.

The federal government is pushing for enhanced climate disclosure even though the provinces are directly responsible for securities regulation. On June 5, Ryan Turnbull, member of Parliament for Whitby and parliamentary secretary to the minister of finance, announced an additional $10 million in funding for the International Sustainability Standards Board office in Montreal, in addition to $8 million already allocated in 2022. Turnbull, who attended the ISF roundtable on April 15, has been a strong advocate inside the government for sustainable investment policies.

Turnbull was not available for comment for this article, but a Finance Department spokesperson says the federal government “is working closely with provinces and territories to support the uptake of internationally aligned climate disclosure standards across the economy. Roundtables that bring together investors, issuers of climate disclosures, academics and other experts provide valuable feedback to inform this work and help to ensure a broad range of perspectives is considered. The government will provide an update on its engagement with Canadian regulators in the coming months.”

Despite the foot-dragging by the provincial securities commissions, Koskinen believes policy is moving forward in Canada. “For the first time in several years I am optimistic that we can actually get something done,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Time to start implementing mandatory climate disclosures in a gradual and pragmatic way.”

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

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High oil prices are seen as a net positive for Canada. For energy sellers, that’s true. For everyone else, it means crisis: the largest oil shock in history is headed our way, and nothing can stop it. If the strait stays closed long enough, Johnston warned, the economic impact “will be like the pandemic without COVID.” This time, Canada must get the crisis response right.

My non-partisan report, Outrunning the Storm, explored risk scenarios at $90, $150 and $200 a barrel. At every price, critical national systems are at risk. It’s more than energy: petrochemical inputs underpin the entire food system, including fertilizer; the entire healthcare system, including medical supplies and pharmaceuticals; the lifeline to remote First Nations communities. In Ontario, car sales, manufacturing and a risky finance sector are exposed –industrial capacity Canada cannot lose.

The report includes 90 urgent recommendations which will deliver a $10 to $15 return on every dollar – because that is what it will cost if we wait. Some are near-costless, like lowering speed limits and extending Ontario’s Bruce Nuclear licence to protect Ontario’s energy supply. Others, like investing in farm upgrades and establishing stockpiles of fuel, fertilizer and pharmaceuticals will cost between $6 to $7 billion at today’s price of oil, my analysis finds. Wait until $150/bbl and the same measures will cost $17–39 billion.

While Canada’s governments should be racing to shield residents against next winter’s food, fuel and supply shocks, the only way to weather this storm and emerge stronger is to permanently reduce our reliance on fossil fuels through sustained, transformative investment.

For many northern First Nations, that means ending reliance on diesel-powered generators and replacing it with solar energy and an expanded electric grid. A green ammonia plant powered by hydroelectricity would end prairie farmers’ dependency on imported fertilizer. Ramping up Canadian pharmaceutical production to increase domestic supply is a matter of economic security.

A national passenger-rail renewal program could serve several needs at once. High oil prices can trigger a cascade of shocks through sales and manufacturing for aviation and vehicles. My analysis has determined that retooling auto and aviation plants to build passenger rail cars, paired with payments to owners who recycle vehicles, could create or preserve up to 358,000 jobs. Night trains and expanded auto ferries could replace short-haul flights on routes like Vancouver–Calgary and Calgary–Edmonton. Over its 80-to-100-year operational life, a national rail network would avoid an estimated 475 million to one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Another major opportunity is converting Canada’s waste methane to hydrogen and carbon materials – methane that is being freely vented from coal mines, landfills and Alberta’s 80,000 stranded wells. Methane to hydrogen and carbon could create 100,000 jobs, many requiring the current skills of oilfield workers; it would be a new source of sought-after synthetic critical minerals, all while reducing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 33% and generating billions in new revenue.

Acting now pays twice: higher oil prices improves the payback on alternatives, and these investments will never be cheaper.

Canada and the world are already in the most serious crisis since the 1930s. The United States is undermining our economy with tariffs, with the president openly threatening to make us the 51st state, and Alberta separatists are helping. Extraordinary times demand wartime-level economic responses. The Depression-era and wartime policies of C.D. Howe, William Lyon Mackenzie King and the Bank of Canada offer a proven path. These investments will toughen our economy and transform our infrastructure; the private sector has a role, but Ottawa must lead.

We do not have years or months. We have days. The sooner we act, the better the outcome – and fortune favours the bold.

Dougald Lamont has been a public policy researcher for 30-plus years. He was leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party and MLA for St. Boniface for five years and has lectured in government–business relations in Canada.

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“What she showed us is that nature doesn’t recognize our borders, and our protection systems have to catch up to that reality,” says Laurel Angell, director of government relations and policy at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, a transboundary U.S.–Canada–Indigenous wildlife protection non-profit.

Canada shares a nearly 9,000-kilometre-long border with the United States, and more than 500 migratory species cross that border each year, ranging in size from the monarch butterfly to the grey whale – and that’s not including the animals that roam across the border constantly, such as whitetailed deer, grizzly bears and grey wolves like Pluie.

Nature doesn’t recognize our borders, and our protection systems have to catch up to that reality.

