From increased respiratory illnesses to morbidity, from adverse effects during pregnancy to the mental toll exacted in the aftermath of wildfire destruction, the blazes that have become an increasingly visceral sign of a warming planet are exacting a painful blow. “There is no safe level of exposure to wildfire smoke: the more exposure we get, the worse a range of health outcomes,” Marshall Burke, an associate professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, said earlier this year, in the midst of one of the worst wildfire seasons Los Angeles has seen.

Wildland wildfires are gobbling up about 26% less landmass than they did two decades ago, according to research led by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health and published by Science magazine. But the number of people exposed to fires has shot up some 40%, in part because people are living closer to areas now prone to igniting.

Wildfire smoke contributes to the deaths of about 40,000 people a year in the United States alone, a study published this year in Nature found, and that number is forecasted to rise to 70,000 people by 2050. A similar study published by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research in 2024 found that wildfire smoke contributes to about 16,000 deaths in the United States, and that number could climb to close to 30,000 deaths by the middle of the century.

“There is consistent and significant evidence of an association between wildfire smoke exposure and an increased risk of emergency room visits, hospital admissions, physician visits, or medication dispensations for respiratory conditions.

– Health Canada

“This really points to the urgency of the problem,” Minghao Qiu, the lead author of the report, told NPR. “Based on our results, this should be one of the policy priorities, or the climate policy priority, of the U.S., to figure out how to reduce this number.”

Another study predicted that wildfire smoke will kill 1.4 million people every year by the end of the century. And while headlines are often focused on North American or European blazes, it’s in Africa where the greatest risk is playing out. The UN University study found that 85% of global exposure to fire was in Africa.

Half a pack a day

Wildfires are a major source of pollution. In fact, they are 10 times as toxic as air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, a recent Stanford University study found. Smoke from wildfires can affect air quality in the immediate vicinity and stretch out over great distances. As flames gobbled up forests in Northern Ontario and Alberta this past June, Toronto briefly recorded the worst air quality reading in the world, while parts of the United States were covered by a smoky haze. In Detroit, for example, air quality readings during the wildfire summer were akin to smoking a quarter or half a pack of cigarettes a day, according to one pulmonologist.

“There is consistent and significant evidence of an association between wildfire smoke exposure and an increased risk of emergency room visits, hospital admissions, physician visits, or medication dispensations for respiratory conditions,” according to a study of available research conducted by Health Canada in 2024. There is “significant” evidence, for example, linking asthma to wildfire smoke exposure. Women, children and seniors faced increased risk of respiratory morbidity, the study noted.

Read more of our wildfire coverage

Canadian groups call for dramatic increase to wildfire defence funding

Massive wildfires are forcing governments worldwide to budget more for disaster

Canada is under attack by wildfires. It’s time to respond like it’s national defence.

The fight against wildfires is getting increasingly high-tech

A more nascent area of research is the impact that wildfires have on reproductive development. Researchers note that while there is limited comparative information, the most consistent evidence is for low birth weight and preterm birth as a result of wildfire smoke. The timing of exposure to wildfires also matters – with evidence pointing to the second and third trimesters as being the most delicate, and the severity of wildfires and proximity also influencing adverse birth effects. It’s not just about exposure to wildfire smoke; the mere occurrence of wildfires may also have an impact. “This is an important consideration, as increased maternal stress leading to the adverse birth outcomes could result from both wildfire smoke exposure and occurrence,” a 2024 Health Canada report warned.

Likewise, both exposure and occurrence may be taking a toll on mental health. A number of studies have found increased rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression in both children and adults, which is in line with the climate grief that many people express in an age of seemingly constant environmental crises. The impacts of a wildfire may stretch on for months, or even years. However, it’s not clear that wildfire smoke specifically is linked to adverse mental health effects, “given the difficulties in differentiating the impacts attributable to smoke from those due to trauma associated with the wildfire occurrence (for example, potential loss of property or livelihood, physical threat, evacuation).”

For Qiu, the Stanford researcher, the importance of adaptation is ever more glaring in our learning-to-live-with-wildfire future: “We need to explore what types of adaptation strategies are most useful.” He points to improving access to air purification at home and creating networks of clean-air centres to help people avoid exposure during smoke days.

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

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Yet both have a contradiction at the heart of their business model. They are also two of Canada’s largest investors in fossil fuels, including dirty coal, investments that adversely affect the health of the clients they’re insuring.  

The German NGO Urgewald just published a global database of fossil fuel investors, companies that own the most stocks and bonds in oil and gas and coal companies. The top five for Canada are Sun Life, RBC, Power Corporation, Manulife and TD, each with billions invested.  

It’s not a surprise to see the big banks on this list, but this represents a particular contradiction for Sun Life and Manulife, whose core business centres on the health of their clients.  

As the climate crisis accelerates, more attention has been focused on the role of the property and casualty insurance industry on the front lines of impacts such as floods, fires and storms. This is already driving increases to Canadians’ home insurance rates.  

But less attention has been focused so far on the role of the health and life insurance industry in the climate crisis, even though it’s not just property that’s negatively affected by climate impacts – it’s people too.  

Last year the Canadian government completed a major assessment of climate and health that concluded that climate change is already negatively affecting the health of Canadians through disease, injury and death, and that health risks will increase with warming.  

