Since then, insurers have led the way in calling out the risks of flooding, wildfires and other symptoms of a broken world. So you might expect that global insurers, experts in managing risks, would be out front in protecting people and property from climate-related disasters and shunning the industries that poison our planet.

Turns out many insurers are still helping fossil fuel companies boost production by underwriting new projects and investing in oil and gas. At the same time, some are hiking premiums or backing away from coverage of high-risk properties. Canadian home insurance premiums are expected to rise more than 7% in 2024, according to MyChoice.ca, and the average cost of home insurance in Florida is expected to reach almost US$12,000 this year. In France, up to 2,000 towns were recently left uninsured as insurance companies terminated contracts in response to rising storm damage costs.

“Insurance companies prefer to pass on the costs of the climate crisis to communities and individuals, rather than make those responsible (fossil fuel companies) pay,” wrote London-based Insure Our Future (IOF). This spring, the organization called on Axa to stop insuring export terminals for LNG (liquefied natural gas). For the last seven years, IOF has ranked the top 10 insurance firms supporting fossil fuel development.

“If insurance companies took climate science seriously, they would fully align their underwriting and investment strategies with a credible 1.5°C pathway,” said Peter Bosshard, the outgoing head of IOF. “They would be suing fossil fuel companies, to make polluters pay for the growing costs of climate disasters and keep insurance affordable for climate-affected communities.”

If insurance companies took climate science seriously, they would fully align their underwriting and investment strategies with a credible 1.5°C pathway.

–Peter Bosshard, Insure our Future

Sixth on the list of the world’s biggest fossil fuel underwriters is Canadian insurer Fairfax Financial, estimated to have earned US$600 million from oil and gas companies in 2022. Founded by Toronto billionaire Prem Watsa, Fairfax acknowledges climate change as an ongoing business risk – but its 2023 annual report notes that property reinsurers “enjoyed another year of meaningful rate increases.”

Fairfax’s business-as-usual attitude is underscored by the fact that it increased its ownership of Dallas-based oil firm Exco Resources to 49%, up from 44% a year ago. Fairfax’s 2023 report boasts that Exco “did plenty of drilling” in 2023 – boosting its oil reserves by more than twice as much as it extracted through production.

No one expects the insurance industry to solve climate change on its own. But it can start by not making things worse.

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Though just 3.5% of Ford’s revenue came from manufacturing electric vehicles in 2022, it poured more than US$2.1 billion into EV production last year and says it plans to invest US$50 billion by the end of 2026, with hopes of producing two million EVs a year. The Detroit automaker isn’t alone in the auto industry’s race to build BEVs (battery electric vehicles). Teasing out corporate pledges from their ledger books is key. Corporate Knights has been collecting data on major corporations’ green progress for two decades. Our Sustainable Economy Intelligence database tracks how much companies are funnelling into green capital expenditures (sustainable investment) and the percentage of revenues they earn from planet-friendly products and services (sustainable revenue). 

So which of the legacy automakers is pulling ahead of the pack? Our EV hero this year is Sweden’s Volvo, which earned 20.2% of its revenue from sustainable products in 2022. That figure should keep ticking upward, now that it has announced it will be selling its last diesel car in early 2024 on the road to going all-in on EVs by 2030. In October, Volvo saw its battery electric vehicles (BEVs) jump 29% over the same period last year.

“Volvo will not sell a single car that is not full-electric after 2030, regardless of market,” the brand’s chief commercial officer, Björn Annwall, said in June. “No ifs, no buts.” 

The companies in second and third place in the EV race (Germany’s Daimler and BMW) are still laps behind the Swedish car maker, with 12.3% and 11.6% in green revenue. Behind the scenes, BMW has been leading opposition to the EU’s 2035 zero-emissions CO2 standard that would phase out the sale of gas-powered cars. 

While they may not be as outspoken as BMW, most car companies are still hiding behind industry groups that lobby against more aggressive emission regulations in both the U.S. and Europe. Meanwhile, Volvo Cars announced that it was leaving the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) by the end of 2022 for that very reason: “We have concluded that Volvo Cars’ sustainability strategy and ambitions are not fully aligned with ACEA’s positioning.”

Angling to catch up is Volkswagen, which InfluenceMap notes is also “supporting more ambitious climate regulation than their competitors.” More than any other major car company in 2022, VW channelled an impressive 38.4% of investments (more than US$8.3 billion) into going green. The race is on. 

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When you look at the oil industry’s efforts to decarbonize, the results are lacklustre. By our count in 2022 – seven years after the Paris Agreement – the vast majority of oil companies still earn less than 1% of their revenue from renewable sources. 