– Laurel Angell, Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative

The two countries have collaborated on cross-border wildlife conservation for decades, sharing research and partnering on initiatives. Key to this has been the relationship between federal agencies, local governments, non-profits, scientists, private landowners and Indigenous groups. But as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration slashes funding for conservation research and federal departments, and rolls back critical endangered-species laws, wildlife that rely on the stability of these relationships now face unbalanced protection.

“We are genuinely concerned about what’s happening to federal land and wildlife management agencies,” Angell says. “Our federal partners are essential to this work, and when you cut those agencies deeply, you lose the people, the research capacity, the field scientists and the relationships that make cross-boundary conservation actually function.”

In 2025, Trump began slashing jobs at U.S. public land agencies, firing rangers and land managers who protect public parks. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has had an 18% reduction in workforce – about 1,800 jobs, including around 500 biologists. In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, FWS director Brian Nesvik said that “almost 60 percent of the nation’s wildlife refuges lack the resources and staff needed to fulfill their missions.”

Sixteen out of 22 land research cooperatives – government research centres that focus on science-based conservation – have been placed on indefinite hiatus. During his first administration, Trump proposed several provisions that would weaken the critical Endangered Species Act (ESA) to make energy and resource development easier. And the 2027 proposed budget would cut funding by hundreds of millions of dollars to a host of environmental programs and departments.

Staff cuts to the Fish and Wildlife Service predate the current administration, says Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. But the accelerated rate is worrying, he says, particularly the loss of scientists, who are integral to collecting the data sets that then inform conservation work. As climate change and biodiversity loss affect how transboundary wildlife – including endangered species such as caribou and monarch butterflies – shift their movements, up-to-date data and research is vital.

These aren’t solely U.S. problems. Many species protected by the Endangered Species Act migrate across the border, like the whooping crane, which travels from Texas to breeding grounds in the Northwest Territories and Alberta. These migration routes are essential to their survival.

On-the-ground conservation work across the border has been disrupted, too. “There are cross-border conservation projects right now where the U.S. side of critical habitat and connectivity mapping work is being cut mid-stream, leaving partners working from an incomplete picture of the landscape and leaving many people uncertain about what to even do,” Angell says.

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Connectivity mapping helps researchers maintain and improve wildlife corridors across borders, which are protected spaces that allow animals safe passage through busy roads and private lands. Making sure animal populations aren’t isolated is essential to their survival. For more than 30 years, Y2Y has worked to bridge the gap between two of the largest Rocky Mountain grizzly populations in Montana and Canada, which were split by 240 kilometres. Now, through land conservation and wildlife corridors, that gap is just shy of 50 kilometres. Once connected, the transboundary populations can migrate and mate, strengthening their numbers.

“That’s what we’re trying to protect,” Angell says. “And that last stretch to achieve real, full connectivity – which would be a landmark conservation success story – requires sustained investment and rigorous science, not less of both.”

Both Angell and O’Mara have cause for optimism, however. So far, the U.S. Congress has pushed back on most of the proposed budget cuts, “in a bipartisan, nonpartisan way,” O’Mara says. “I think at the end of the day, there’s so much support – across regions, across political ideology, across the national boundary – for this work,” he says. “That’s what gives me hope.”

Ayesha Habib is a Toronto-based journalist who has written for The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The Narwhal and Maisonneuve.

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

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

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

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

The case for a transatlantic framework

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Throughout it all, speculation abounds that an EV tipping point approaches.

New battery-electric vehicle (BEV) registrations in Europe took off in the first quarter of 2026, rising by nearly 30% from a year ago, as the U.S.-Israel war in Iran spiked gas pump prices to levels not seen in years, Reuters reports. BEV registrations (a proxy for sales) jumped more than 50% in March alone.

Pedal to the metal on EV sales

Estimates are that more than 21% of all new cars registered in March in the European Union and EFTA (the European Free Trade Association, whose member countries are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland) were ⁠electric.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s BEV market grew 12.8% in the first three months of 2026, with BEVs accounting for 22.5% of new car sales.

While high gas prices have been a major driver of BEV sales, new  and pre-existing – policy supports also played a role. “Generous government incentives” spurred the 50% year-on-year uptake of EVs in France, The Guardian reports.

That Nordic countries continue to outstrip their southern neighbours in BEV uptake – 98% of all new cars sold in Norway in March were BEVs, “followed by Denmark at 76% and Finland at almost 50%” – owes in part to “higher wages, generous subsidies, and extensive [public] charging infrastructure.”

Gas pump prices appear to be behind Italy’s full-throttle acceleration into the EV market, with that country experiencing a 65% year-on-year increase in EV sales in March.

Gas price concerns are also fuelling EV demand across Asia, with Japan – or rather, Toyota – offering a case in point. Toyota sold almost 3,500 EVs in March, “an increase of 4,117%” over the same month last year, Electrek writes.

EV tipping point ahead

“Rapid innovation, decline in cost and a rise in popularity” are all driving EV sales toward a tipping point “where uptake becomes self-propelling” and EVs “irreversibly replace internal combustion engine vehicles,” write the authors of a study published in early December in Nature Communications.