It also found that impacts disproportionately fall on vulnerable populations. Perhaps the most dramatic example was the 2021 heat dome, which killed 619 people in B.C., but health impacts are also showing up more quietly, worsening the mental health of young people. A Lakehead University study found that 40% of those aged 18 to 25 say climate anxiety already affects their daily functioning.  

As well, we also know that burning fossil fuels has direct health impacts via air pollution, such as respiratory disorders, strokes and heart attacks. The federal government estimates that coal burning results in hundreds of thousands of premature deaths globally each year.  

Why, then, do life and health insurance companies continue to foster these negative health impacts via their investments? And what are the implications for the insurance policies they issue, and potential claim payouts?  

Sun Life and Manulife grew in part by adding asset management to their business and invested in everything, including fossil fuels. Today, both companies have promised to reach net-zero by 2050 in emissions resulting from their investments but are yet to follow that up with any meaningful policy on fossil fuels. Both are at the early stage of evaluating how the climate crisis will affect their life and health policies and whether they will see a rise in claims, or a shift in qualification criteria. Without more work and more disclosure, this is a concerning risk for investors. 

Our organization, Investors for Paris Compliance, filed a shareholder proposal at Sun Life asking for this disclosure, to be voted on at its annual general meeting on May 11. With Manulife, we are hoping to see progress on these issues in its ESG report that will be released around the same time.  

The insurance industry is on the front lines of the climate crisis. Insurance companies should be leading the charge in fossil-free investment. Their business depends on it.  

Matt Price is the executive director at Investors for Paris Compliance. Kyra Bell-Pasht is the director of research and policy at Investors for Paris Compliance. Investors for Paris Compliance is a shareholder advocacy organization that holds publicly traded Canadian companies accountable to their net-zero commitments. 

The post Canada’s life insurers have a fossil fuel problem appeared first on Corporate Knights.

This might seem like typical fossil fuel industry marketing. But not to Canadian physicians, who are increasingly concerned about the climate-warming dangers of methane, the primary ingredient in natural gas production, and the health risks of burning natural gas in home appliances such as stove tops and water heaters. Rather than dismiss “clean gas” propaganda as the last gasp of a desperate industry, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) is fighting the industry’s climate claims with an ambitious bid to establish “greenwashing” as unacceptable – and maybe, eventually, illegal.

In November, the federal Competition Bureau announced it will investigate a complaint filed in September by six doctors, nurses and public health advocates who accused the Canadian Gas Association (CGA) of misleading consumers by aggressively promoting its products as “clean” and “affordable.” The complaint asked the bureau to force the CGA and its member companies (which include Enbridge, Epcor and TC Energy) to stop advertising natural gas as clean and affordable, issue a retraction and pay a $10-million fine.

While it’s unclear how long the bureau’s investigation will take, CAPE is gearing up for a battle, says campaign director Leah Temper. “We’re trying to de-normalize the fossil fuel industry, so there will certainly be a lot of pushback.”

But CAPE is also upping the stakes by lobbying Ottawa to include new regulations on greenwashing in its current overhaul of competition legislation. CAPE, which claims to represent 700,000 physicians, is also leading a campaign – along with the David Suzuki Foundation and other activist organizations – to convince the federal government to follow the lead of France in banning fossil-fuel advertising. The movement is gaining momentum: at COP27 in Egypt in November, a high-level UN group (led by former Canadian environment minister Catherine McKenna) released a report, Integrity Matters, that says “It’s time to draw a red line around greenwashing.”

Why are doctors leading this charge in Canada? They’re following the lead of physicians who launched grassroots programs to discourage smoking and ban tobacco ads 50 years ago, well before complacent national organizations and lawmakers started taking stands.

CAPE argues that fossil fuel marketing and promotion endangers human and planetary health in three ways: industry ads aim to stimulate demand for carbon-intensive goods and services at a time when a growing web of climate policies clearly require curbing demand; fossil fuel advertising fails to disclose known health and environmental hazards; and misinformation undermines public support for climate action.

The CGA responded to the Competition Bureau’s decision with a generic statement noting that it would cooperate with the inquiry and that “natural gas plays an important part in Canada’s energy mix.” At press time, the CGA had not responded to two requests for comment from Corporate Knights.

What’s next on CAPE’s agenda? Temper says the organization is eyeing a complaint about the Pathways Alliance, a consortium of oil sands producers that claims it’s on a net-zero path while also seeking government funds for expansion. And it’s considering other mechanisms, such as seeking injunctions against individual greenwashing campaigns or testing Canada’s self-regulating Ad Standards system. Mainly, though, Temper hopes this work will result in a broad ad ban that makes further complaints unnecessary: “We don’t want to keep playing ‘Whac-A-Mole.’”

The post Canadian doctors prescribe fines for natural gas ‘greenwashers’ appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Yet a company whose products are all based on microbes has been named the most sustainable company in the world in Corporate Knights’ Global 100 ranking. Chr. Hansen is a Danish bioscience company that dates back 140 years and “develops natural solutions for the food, nutritional, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries,” the company says.