The best performer was France’s TotalEnergies, which calls itself “a major player in renewable energy production,” including hydroelectricity, solar, wind power and biofuels. In 2022, Total’s green energy resources accounted for a negligible 1.3% of total revenue. Other underperformers on our list are U.K. giant BP, at 1%; Canada’s Suncor, at 0.29%; Shell, at 0.15%; and Norway’s Equinor, at 0.12%.

A closer look at their capital investments, however, indicates that in 2022 a few key players were earnestly investing in turning that ship around. Total put an impressive 34% of its total investment capital into sustainable projects – up from 26% in 2021. BP, in second place, directed 26% of its investments to green activities in 2022, up from 19%. Shell took third place, with 19%, but quintupled its green investments (in wind, solar, hydrogen and EV charging) over 2021. Suncor invested 10.4% of its capital on green projects in 2022.

But 2023 has been the year of oil industry backpedalling on renewables and doubling down on fossil fuels. 

In February, BP halved its target for cutting emissions by 2030, to between 20% and 30% versus its previous goal of 35% to 40% – despite shareholders having approved the original plan. In April, Total made a similar announcement, with CEO Patrick Pouyanné arguing that the additional production would help keep oil prices low. In May, new Suncor CEO Rich Kruger, an Exxon veteran, announced four priorities – safety, operations, reliability and profitability – with no mention of climate. In June, Shell’s new CEO said the firm was cancelling its planned, orderly cutback in oil production, calling cuts “dangerous and irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, back at the henhouse, COP28 president – and oil industry executive – Sultan al-Jaber said he has convinced more than 20 oil and gas firms to recommit to net-zero at November’s climate summit in oil-rich United Arab Emirates. “For too long, this industry has been viewed as part of the problem,” said al-Jaber. “This is your opportunity to show the world that, in fact, you are central to the solution.”

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The new agency, touted as the first of its kind in the world, would supposedly shine a light on alleged human rights abuses by Canadian companies at their foreign operations. Whether investigating the use of forced labour in China’s Xinjiang region, starvation wages at Bangladeshi sweatshops or sickness caused by pollution from mining operations in the Amazon, CORE would bring offenders to heel and help ensure that conditions improved.

Alas, it hasn’t turned out that way.

There has been no shortage of complaints to CORE – 26 in all between March 2021 and early 2023, most of them centred on the use of forced labour by garment companies in China. Yet, as a Globe and Mail investigation found, the agency had not closed the books on a single case as of April 2023. Of the 26 cases brought to its attention, eight were deemed inadmissible, two were withdrawn, and the admissibility of one was still being reviewed. Not one of the remaining 15 had moved beyond the “initial assessment” stage, according to CORE’s latest quarterly report, even though the agency aims to complete that assessment within 90 days. (Besides the Chinese cases, one relates to a company operating in Honduras and another to a company in Bangladesh.)

The agency has been hobbled in a number of ways. The government has backed away from its initial promise to give CORE investigative powers, such as compelling companies to produce relevant documents. Also, CORE has no way of enforcing whatever conclusions its investigations may come to, and its activities remain confined to just three sectors: mining, oil and gas, and garment manufacturing.

An advisory council on responsible business conduct, designed to work in collaboration with CORE, collapsed in mid-2019 when 14 members representing human-rights organizations and labour unions quit on the same day, saying they had lost confidence in the government’s commitment to corporate accountability. CORE’s latest annual report makes no mention of reviving the panel.

“We’re very disappointed right now,” Ketty Nivyabandi, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada, told the Globe earlier this year. “This is not what we had advocated for. We’re not recommending the office to communities that we engage with.”

The agency defended itself in its last annual report by noting that much of its work has “an iceberg effect,” with companies often making long-lasting undertakings that remain “under the surface for a period of time” – an assertion strangely at odds with its early promise of transparency.

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At the “hero” end of the spectrum, we tip our hats to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a non-profit network of 280 journalists in more than 100 countries who collaborate on cross-border investigative projects. The ICIJ’s mission, as its website puts it, is to convince reporters around the world “to set aside traditional rivalries to uncover corruption, abuses of power and grave harms inflicted on the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Best known for exposing the offshore holdings of scores of politicians and public officials via the Panama Papers, its latest investigations reveal the flaws in environmental auditing and certification programs (including the Forest Stewardship Council) supposedly designed to promote sustainable forestry and combat illegal logging. A team of 140 reporters from 27 countries uncovered forest failures from Canada to Taiwan, the U.S. to Turkey.

One branch of the Deforestation Inc. investigation highlighted the failure of European governments to halt imports of Myanmar teak, a richly coloured wood prized for its resistance to sunlight and salt water. Demand from luxury yacht makers has ravaged the teak forests, and the trade has been infiltrated by organized crime and is now riddled with corruption. As a result, several countries have imposed supposedly tight bans on imports of teak from Myanmar. In 2021, as part of a broader crackdown against the military junta in Yangon, the EU also sanctioned Myanma Timber Enterprise, which has a monopoly on the country’s teak trade.