A combined effort by researchers from the University of Exeter, the University of Macao and the World Bank, the study found that even as the sale of gas-fuelled vehicles began to decline in 2019 (the study period ran 2016 to 2023), EV plus hybrid sales increased exponentially, with the global fleet doubling every 1.5 years. Sales in the European Union doubled every 1.3 years, while China saw EV plus hybrid sales double every year. “Our data and analysis provide evidence that several European markets and China have begun tipping towards EV dominance, although this is not convincingly the case for the U.S.,” the research team writes.

But a degree of uncertainty about the timing of the shift remains, even for strong EV markets. “Once investment is sunk into converting production lines, a return to [internal combustion vehicles] becomes comparatively expensive, irrespective of the oil price,” they write. The “imposition of new tariffs” remains the wildcard, they warn.

All eyes on China

Your average EV battery contains four basic components: the cathode (some combination of metals, often including lithium), the anode (typically graphite), the separator that keeps cathode and anode from touching explosively, and an electrolyte solution. As Bloomberg explains, China corners the market on all four.

It is also leading the charge on battery innovation. China’s latest iteration of its lithium ion phosphate battery now rivals its far more expensive kin, the nickel manganese cobalt battery, in energy density. According to its makers, the lithium ion phosphate battery can recharge “in about the same amount of time as it takes to refuel a gas car.”

China’s battery innovations extend far beyond improving the lithium ion phosphate one, however. Chinese battery-manufacturing giant CATL has just made public “six stunning new battery technology innovations, including an electric vehicle battery with driving range of up to 1,500 kilometres and the third generation of its Shenxing Superfast Charging Battery that it says can charge from 10% to 90% in six minutes and 27 seconds,” Zecar reports.

And China’s pre-eminence doesn’t end with batteries: Momenta (autonomous driving), Huawei (super-rapid-charging EV systems, among other things) and Alibaba (“intelligent cockpits”) are all headquartered there.

Meet the 2026/2027 BMW iX3

Western automakers have lost huge amounts of ground in China as new domestic highfliers like BYD seize market share. Western brands like BMW and Volkswagen held just 32% of the market this year, down from 64% in 2020, the Financial Times reports.

BMW is among those seeking to regain traction in the huge Chinese market, and it is doing so through direct collaboration with its hosts. Enter its BMW iX3, an electric sport-utility vehicle equipped with a CATL battery and the latest technology from Momenta, Huawei and Alibaba.

While Germany’s second-largest auto manufacturer intends to sell the iX3 abroad, it is also laser-focused on the domestic Chinese market. “Developed ‘in China, for China, and with China,’” the iX3 “has been deeply localized for China,” BMW states in a January release.

“Tailored to local traffic conditions and usage scenarios, the system is designed to deliver highly capable driver-assistance functions optimized for complex urban environments, highways, and long-distance travel in China, further enhancing safety, comfort, and driving confidence,” the car manufacturer adds.

Volkswagen – Germany’s largest car manufacturer – is also looking to collaborate with China. VW “plans to launch 50 plug-in hybrid and EV models in China by the end of the decade to rejig its petrol-heavy lineup with vehicles designed and engineered locally as part of its ‘in China for China’ strategy,” the Financial Times reports.

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

Gaye Taylor is a staff writer for The Energy Mix. She is passionate about showcasing what individuals and communities are doing to advance climate solutions, in Canada and around the world. 

The post EV sales in Europe and Asia soared following the start of the war in Iran appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As an industrial powerhouse, it has more recently turned into an example of Chinese green transformation, boasting the world’s first smart and zero-carbon port that is 100% electricity driven and green-energy backed. Onsite industrial-scale wind turbines and solar panels ensure renewable-energy self-sufficiency in the 10th-busiest port in the world, handling more than 20 million shipping containers annually.

It’s perhaps no wonder, then, that China chose to host last year’s summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Tianjin, on the banks of the Bohai Sea, in yet one more show of growing influence from Beijing. With twice the number of world leaders in attendance since the summit launch in 2001, from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Indian head of state Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping called for an end to the “Cold War mentality” that was triggering “turbulence and transformation” and called for “equal and orderly multipolarization” of the world that could pave the way to a “more just and equitable global governance system.”

The group pledged increased cooperation in energy, infrastructure, green industry, AI and innovation. These are the economic pillars of the present and the future that is being built. And they are the architecture for a new kind of cold war, one over our ecological future, propelled by a growing geopolitical rivalry between the giants of the 21st century.

Great power rivalry

In an article last year in Foreign Policy magazine, the influential historian and futurist Nils Gilman argued that the advent of the “ecological cold war” is upon us, driven by a struggle “over the metabolic basis of modern industrial society.”

“Call it a Green Entente vs an Axis of Petrostates,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

In the wider transition to a low-carbon economy, China needs no introduction. Its influence in the green transition – through supply chain routes and cheap hardware – is plain to see. It has installed more solar and wind than the rest of the world combined, the United Nations has said. Its capacity to drive down the cost of clean technologies has been a boon for reining in the growth of carbon emissions, giving vast swaths of the planet the tools to shift to renewables.

It has also played at least some role in the U.S. decision to retreat from climate policies, with a Trump administration that has made a U-turn to a fossil fuel agenda and adopted protectionist measures in an “America first” attempt to decouple from Chinese economic might. At the same time, the United States has signalled a sharp interest in ridding itself of dependency on China for critical minerals, which are not just key to green tech but intrinsic to military hardware. This year, Trump launched “Project Vault,” which includes loans for domestic mining and a bid to stockpile reserves.