“We develop and produce cultures, enzymes, probiotics and natural colors for a rich variety of foods, confectionery, beverages, dietary supplements and even animal feed,” adds CEO Mauricio Graber. “Our product innovation is based on more than 30,000 microbial strains that we call ‘good bacteria.’”
Chr. Hansen’s approach to sustainability is based around how it can contribute to the United Nations’ Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs), with 82% of the company’s revenue contributing to the targets.

“We believe the SDGs are a really good framework to translate our business into sustainability impact. We analysed our entire product portfolio to see which of the SDGs we had the most impact on and we decided to focus on three ‘strategic lighthouses,’” Graber says. “These are business areas we see as developing and growingaboth because of the commercial opportunities and the positive impact on the planet and sustainability.”

The first pillar of this strategy is food cultures, with the principal focus on bacteria that reduce food waste by prolonging the shelf life of food products, mainly yogurt and cheese. The company has a target of reducing yogurt waste by 1.2 million tonnes by 2022 from 2015 levels.

The second pillar is plant protection, which links to the SDG of sustainable agriculture. “We provide natural microbial solutions that can be used as an alternative to conventional pesticides while also increasing yields,” the CEO says. “It is much closer to the way that nature intended things and removes the risks and negative impacts of pesticides.”

Chr. Hansen is focusing on the megacrops – corn, sugarcane and soy – because they occupy the most land, but says its products are “crop-agnostic.” It is also working with the Danish Development Agency and Care Danmark on a project in Kenya to see if small-scale farmers can benefit from the same protection.

The third pillar is linked to the SDG of health and wellbeing. Central to this is to promote natural ingredients as a way to help gradually reduce the overuse of antibiotics in livestock farming and the impact of antibiotic resistance through the use of probiotic bacteria.

Chr. Hansen’s probiotics products help infants to develop good gut health, others can shorten the duration of the common cold and influenza-like illnesses. Chr. Hansen is researching how probiotics can help alleviate side effects from regular drugs.

One of the areas in the Global 100 ranking where Chr. Hansen performed particularly well was in the clean revenue category and in the representation of women on the board and in executive positions. It has recently appointed Dominique Reiniche as chairman of the board, making it the first large listed Danish company to have a female chairman. “We are in a growing battle for talent, and we need to improve diversity of all types,” Graber says.

Starting this year, the executive management board’s remuneration is also linked to the company’s targets on diversity, another area where it scored strongly.

Chr. Hansen’s success is based on a strategy of using natural solutions to address some of the key global megatrends, such as increasing food yields, reducing food waste and phasing out antibiotics in animal production, Graber says. “We are just at the start of the era of natural solutions using good bacteria,” he concludes.

Click here to return to the 2019 Global 100 landing page.

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“This is one of the most significant research funding announcements in the history of Queen’s,” said the university’s principal Daniel Woolf. I learned later from a cancer society spokesperson that media are only interested in the results of clinical trials, not the launching of them – even if Canada is taking the lead internationally.

I’m biased. My father, Paul Hamilton, died of non-small cell lung cancer this past April, seven months after diagnosis. Like many people shortly after learning they have cancer – in his case, it was Stage 4 from the start – my dad got religion about the importance of healthy eating and other measures to boost the immune system. He was drinking dandelion tea. Taking melatonin to improve his sleep. Sprinkling turmeric on his food. Popping astragalus pills. Eating organic fruits and veggies.

But it didn’t take long for reality to set in. Healthy eating, even if it did boost his immune system a bit, wasn’t going to deal with the core problem – the cancer. It can’t hurt, of course, but in the end it was medication that bought him a few extra quality months, and that was considered a good outcome.

The reason why the immune system – healthy or not – is ineffective against malignant tumours is because cancer cells use a specific type of protein to cloak themselves. This makes them invisible to “killer” T-cells, the front line soldiers of our immune system. To use a Star Trek reference, it’s like the U.S.S. Enterprise trying to fight a cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey. There are miracles, of course, but the odds are never good – and life isn’t a TV show.

As Cancer Research U.K. tells people on its website, “Your immune system is very unlikely to be able to fight off an established cancer completely without help from conventional cancer treatment, although there are very rare documented cases of cancers just disappearing.”

Still, you never give up hope. It’s like Lloyd in the film comedy Dumb and Dumber when he asks his love interest Mary if there’s at least a 1-in-a-100 chance she could ever fall for him. “I’d say more like one out of a million,” she tells him, to which Lloyd replies enthusiastically: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance? Yeah!”

The odds of defeating cancer can be 1-in-a-billion and you’d still cling to that 1. So I spent a significant amount of time learning about and navigating through the clinical trial system, hoping maybe – just maybe – there was some experimental wonder drug that might come to the rescue. A helpful woman coordinating clinical trials at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital proved an invaluable resource, and it was she who told me about some promising new “immunotherapy” drugs in the clinical trial pipeline.

Immunotherapy is all about better harnessing the body’s immune system to kill cancer cells. I’d learned a little bit about this approach through my own research, but didn’t really understand its potential until I read the December 2013 issue of Science magazine, which declared cancer immunotherapy the scientific “breakthrough” of the year. “It’s an attractive idea, and researchers have struggled for decades to make it work,” the magazine’s editors wrote. “Now, many oncologists say those efforts are paying off.”