Europe has responded to growing national backlash to climate policies by cooling them down and doubling down on its own protectionist measures. In the midst of all this, emerging economies that could help accelerate the energy transition are running up against roadblocks.

A piece of the green pie

While some observers take issue with Cold War framing, others are mapping out the ripple effects of these geopolitical tensions when it comes to the race to slow down planetary warming. “We are in the midst of a green cold war,” agrees economist Jorge Arbache, a professor at the University of Brasília. “The implications are that China, which is already leading, will probably lead even more because China will keep investing in green production.”

For Arbache, the heart of the struggle has to do with the amount of money that is at stake. Suffice to say, it’s a lot. One 2025 estimate from the Boston Consulting Group pegs the opportunities embedded in four key sectors – critical minerals, green tech manufacturing, green industrial material and green services – as US$11 trillion by 2040. “We are talking about an extremely big business agenda, and of course there is a competition in terms of who will eat what size of the cake,” Arbache says.

Although many developed countries are well positioned to participate in that agenda, it is also true that they do not necessarily have the key elements, such as critical minerals, available clean energy, carbon markets, abundant water and biodiversity. “Geography is back,” Arbache says. That means that developing economies that do have those assets could find themselves better positioned than before. “It gives those economies a bargaining power that they did not have very recently,” he says.

Chaos vs. foresight

But the name of the game, lately at least, has been chaos, driven by its number-one agent, U.S. President Donald Trump. “If I could sum it up, it’s better to govern chaos, because order is too costly,” observes Sabino Vaca Narvaja, a political scientist and former Argentine ambassador to China. “A fragmented society is easier to manipulate.”

China, of course, is steeped in contradiction, pouring money into coal projects, and facing accusations of human rights violations. It also has a different logic to its movements, Vaca Narvaja notes, one that bets on the long term. And so far, it has paid off.

The Chinese incursion into the green market was not about business at the outset, Arbache notes; it was about domestic security. Beijing registered, decades ago, the vulnerability it could face when it came to power supply. A desire to become energy self-sufficient shifted it into green-tech development, which has positioned it as a leader in renewables development. It now has a stranglehold on a huge chunk of the critical-minerals market, controlling 50% of global production and 87% of processing and refining.

China’s formula also relies on the rest of the world, Vaca Narvaja notes. It needs the world to buy its products. And it is. “China’s cleantech products are going basically everywhere in the world,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, non-resident senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s China Climate Hub, in a conversation held last year on China’s climate path amid trade tensions.

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For all major cleantech products except batteries, “the Global South, broadly understood, has overtaken the old developed world as the larger destination,” Myllyvirta said. There are countries with impressive uptake in solar, such as Pakistan, South Africa and Middle Eastern countries, but it’s the broad-based nature of the boom that’s sending the biggest signal. “From one side, there is the cost competitiveness of Chinese supply, and from the other side, there is a massive diversity of drivers,” he said.

Electrification is everywhere. Cities are turning to electric buses. Drivers are turning to electric vehicles. Governments and individuals alike are turning to solar power in the Middle East and Africa. Clean-energy sectors continued to drive growth in China in 2025, doubling in value from 2022 to US$2.1 trillion – which is equal to the economies of Brazil or Canada, according to an analysis from the think tank Carbon Brief.

At the same time, a glut in solar panel production is leading to uncertainty. Beijing set its 2026 growth target between 4.5% and 5%, the lowest level in 35 years, noting a “grave and complex” landscape.

“I don’t think we will be talking about renewable energy the way we are if it wasn’t for what China has been able to accomplish in the last decade,” says Jai Asundi, executive director of the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, in Bangalore, India. “Taking a technology that has been developed somewhere else, and driving the price down. A classic capitalistic efficiency market. That is, if you are more efficient in the way you use a resource, then the capital flows to you.”

Emerging economies demand protagonism

The flip side of that efficient flow of capital, of course, is that it can make it difficult for other economies to compete. Take a place like India, where attempts to jump-start domestic green-energy device production have stalled. “Energy prices are very high in India. So to produce something is already very costly. And some of these technologies are very energy intensive,” Asundi says.

India, which represents 17% of the world’s population, is a prescient case study for wide swaths of the world that are trying to shrink a yawning inequality gap by raising gross domestic product, without contributing to global warming. The developed world built its industrialized wealth at the expense of the environment. That is no longer an option.

“What we are struggling with is this notion of how we work as an ecosystem,” Asundi says. “How do we work as a global society as opposed to a country-driven society? Because after all, climate change is not a country phenomenon; it is a global phenomenon.”

Chen Yu, senior policy officer at the non-profit Global Witness, agrees. “U.S.–China competition may continue, and the global energy landscape seems to be becoming more regionalized and multipolar, but this does not necessarily mean inevitable confrontation,” she says. “The key question is whether competition preserves space for cooperation and allows for fairer rules and resource distribution, rather than creating exclusive blocs.”

Whatever the mix, what matters, she stresses, is that the process of reducing emissions is not delayed.

The rise of ‘powershoring’

Unfortunately, the current moves and countermoves of nations trying to bolster national economies, and respond to electorate demands, is proving detrimental. Arbache says there are alliances available now using today’s technology that could speed up decarbonization, but they are being squandered. The Brazilian economist, who is also the former vice president of the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, coined the term “powershoring” to describe the strategic relocation of energy-intensive industries to countries that have clean, abundant and secure energy. To produce one tonne of aluminum using coal-fired electricity results in 20 to 22 tonnes of carbon dioxide, Arbache says. But if you produce that same aluminum in Iceland, which runs on nearly 100% renewable power, the carbon output drops to 2 to 3.5 tonnes.

Countries like Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay also offer abundant green grids for manufacturing. But they are not attracting as many powershoring projects as anticipated from places like Europe, Arbache says. “Although they need new allies and friends to solve their problems, they are still very skeptical because of this very notion of protectionism,” he says. “In the end, they are harming their own economies and they are also harming our economies.”

Canada’s balancing act

Canada, with three-quarters of its exports going to the United States, is also navigating tricky terrain. The shifting sands of Trump tariffs has led the government to overhaul how it approaches trade and put it in hot pursuit of new partners – or increasing the strength of existing ones.

Prime Minister Mark Carney said as much in his headline-grabbing speech at Davos this year, where he warned middle powers that if “we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” The phrase carried added weight because it came on the heels of an announcement to expand trade with China, and, crucially, allow at first up to 24,500 Chinese EVs annually into the Canadian market. Carney has since signed agreements with India to export uranium for its fleet of nuclear reactors, critical minerals, and oil and gas. The government also announced a split from the United States over auto policy, revitalizing incentives for EV production and purchase, and the intention of customizing new tailpipe emissions rules, rather than defaulting to the U.S. ones.

The divergence from U.S. policy is significant, says Rick Smith, president of the Canadian Climate Institute. “All we get from the Trump administration is this drumbeat that fossil fuels are the future. It’s very easy to let that overwhelm us as Canadians – to assume that that’s correct, and it’s not,” he says. “The actual economic opportunity is in decarbonization.”

While there are inherent challenges to decarbonization for an oil- and gas-producing country that other nations do not have, Smith says Canada is in a privileged position to move in on the booming battery market. “We’ve got all the elements of a very significant battery supply chain in Canada. And very few countries can say that,” he says. “In a grand contest between China and the United States, should we just be happy that China’s winning on the decarbonization front? No. We should also be getting our elbows up and trying to compete.”

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

The post The race for low-carbon energy is turning into a green cold war  appeared first on Corporate Knights.

I mean, that’s the received wisdom of the moment. The media are full of commentators (many of whom, like this guy, barely believe that climate change is real) crowing about the so-called collapse of net-zero.

Over the past year it has sometimes felt as though the issue has been banished from polite company, relegated to the nosebleeds in the national political arena.

But here’s the thing: climate change hasn’t disappeared from the consciousness of Canadians. It’s simply been displaced, at the moment, by other issues. As pollster David Coletto has found, “At the top of Canadians’ worry list sit the rising cost of living (66%), the economy (39%) and healthcare (35%). The public mood is focused intensely on the pressures of the everyday.”

There’s lots of evidence that Canadians still feel strongly about climate change, despite this recent reshuffling of their priorities. Nearly two-thirds of Canadians think of it as a “major crisis,” and clear supermajorities think governments and companies should be doing more to address it.

So, what should we make of all this?

2026 marks 30 years that I’ve been a working advocate for environmental progress. Through multiple great organizations, countless campaigns and every kind of sustainability issue you can imagine, here’s one of my most important lessons learned – a good thing to remember this Earth Day:

Though it has its ups and downs, concern about climate change will always come roaring back as a top public concern.

There are at least two reasons for this that are often lost on commentators who are too focused on the temporary swings in issue polling.

The first is that, as I’ve said many times in this space, climate change progress is now driven by technological and economic trends that are unstoppable. These trends have been accelerating for years. But they have now been turbocharged by the Iran war, which is constraining global oil and gas supply and cranking up the price of gasoline and natural gas. As a result, consumers are rushing to buy electric options that are increasingly affordable and not subject to these wild price swings: from electric vehicles to solar panels to induction stoves, in places as diverse as Lagos, San Francisco and New Delhi.

The second reason is that – perhaps unique among public policy issues – climate change has a built-in ratcheting effect. Even if we stopped all production of carbon dioxide tomorrow, more severe wildfires and flooding and drought are going to keep getting worse around the world. The negative impacts of climate change are increasingly visible and dramatic and measurable.

It’s quite often the case that policy files get bumped back up the priority list only because of things going wrong. One recent example that people may remember is the safety of long-term care homes. Before the pandemic, provincial governments scarcely gave it a thought, and regulatory oversight and public scrutiny were almost non-existent. When the death toll among the elderly in long-term care homes tragically took off during the pandemic, public outrage forced those governments to move quickly to address the issue.

The grim reality is that climate change is going to serve up endless, worsening, disasters over the next few decades to fire up the public imagination, and force a political response.

The issue may wax and wane in prominence, but it will never disappear for long.

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What does climate change progress look like?