It’s also an empowering idea, one that gave my father comfort when we spoke about it. Instead of poisoning our bodies with chemotherapy, which weakens the immune system, immunotherapy levels the playing field so our T-cells have a fighting chance. I showed my dad YouTube videos showing T-cells under a microscope seeking out and destroying cancer cells. It’s really remarkable this goes on inside our bodies.

And this brings me back to the international clinical trial being led by Queen’s University. The drug being trialed is called MEDI4736, a monoclonal antibody developed by U.K.-headquartered pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. Up to 1,100 lung-cancer patients from Canada and around the world – people who have already gone through surgery and chemotherapy – will get a chance to sign up.

MEDI4736, to simplify it, doesn’t try to kill the cancer cells. What it does is de-activate the cloak that the cancer cells use to evade immune system detection. To continue with the Star Trek analogy, it’s like disabling the Bird of Prey’s cloaking system so the U.S.S. Enterprise can take it down with a battering of targeted photon torpedoes. That’s a heck of a lot better than randomly firing in hopes of hitting an invisible nemesis, but at the same time knocking out ships in your own fleet – which is pretty much what chemotherapy does, and not very well.

AstraZeneca boasts that MEDI4736 “holds potential to shape the future of cancer treatment,” and is optimistic the drug will be effective against a wide range of cancers, including pancreatic, gastroesophageal, head, neck and skin cancers. It’s not the only immunotherapy drug being tested. In fact, some drugs in this class have already been approved, and are proving quite effective, for use in patients with malignant melanoma. A few years from now, who knows what immunotherapy drugs will be treating – and possibly curing?

So what’s the sustainability angle? This is, after all, Corporate Knights, the magazine for clean capitalism.

Well, there isn’t really one – or at least not a strong one. AstraZeneca, as a company, has ranked well in past years on Corporate Knights’ Global 100, but it dropped off the list in 2014 and a re-appearance isn’t expected in 2015. Not that the company is a poor performer overall. Out of 171 publicly traded companies in its sector globally, AstraZeneca ranks Top 15 when measured across 12 key sustainability-performance indicators.

But more relevant to this discussion, the emergence of cancer immunotherapy gives us all even more reason to embrace lifelong healthy eating and a sustainable lifestyle, as well as avoid (reduce) the toxins and pollution in our environment that can be crippling to our immune system.

Under today’s cancer-fighting regime, our T-cells are battle-worn and struggling, but under tomorrow’s they promise to be the Navy Seals of cancer combat.

When it comes down to it, though, this is just an interesting story about an important Canadian-led clinical trial that needed to be written.

The post Exposing cancer’s sneaky tricks appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Yes, concluded Health Canada, some people interviewed and assessed as part of its 1,238 household epidemiological study were shown to get highly annoyed by wind turbine noise and other factors, such as shadow flicker and flashing lights.

While that annoyance has led to increased stress for some, that doesn’t equate to evidence of a health impact, the department reported. “No evidence was found to support a link between exposure to wind turbine noise and any of the self-reported or measured health endpoints examined,” it said in a statement.

It’s important to put this study into context. Launched in July 2012, the research effort was hailed by wind opponents as a major victory, perhaps on the assumption the results would finally demonstrate that wind turbines do make people sick, despite years of research from Europe showing otherwise.

That Health Canada decided to wade into this area also raised suspicion of its motives. After all, it hasn’t done the same for the oil sands, what most would safely consider a bigger health concern. Many in the wind community thought the study would end up being a hit job on wind energy aimed at appeasing the federal Conservative government’s support base in rural Ontario.

And make no mistake, this was a comprehensive study – and likely a costly one. It involved staff from Statistics Canada doing in-person questionnaires with the occupants of more than 1,200 households located near wind farms in Ontario and Prince Edward Island. All households within 600 metres of a wind turbine were included, as well as a random sample of homes between 600 metres and 10 kilometres.

Hair samples and blood pressure data were collected to assess stress levels, such as the degree of concentration of cortisol in hair. On top of that, Health Canada spent more than 4,000 hours measuring different levels of wind turbine noise, including low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Again, they found evidence of stress possibly linked to an annoyance factor. There were people who self-reported sleep disturbance, migraines, dizziness, high blood pressure, and other conditions, but as Health Canada pointed out, “the prevalence was not found to change in relation to (wind turbine noise) levels.” In other words, go to a community without wind turbines and you’re likely to find the same level of complaints.

Perhaps most interesting about this study is data that suggests the highly subjective nature of “annoyance” as it relates to wind turbines. The research found that people studied in Ontario were 3.29 times more likely to be annoyed by wind turbine noise than people studied in PEI. Expressed as a percentage, 16.5 per cent of respondents in Ontario were found “highly annoyed” by wind turbine noise versus 6.3 per cent in PEI.

“Investigating the reasons for the provincial differences is outside the scope of the current study,” Health Canada said.

But it’s an important question: Why the difference? Are people living in PEI more genetically immune to noise? From my own experience, the anti-wind movement in Ontario has clearly been more vocal, creating more awareness of alleged health effects of wind through the media and turning the issue into a political hot potato.