Let’s get even more specific as to timing: because so much of the climate change malaise currently afflicting the world is related to the bone-headed moves of the Trump administration (my most recent favourite being the payment of US$1 billion to a French energy company to refrain from building offshore wind farms on leases it had purchased), I’m going to predict that climate change starts re-entering the public discourse on November 4, the day after the Democrats pick up considerable seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, which all public polling says they are on track to do.

Democrats have internalized an urgency to solve climate change. Yes, this may vary from candidate to candidate and from place to place, but whether it’s centrist Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s commitment to accelerating clean-energy deployment or progressive New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s tying together of heat pumps and affordability, a basic commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a permanent part of the Democratic Party’s offering.

Why is this the case? Because it’s a big deal for a significant majority of their voting base. More than 85% of registered Democrats think that developing clean energy should be a high or very high priority for government. But beyond the brass tacks of electoral incentives, there is the hard-headed dollars-and-cents argument that the United States cannot let China dominate this new industrial revolution powered by clean electricity and electrical machines like EVs and heat pumps.

History will record Donald Trump’s quixotic crusade against windmills and the rest of the clean-energy transition as an irrational, short-lived and economically disastrous footnote.

So this Earth Day, take heart: the pendulum of climate change concern is about to swing again. We’re almost through this difficult period. This time next year it’s going to be a whole new ball game. And we’re going to be on the offence again.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute, the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health, and the executive producer of Plastic People, a 2024 documentary chronicling the damage done by microplastics in the human body.

The post Think concern for climate change is passé? Think again. appeared first on Corporate Knights.

This story was originally published by Canary Media. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style.

It’s typically depicted as green. It’s loved by some and feared by others. It had a heyday in the 1960s before drawing a political backlash that led to statewide prohibitions. Now, as it grows more popular with Americans than any time in recent memory, state after state is changing the law to once again legalize it.

The United States is racing to restore the might of its once-great nuclear sector and build new reactors to meet surging electricity demand and compete with China and Russia. It’s been a rapid change: a decade ago, at least 16 states restricted construction of new nuclear power plants, a legacy of the lasting reputational damage from Three Mile Island, the United States’ only major civilian nuclear accident.

Five states – Wisconsin, Kentucky, Montana, West Virginia and, most recently, Illinois – have fully lifted their moratoria since 2016. Others are loosening the reins, with Connecticut easing restrictions on small modular reactors and Rhode Island allowing utilities to buy electricity from neighbouring states’ nuclear plants.

Five more – California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and Vermont – are now weighing legislation to overturn their bans. Oregon, meanwhile, is considering a bill that would require a feasibility study to look into nuclear power. (In Hawaii, the results of such a study concluded in December that the state should maintain its moratorium on atomic energy.)

California lawmakers introduced a bill last month to repeal the state’s 50-year ban on new nuclear power. Legislators in New Jersey, where the recently elected Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill campaigned on building a new reactor, advanced a bill earlier this month that would de facto overturn the state’s moratorium. Last week, a bipartisan band of lawmakers in Minnesota’s statehouse vowed to legalize reactor construction again in the state ​“because we have to.”

The legislative push offers the most significant evidence so far that blue states that once served as bastions of anti-nuclearism are embracing atomic energy. The shift comes amid a deregulatory campaign by the Trump administration that’s meant to clear bottlenecks in the nuclear supply chain and spur a new wave of reactor projects, both big and small. Nuclear power started attracting attention again in recent years as the trade-offs of relying on wind and solar alone grew clearer and demand for electricity soared in the near term from data centres and in the long term from forecasts on electrification of vehicles, heating and industry.

A global race is now underway that the United States and its allies are largely losing. On both sides of the Atlantic, the nuclear industry mostly stalled over the past few decades as flat electricity demand and cheap natural gas from the United States and Russia made atomic power plants seem like a 20th-century relic. But the geopolitical risk of relying on a fossil fuel that requires constant replenishing became undeniable as Russia started throttling shipments of gas to Ukraine’s allies after the war kicked off in 2022.

Now U.S., European and Japanese companies are scrambling to secure funding and offtake agreements for reactor designs that, in many cases, haven’t yet been built. Soaring oil and gas prices, which the International Energy Agency warned this week will take a long time to stabilize even after the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran ends, are expected to only further drive demand for nuclear power. France’s historic buildout of nuclear reactors, after all, started in response to the 1970s oil embargo.

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Meanwhile, Russia’s state-owned Rosatom dominates the nuclear export industry, actively building the first atomic power plants in newcomer countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Bangladesh. On Monday, the Kremlin announced its latest deal to build Vietnam’s debut nuclear plant. And China is building nearly as many reactors at home as the rest of the world combined, at a relatively rapid clip.

States started banning new nuclear power plants even before the partial meltdown in 1979 at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The Atomic Energy Commission, the federal regulator in charge of both overseeing commercial reactors and promoting the industry, was increasingly seen as too cozy with the companies under its authority. An anti-war movement with limited options to slow the military’s atomic weapons race instead trained its attention on the civilian power industry, and environmentalists took issue with the relatively small but extremely long-lived volumes of radioactive waste that nuclear plants produce.

California enacted one of the nation’s first major statewide bans on building new nuclear plants in 1976, three years before Three Mile Island. Until then, states and municipalities had only minimal restrictions on nuclear power plants, which fell primarily under federal jurisdiction. But a 1974 law in California reorganized the Golden State’s bureaucracy, centralizing energy regulation for the first time in Sacramento and granting the newly established California Energy Commission powers to restrict permits for atomic energy facilities until a plan to permanently deal with nuclear waste came to fruition. Through its top cultural export, the state broadcast its skepticism of atomic energy: released just 12 days before the Three Mile Island accident, a Hollywood thriller starring Jane Fonda, ​The China Syndrome, depicts a dangerous cover-up of a problem at a nuclear power plant.

In the years that followed, more states, including Maine and Oregon, adopted California-inspired moratoria predicated on a permanent solution for nuclear waste coming into commercial use, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Others – including Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont – effectively banned nuclear construction by making any new reactors subject to politically unattainable approval by the state legislature. A handful of states also rewrote rules to require a statewide referendum on building a new nuclear plant.

Some states enacted only partial bans. New York, for example, just barred construction of nuclear reactors on Long Island, where protesters blocked the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant from coming online and financially crippled the region’s utility, forcing a state takeover.

Attitudes toward nuclear power have since evolved. Despite a drop in support following the meltdown at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan in 2011, a majority of Americans in both political parties have come to favour an expansion of nuclear energy. Polls from the Pew Research Center and Gallup show the highest support in years.

In 2016, Wisconsin became the first state to reverse course. Lawmakers in the factory-dense state pitched legislation to repeal the ban as a way to shore up the supply of reliable, clean power for manufacturers whose shareholders increasingly demanded a lower carbon footprint.

Seeking an alternative to fossil fuels that could make use of existing transmission lines and boilers at coal-fired plants, Kentucky followed suit a year later. Montana came next, in 2021, then West Virginia in 2022.

Illinois, by far the largest user of atomic energy of any state, only partially lifted its ban at the end of 2023, legalizing construction of as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors with an output of 300 megawatts or less. While more than a dozen developers are racing to commercialize various kinds of so-called SMR designs, the promise of cheaply mass-producing identical reactors remains mostly theoretical. The only modern nuclear reactor design in operation in the United States, the 1,100-megawatt Westinghouse AP1000, remained effectively banned in Illinois until January, when Democrat Governor JB Pritzker fully repealed the moratorium and called for new plants.

The changing sentiment is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for more nuclear plants to start construction in the United States. Big questions remain about how to finance projects, train workers and establish supply chains for novel kinds of reactors.

Alexander C. Kaufman is a contributing reporter at Canary Media and an award-winning writer who has covered energy and climate change for more than a decade. 

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The post States are overturning nuclear power bans amid energy crunch appeared first on Corporate Knights.

We already know the headline facts. The wars in Ukraine and Iran are producing emissions on the order of a mid-sized industrial economy. The scramble for energy and resources helped set the stage, and the destruction of pipelines, depots and power stations has become a recurring spectacle. Analysts have tallied the greenhouse gases, the poisoned soils, the bombed substations and the forests turned to smoke. Less discussed is what this means for the energy transition itself: every tank, missile and drone is built from metals and fuels we also need for wind turbines, batteries and resilient grids.

Every tonne of copper that ends up in shrapnel rather than in wires, every kilogram of lithium that ends up in loitering munitions rather than stationary storage, slows the transition and deepens climate risk for everyone, including the supposed winners. When we choose war, we are not just adding to the climate problem; we are cannibalizing the solution.

Here we face a fork in the road. One path is to treat transition minerals as the new oil: strategic assets to be hoarded, weaponized and fought over. That path is already visible in export controls, trade extortion and a growing list of violent incidents and community protests around mines in the GlobalSouth. The other path is to treat them as a global lifeline for common security, with shared stockpiles, transparent reporting, producer countries as real partners and apolitical norm that the first call on these minerals is decarbonization, not escalation.

Modern warfare also confirms, in the harshest possible way, the old principle that shows up in all the great religious traditions: what you do unto others, you do unto yourself. In a tightly coupled Earth system, the effects of our actions propagate through food webs, supply chains and the atmosphere. When a refinery or gas pipeline explodes, the carbon doesn’t check passports on the way up. When artillery fires shell after shell into fields, the contaminants do not ask permission before entering rivers and crops. Thermobaric weapons suck oxygen from the air and generate firestorms; forests and towns burn, releasing greenhouse gases and black carbon that darken ice and accelerate melting thousands of kilometres away. High-precision missiles and drones can target power plants and transmission lines with uncanny accuracy; the replacement steel and concrete, when they eventually arrive, carry their own enormous carbon price tag. In Ukraine, war-related emissions are now estimated to exceed the emissions from all of the country’s civilian sectors.

And yet, from a certain narrow corner, war looks like a success story. Defence budgets climb; order books for missiles, shells and air defence systems fill; share prices rise. Headlines announce record revenues for the world’s largest arms makers. If your horizon is the next quarter and your constituency is shareholders, war is indeed “good for business.”

Should governments that proudly report power-sector decarbonization be allowed to keep military emissions off the books?