What it amounts to is the power of suggestion. Tell more people that wind turbines make you sick, and more people are likely to interpret and perceive their own conditions as attributable to wind turbines. In science, this is called the nocebo effect, the opposite of the placebo effect.

Similar reasoning can be applied to why some areas with wind turbines can experience a temporary decrease in property value while others don’t. Tell somebody something tastes like crap and the odds are they are less likely to take a bite.

Another interesting finding, one that has been found in other studies in other jurisdictions, such as this Dutch study, is that the level of annoyance substantially decreased when the household was benefitting financially from having a wind turbine located nearby.

“Annoyance was significantly lower among the 110 participants who received personal benefit, which could include rent, payments, or other indirect benefits of having wind turbines in the area,” Health Canada said.

“There were other factors that were found to be more strongly associated with annoyance, such as the visual appearance, concern for physical safety due to the presence of wind turbines and reporting to be sensitive to noise in general.”

As mentioned, wind opponents won’t be satisfied by this study. They will continue to call wind expensive and ineffective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as claim negative impacts on property value. They will continue to brand wind turbines bird killers, despite the fact there are far bigger threats to birds than wind, such as skyscrapers and cats.

And while this study undermines their claims of a sickness they call wind turbine syndrome, they will continue to highlight the annoyance factor as a reason to do away with wind, despite the fact that we all involuntarily experience all sorts of similar annoyance factors throughout out lives – from noisy roads and highways to neighbours that drive you batty.

In the case of wind, that doesn’t mean every effort should not be taken to minimize potential annoyance. Quite the opposite, the wind industry has a duty to do so and should be held to account for negligence or poorly managed projects, when complaints raised are found reasonable.

It also doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who are particularly sensitive to noise, vibration and other things possibly associated with the operation of wind turbines. The same, of course, applies to people particularly sensitive to pollution, wireless frequencies, and certain smells.

What it does mean is that findings from Canada’s health agency, after doing a local, comprehensive and independent study – research that has been vetted by a wide range of scientific experts – has added considerable weight to evidence that says wind turbines don’t make people sick any more than a neighbour’s incessantly barking dog or a demanding, grumpy boss.

Or, for that matter, angry e-mails sent from wind opponents who don’t agree with what journalists write. Let’s hope this study at least puts to rest silly calls in Ontario for a moratorium on wind energy because of potential health implications.

The post No evidence of wind sickness: Health Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Five environmental groups and one farmer’s union are working together to dissuade Health Canada from approving a new systemic pesticide that could prove harmful to bees, birds, small mammals and other organisms. The pesticide, called flupyradifurone, attacks the nervous systems of insects and has the potential to contaminate pollen, fruits and seeds of plants. Bees and other pollinators, for one, are already having a hard time coping with the effects of neonicotinoids, which is widely believed to be a major cause of mass bee die-offs. “Scientists have called for a global phase-out of neonics. The last thing we need is another systemic pesticide contaminating the environment,” said Karen Eatwell, a spokesperson for the National Farmers Union. Health Canada has initiated a public comment period on its proposed approval of the new pesticide, says the group, which includes the Sierra Club Canada Foundation and the David Suzuki Foundation. Comments are being received up to November 3.

32 countries at “extreme” risk of conflict

An analysis of 198 countries has identified 32 nations that are most likely to experience conflict and civil unrest as a result of climate change. Bangladesh was found to be the most at-risk country in the world, followed by Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Nigeria and Chad, as well as island nations the Philippines and Haiti. Perhaps even more alarming is that growth economies like Cambodia, India and Pakistan are also on the “extreme risk” list, raising an important question about how much climate change could destabilize our increasingly globalized economy. Maplecroft, the analytics company that produced the report, said that one unifying characteristic of all these economies is their heavy dependence on agriculture for job creation and growth. “Changing weather patterns are already impacting food production, poverty, migration and social stability – factors that significantly increase the risk of conflicts and instability in fragile and emerging states alike.”

85,000 buildings in NYC flood zones: Report

You can bet insurance companies are taking note of this one. A policy brief released this week from the Office of the New York City Comptroller has determined that 84,596 buildings and 400,000 residents in NYC now lie within the so-called 100-year flood plain thanks to the rising effects climate change. The building count more than triples the previous estimate from 2010 and represents property value of nearly $130 billion, according to the analysis. The new estimate came about because of the $14 billion in devastation caused two years ago by Hurricane Sandy. “With such immense value arrayed along the city’s coast, we must act now to make the necessary investments to protect our homes, our businesses and our neighborhoods from the future effects of climate change and the potentially destructive force of another hurricane,” the brief states. “While the costs of resiliency projects are high, investing in the city’s future will pay enormous dividends, both to our waterfront communities and our broader economy.” The brief follows a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists that urges eastern and Gulf coast communities to prepare for chronic flooding over the next 15 and 30 years. To assist with adaptation, New Jersey just launched its Energy Resilience Bank, also in response to Hurricane Sandy. The bank will spend $200 million (U.S.) toward development of distributed energy resources at critical facilities so they can stay operational during outages caused by extreme weather. As Corporate Knights’ Ashley Renders reported today, Canada isn’t immune to the expected rise in flooding events. Unfortunately, it is the only country in the G8 without overland flood insurance.