But that business model is parasitic on the larger economy and on the biosphere. War destroys infrastructure, scares off investment, shreds trade links and forces governments to divert money from health, education and decarbonization into replenishing stockpiles and repairing damage. It also burns through critical minerals that the low-carbon economy will need for generations.

Militarization is itself a threat to our security and that leads to some uncomfortable but necessary questions for business and finance. Should climate-aligned investors treat defence exposure as compatible with net-zero strategies, given what we now know about war’s emissions and mineral demands? Should governments that proudly report power-sector decarbonization be allowed to keep military emissions off the books? Should critical-mineral off take agreements be judged only on price and supply security, or also on whether they prioritize uses that reduce net global risk?

My father’s line about there being no winners in war was, in its way, a statement of planetary accounting. In the 21st century, with the atmosphere full and the mineral supply tight, any war anywhere threatens states and markets everywhere, and the thin atmospheric envelope that makes any kind of economy possible at all.

 Ralph Torrie is director of research at Corporate Knights.

The post When we choose war, we cannibalize the solution appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Historically considered a theoretical shortcut across the top of the world, the geopolitically charged Northern Sea Route is gaining prominence, in particular as part of China’s “Polar Silk Road” initiative, which seeks to develop Arctic shipping routes and energy projects as an extension of the Belt and Road infrastructure diplomacy drive.  

In December, China achieved a key milestone with the maiden voyage of the China-Europe Arctic Express, a commercial liner service that travels the Northern Sea Route along Russia’s Arctic coast. The vessel Istanbul Bridge was the largest container ship to ever complete the journey, which took two months on the water and three years of preparation.  

China has long sought to establish a stronger economic and political presence in the Arctic, describing itself as a “near-Arctic state” in an official 2018 policy paper that identified warming in the region as a key incentive for deeper involvement. That paper launched China’s ambitions for a northern corridor and encouraged Chinese firms to invest in Arctic shipping infrastructure.  

But the momentum has caused concern among some big shipping players, who say the new route is still too dangerous. “Safe navigation cannot be assured,” Søren Toft, chief executive of the Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping Company, warned in a LinkedIn post earlier this year. “Sending container ships across the Arctic raises a lot of red flags,” Sian Prior, lead adviser for the Clean Arctic Alliance, said in response to the inaugural China-Europe Arctic Express journey. Andrew Dumbrille, the organization’s North American adviser, said the industry is ill-equipped to deal with accidents such as oil spills in the region because it doesn’t have emergency-response equipment nearby. “That means any spills will stay in the water for longer, wreaking more damage,” he said. 

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Some observers suggest that China’s systematic push into the Northern Sea Route does much more than undermine Arctic safety and threaten fragile natural systems. An important yet little-noticed 2025 report, Vessels on the Northern Sea Route, was published by the Bellona Environmental Transparency Center, which is part of the Bellona Foundation, an Oslo-based non-profit that fights oil and gas pollution. Established by staff who fled Russia in 2022, the group monitors Russia’s environmental impact, nuclear safety and Arctic pollution. They found that China’s growing maritime role in the region is deeply entangled with Russian geopolitical ambitions, Western sanctions evasion and environmental risk.  

The Northern Sea Route stretches 5,600 kilometres along the Russian Arctic coast, from the Kara Gate in the west to the Bering Strait in the east. Russia asserts extensive control along the route, regulating passage through a permit-based system that requires ships to use Russian pilotage services and icebreaker escorts in ice-covered conditions. Vessels transiting the Northern Sea Route are subject to Russian tariffs for these services, and those fees are collected by a subsidiary of Russia’s state nuclear company, Rosatom, which is closely integrated with the country’s military-industrial complex and linked to its invasion of Ukraine.  

Russia’s shadow fleet in the north 

The scale of traffic along the Northern Sea Route is steadily growing, and oil represents a large share of what’s making the trip. The 2025 summer–autumn season saw 103 transit voyages along the corridor, up from 97 in 2024. Thirty-four of the vessels last year were tankers, transporting about 1.9 million tons of crude oil. Fifteen container ships made the journey, including the Istanbul Bridge, up from 11 the previous year, and altogether they carried around 400,000 tons of containers. 

 China is positioning to take a bigger piece of the pie. In September, China’s NewNew Shipping Line signed agreements to invest up to five billion rubles to build a logistics complex in Provideniya Bay, to service vessels travelling along the Northern Sea Route. The company also has plans signed to develop container shipping through Murmansk’s ice-free port. 

Bellona found that most non-Russian-flagged vessels permitted onto the Northern Sea Route in 2024 transported Russian oil to China and India, violating sanctions. This “shadow fleet,” deployed in some of the world’s most hazardous waters, comprises poorly insured aging tankers, often without appropriate ice-class certification. 

The risks are severe. In 2024, Rosatom issued 1,312 permits to 975 vessels to enter the Northern Sea Route, of which 100 sailed under non-Russian flags, including 33 tankers carrying liquefied natural gas and 22 oil tankers. About one-third of them were not ice-class vessels, and more than half of these oil tankers were more than 15 years old.  

While China’s Polar Silk Road is building an important trade link with Europe, it’s also a sign of how commercial ambition could outrun governance in one of the world’s most fragile seas. 

Gordon Feller is a Global Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. 

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