Climate depression… It’s real

If all of this news about flooding and conflict is getting you down, you’re not alone. Madeleine Thomas at Grist.org wrote an insightful piece this week pointing to the struggle some climate scientists, environmentalists, and other “frontliners” are having with anxiety and depression as a result of climate research. “From depression to substance abuse to suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder, growing bodies of research in the relatively new field of psychology of global warming suggest that climate change will take a pretty heavy toll on the human psyche as storms become more destructive and droughts more prolonged,” wrote Thomas. “For your everyday environmentalist, the emotional stress suffered by a rapidly changing Earth can result in some pretty substantial anxieties.” Corporate Knights had a story on this important but underreported issue in our Summer 2014 magazine. Two years earlier, we ran a feature looking at the impacts of climate change on the mental health of employees working at companies perceived to be contributing to or solving the problem.

Tall travellers of the world unite!

The problem tall people have sitting in airplane seats isn’t really comparable to climate change, but it can cause considerable stress and discomfort – particularly for long flights, and when the person sitting in front insists on permanently reclining their own seat. As The Economist’s business travel blog wrote this week, “Spending three hours wedged into a seat that cannot physically accommodate your legs may not technically qualify as medieval torture, but it’s a close call.” The blog points to the fact that many airlines now accommodate extra-large – that is, heavier – passengers by finding them a complimentary second seat that allows them to spread out. So, it asks, why not adopt the same policy, official or otherwise, for tall people? It’s a reasonable suggestion, and such a call for civility would only be fair. After all, tall travellers have a proud history of helping their shorter peers get their luggage into and out of overhead compartments. But as one of Corporate Knights’ Twitter followers replied, “KLM would go out of business” with such a policy. True, those Dutch folks are pretty tall. But we love them just the same.

The post Time to talk about the birds and the bees appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Duhigg uses the example of former Alcoa chief executive Paul O’Neill, who took a struggling U.S. aluminum manufacturer and turned it around by being obsessed with one operational indicator: workplace safety.

Not only did O’Neill improve the company’s lost-day injury rate to 0.2 per 100 workers, down from 1.86, he created a culture of safety that has since seen the rate drop to 0.125. Workplace safety statistics are now published publicly on the company’s corporate website, in near real time. On O’Neill’s watch, the decline coincided with a quintupling of Alcoa’s net income and a 15-fold increase in revenue.

An impressive accomplishment, one that got O’Neill handpicked by former U.S. president George W. Bush as America’s 72^nd Secretary of the Treasury. And little did he know that, 13 years after leaving Alcoa, his work at the company would be referenced by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to support new disclosure regulation – an expanded “name and shame” rule – that has proven highly unpopular with many American businesses.

David Michaels, an assistant secretary with the U.S. Department of Labor, revealed the details at a press conference last November with a cheerleading O’Neill by his side. Under the proposed rule, employers with 250 or more employees would have to start electronically reporting to the OSHA all serious workplace injuries soon after they occur. That data – including company name, type of injury, and cause – would be posted online for anyone to see.

Extreme Disclosure

Citing the fact that about three million American workers at private companies got injured or ill on the job in 2012, Michaels said such a rule is necessary to “save lives and limbs.”

“How will this make workplaces safer?” he asked. “Public posting of workplace injury and illness information will nudge employers to better identify and eliminate hazards.” The better public disclosure will allow businesses to compare themselves against their peers, while prospective employees will have a way to find out how companies in a sector rank on work safety, Michaels explained.

O’Neill, when introduced later, praised the initiative. “I hope it’s a step but not the final step.”

Many industry watchers cringed, including Howard Mavity, an Atlanta-based labour lawyer with the law firm Fisher & Phillips.

“It’s possible this information will be misconstrued and used unfairly to sully the reputations of employers,” wrote Mavity in a guest post on Forbes.com earlier this year. He described the data published as “lagging indicators” of events that have already happened. “Anyone in the safety profession knows that putting too much emphasis on lagging indicators fails to increase workplace safety.”

Employers should be encouraged instead to do better at communicating safety to employees, Mavity added. “They shouldn’t have to waste valuable time defending themselves to the media. Taking the time everyday to remind employees to be safe is what works. Not publicly shaming employers.”

Joe Trauger, vice-president of human resources policy for the National Association of Manufacturers, said the proposed rules would make information publicly available without context and create confusion. “The raw data may result in unfair conclusions or judgments about a company or particular industry based on information that is not indicative of the actual safety record.”

The OSHA forged ahead nonetheless. In September it formally announced the new rule, which will come into force on January 1. It requires large businesses, with some exceptions, to continue reporting job-related fatalities but within eight hours of happening. On top of that, worker amputations, eye losses, and hospitalizations from injuries must be reported within 24 hours. The reports will have to be called in or submitted via a web portal, but industries with low injury and illness rates are not subject to the rule.

Michaels, in a statement, called hospitalizations and amputations “sentinel events” that reveal serious hazards in a workplace. “An intervention is warranted to protect the other workers at the establishment.” The idea is that by putting such public pressure on an employer it will be forced to raise its game.

Going too far?

In Canada, detailed reporting to worker compensation boards is required. For more serious injuries and fatalities, each province’s ministry of labour must be notified. But data is only publicly released once it is aggregated. Only when a company is investigated and formally charged for a workplace incident are its name and details of the event publicly accessible.

“When you look at how the OSHA operates in the United States versus provincial and federal structures here, things are publicized in Canada but not like south of the border,” said workplace safety consultant Jeff Thorne. The media may discover and reveal details independently, but news outlets are picky about what they cover. “Unless it involves a young worker or it’s a major fatality at a large corporation, you may never hear about it.”

He said in Ontario there have been limited discussions about creating a better way to register occupational injuries and fatalities, but whether such a database would be accessible to the public is unclear. “It’s hard to tell how far along that discussion is.”

Norm Keith, a lawyer with Toronto-based Fasken Martineau who specializes in workplace health and safety, said there is definitely a need for better data collection and disclosure standards, allowing apples-to-apples comparisons across geographies and within sectors, but he has reservations about the name-and-shame approach.

“I have many clients going to trial to defend not so much that they think they’re perfect, but because they can’t afford a conviction in a press release,” he said. A company’s competitors are more than happy to highlight that information when bidding for business in hopes of winning a contract.

Authorities need to be careful in how far they go, Keith said. “Is there benefit from a deterrence perspective? Ultimately, there has to be some fairness and consistency in the way they do it.” For this reason, he added, naming and shaming should probably continue to be governed by the courts.

Corporate Knights contacted the OSHA’s media relations department to request an interview. We were told to submit some questions in advance, which we did. Among them: How measurably effective has this approach been so far? Nearly three weeks after the original request, and after two follow-up queries that elicited no reply, the agency has been silent.

Absent supporting research, workplace safety experts will be watching closely over the next couple of years to see if the U.S. name-and-shame rules do, in fact, lead to a reduction in workplace fatalities and injuries. From Corporate Knights perspective, improving workplace safety disclosure standards, and requiring companies to self-report this high-level data in quarterly and annual reports, may be a more effective approach than government’s creating shame lists, especially when companies may not ultimately be charged with a workplace violation.

Such an approach would set a baseline standard for all companies, and give industry leaders, such as Alcoa, a chance to demonstrate best practices and rise above their peers.

(This story is the fifth in a series of articles on workplace safety that will appear on corporateknights.com during October, in partnership with and with funding support from the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability. Visit our Workplace Safety landing page to follow the series.)

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Last year students at the University of British Columbia voted 4-to-1 in favour of having their school divest from fossil fuels. Now, nearly 200 university faculty have thrown their support behind the students by signing a petition calling for divestment. “Some are concerned divestment might hurt the income UBC receives from the endowment, but this need not to be the case,” states an open letter. “There are many opportunities in the market for an endowment to make equivalent or better returns, and studies designed to measure the impact of divestment have found little or no impact on returns.” The university’s faculty association is expected to decide on Monday if it will hold a referendum on the matter. Specifically, the open letters calls for immediate suspension of future fossil-fuel investments and divestment of existing holdings within five years.

We need a market for water: Brookings paper

The Brookings Institution has released a discussion paper that argues for more use of market forces to reduce water shortages in the U.S. west, a problem that is worse than most originally thought. Indeed, NASA research recently reported that the Colorado River Basin – which supplies 40 million people in seven states – is getting sucked dry. Population and economic growth and water overuse are all contributing to a problem exacerbated by dry, low-rainfall conditions brought about by climate change. Resilience needs to be brought into the water systems, argues the paper. “Western states can take an immediate step to enable more-flexible use of water resources by allowing simple, short-term water transactions,” it states. “Water policy should allow someone who needs water to pay someone else to forgo her use of water or to invest in water conservation and, in return, to obtain access to the saved water.” It also argues that state and local governments have a responsibility to establish essential market institutions, such as water banks, “that can serve as brokers, clearinghouses, and facilitators of trade.”

Is “pharming” sustainable?

Corporate Knights editor Tyler Hamilton has a feature today on the risks and rewards of genetically modifying plants to produce vaccines and a range of other drugs, such as a recent treatment for Ebola-infected U.S. aid workers that was derived from tobacco plants. The approach is proving simpler and less expensive than traditional methods, which rely on complicated bioreactor vessels that grow bacteria and animal cell cultures. Using plants also speeds up the drug discovery and production process, and products created can be designed to be edible and stored without refrigeration – a big benefit for developing countries. But the long-term risks, such as cross-crop contamination and pollen exposure to humans, animals and insects, remains a big sticking point for environmentalists and food industry groups who urge caution. What do you think?

Europe does it: tightens noose on GHG emissions

The European Union has historically led the world on efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but that didn’t stop member country leaders from raising the bar on Friday. The EU did, in the end, agree to a climate change pact that obligates members to collectively cut GHG emissions by at least 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030. As of 2012, the EU cut its emissions by about 18 per cent. This means it will have to make similar progress over the next 15 years. It’s an ambitious goal, but some environmental groups were disappointed that specific national targets are not binding. Other targets include renewable energy having 27 per cent market share on a EU-wide basis and energy-efficiency improvements of 27 per cent – the latter optional. Germany and some others were lobbying for a 30 per cent target for both, but countries such as the U.K. and Poland resisted that push.

Beware fake awards

As a public service to Corporate Knights’ readers, many of them representatives of corporations and startups in the social innovation space, we would like to alert you to an e-mail going around promoting an event called the “2015 Social Innovation Awards.” The e-mail, sent by a person named Sarah Khara, who is identified as a director of the awards organization, outlines nine categories to which organizations can submit applications – with each submission costing $450. Corporate Knights does not know for sure if this award or organization is legitimate, but what we can say is that a Google search reveals no background information about the awards or Sarah Khara. The website supplied in the e-mail – www.socinnovationawards.com – looks well designed, but lacks crucial information about the contest, its history, Khara and other staff, who the judges are, and the judging process. Furthermore, the URL for the website was only created on October 20, and the New York City address given at the bottom of the promotional e-mail appears to not exist. For this reason, we urge all readers who receive this e-mail to proceed with caution. We e-mailed Khara requesting an explanation. We have not yet received a reply.

The post October 24, 2014 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The data says they aren’t, and this has many in the occupational health and safety profession concerned.

Corporate Knights Capital, in its recent report “Measuring Sustainability Disclosure,” analyzed all seven so-called first-generation sustainability indicators and found that only 11 per cent of the world’s 4,609 largest companies disclosed their worker injury rate in 2012.

It was the lowest disclosure rate of all seven indicators. By comparison, 39 per cent of companies disclosed their greenhouse-gas emissions and 59 per cent reported pay equity data.

For some industries, such as financial services, the low disclosure rate arguably makes sense. For example, only 2 per cent of the 382 largest banks reported workplace injury and fatality numbers in 2012. Of the world’s 156 biggest insurance companies, 1 per cent reported fatality figures and 3 per cent disclosed injuries.

Industries related to manufacturing, construction and other higher-risk activities are better at reporting, but have a long way to go. Of 369 large energy companies, only 14 per cent disclosed workplace deaths while 17 per cent reported injuries. Automotive and capital goods companies didn’t do much better.

“Human resources have become one of the most important productive assets in many industries, so it is quite disturbing that only a minority of companies are reporting on safety metrics at the workplace,” said Michael Yow, lead analyst at Corporate Knights Capital. “That only 17 per cent of the world’s oil and gas companies are reporting on worker safety is quite alarming, given they represent one of the most hazardous industries out there.”

The best discloser was the materials industry, where 20 per cent of the 406 companies analyzed reported fatalities and 33 per cent reported injuries. Still far short of where industry needs to be on worker safety, experts say.

“It’s amazing how often safety is left out of the sustainability discussion,” said Jeff Thorne, a workplace safety consultant with Occupational Safety Group. “It’s still a newer concept, believe it or not, to include safety as a performance indicator.”

But as Tom Cecich, chair of the U.S.-based Center for Safety and Health Sustainability (CSHS) told Corporate Knights, “High profile, tragic global incidents have highlighted the need for better occupational health and safety transparency and reporting.”

(Disclosure: CSHS is co-sponsor of this Workplace Safety web series).

Questionable Data

Indeed, poor disclosure isn’t the only problem. The CSHS reviewed the corporate social responsibility, sustainability and annual reports from 100 companies that appeared on Corporate Knights’ 2011 Global 100 ranking.

In a report it released in February 2013, the CSHS revealed a “high variability in terms and definitions” used by companies that disclosed workplace safety metrics, making it difficult to compare company performance.

“Corporate transparency is not achieved simply by disclosing information,” according to the report. “The information disclosed must also be meaningful.”

Part of the problem, it concluded, was lack of clarity from sustainability reporting frameworks, most notably the widely used Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). For example, GRI only asks companies to provide information on “total workforce,” but it doesn’t define “worker,” leaving it open to interpretation. Does it include contract workers? Temporary workers? What about workers further down the supply chain?

The report also found that 15 different methods were used to define a “report-worthy injury” or incident and six different formulas were used to calculate an overall injury rate. Companies were either ignoring GRI guidelines or being confused by them. In other words, the guidelines appeared to be ineffective.

It’s no surprise that in 2012, when GRI began accepting public comment for its planned fourth-generation guidelines, the issue of occupational health and safety received the fourth-highest number of submissions. In response, the GRI decided to create a working group for workplace safety that would inform updated guidelines.

The goal was to improve clarity and transparency of workplace health and safety guidelines. Despite good intentions, not much has happened since. “As of October 2014 GRI has not started the workgroup due to funding issues,” said Cecich.

The main reason CSHS produced its 2013 report was to offer insight for the multi-industry stakeholders expected to sit on the working group. The report’s recommendations were clear:

• Standardize terms and definitions to eliminate confusion and create a consistency of reported data that allows apples-to-apples comparisons within sectors and across geographies;

• Encourage complete reporting of all leading indicators related to occupational health and safety, as well as reporting over multiple years to allow for internal and external stakeholders to gauge whether a company is improving or not;

• Expand coverage beyond just company staff to include temporary workers and subcontractors, as well as workers in the supply chain, all of them “growing and highly vulnerable segments of the global workforce.”

(This story is the fourth in a series of articles on workplace safety that will appear on corporateknights.com during October, in partnership with and with funding support from the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability. Visit our Workplace Safety landing page to follow the series.)

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