Yet the ICIJ investigation revealed that more than 3,000 tonnes of wood entered Europe from Myanmar in 2021, often routed through countries with lax border controls, such as Italy, Greece, Croatia and Poland. To make matters worse, customs authorities and timber industry associations have turned a blind eye to the illegal trade. None of this bodes well for the historic EU law passed in March that bars imports of coffee, wood, beef, cocoa, palm oil and soy tied to deforestation, says the ICIJ: “[analysis of] enforcement data raises questions on authorities’ ability to comply with the new requirements.”

The report concludes that the global forest-products industry remains largely unregulated despite what “companies tell consumers and investors about the sourcing of their projects and their commitment to helping end the global climate crisis.” Without the ICIJ’s work, chances are that message would never have been heard.

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Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber may be a competent politician, diplomat and business leader. But whether the United Arab Emirates’ minister of industry and advanced technology is well suited to chair the forthcoming UN climate summit, COP28, in Dubai this November is a different matter.

Besides his cabinet duties, al-Jaber happens to be chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), one of the Middle East’s largest fossil fuel producers. “The appointment of an oil company executive to head COP28 poses a risk to the negotiation process as well as the whole conference itself,” 27 members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives wrote in January to John Kerry, President Joe Biden’s special envoy on climate change. They urged Kerry to put pressure on the UAE to withdraw al-Jaber’s appointment.

“Having a fossil fuel champion in charge of the world’s most important climate negotiations would be like having the CEO of a cigarette conglomerate in charge of global tobacco policy,” added the lawmakers, all Democrats. Indeed, one of al-Jaber’s goals at ADNOC has been to expand the company’s crude oil output from three million barrels a day in 2016 to five million by 2030.

Activist climate groups, including Greenpeace, Global Witness and Climate Action Network International, have also slammed the UAE’s choice. “You wouldn’t invite arms dealers to lead peace talks,” Alice Harrison of Global Witness told the Associated Press. “So why let oil executives lead climate talks?”

However, Kerry and others have stoutly defended the 49-year-old, California-educated chemical engineer. “Dr. Sultan al-Jaber is a terrific choice because he is the head of the company,” Kerry told the AP. “That company knows it needs to transition.”

Al-Jaber’s supporters point to his role as founder of Masdar, also known as the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, another UAE government-owned business that develops utility-scale renewable energy projects around the world.

It is true that, despite a long attachment to oil, the UAE has invested heavily in renewables at home and abroad, as well as in technologies such as lower-carbon hydrogen and carbon capture. ADNOC became a shareholder in Masdar last year.

Chances are slim that al-Jaber will be replaced. Even so, the furor over his appointment will have served a purpose if organizers of future climate conferences make a little more effort to ensure that high-level appointments pass the smell test.

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But hopeful signs of change are emerging there on a local level, encapsulated in a January decision by Warsaw’s city council to endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, an emerging global campaign that describes itself as “an international mechanism to manage a fast and fair transition away from coal, oil and natural gas.” Warsaw is the first city in central Europe to make such a move.

So far, more than 80 cities and subnational governments have endorsed the treaty. Along with the nation-states of Vanuatu and Tuvalu, the World Health Organization and the European Parliament are officially urging governments to endorse it. California is the latest consider the treaty.

The proposed treaty would align fossil fuel production with the Paris Agreement goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C using three mechanisms: ending the expansion of fossil fuel production, phasing out fossil fuels, and ensuring a “just” global transition that takes account of each country’s ability to replace fossil fuels with renewables.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised new hurdles in Poland’s already sluggish efforts to lower its dependence on fossil fuels but has also created an incentive to move faster. Natural gas was poised to play a key role in weaning Poland off coal, providing a lower-emissions “bridge” from coal to renewable sources. However, much of the gas would have come from Russia, and those plans are now in disarray, since Russia stopped exporting to Poland last year.

“In the conditions of economic recession and growing energy poverty, there is a risk that the energy transition may be slower or even stops altogether,” Ernst & Young warned in a recent report on Poland’s energy sector, estimating that the transformation could now cost €135 billion by 2030, equal to about a quarter of total GDP. The estimate includes measures to soften the blow for coal producers.

Nonetheless, progress is being made. Poland has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing solar energy markets, with capacity soaring from 200 megawatts in 2018 to about 10 gigawatts. It also plans to build 5.9 gigawatts of wind capacity in the Baltic Sea by 2030, rising to 11 by 2040.

Michael Poland, an Australia-based climate justice activist who directs the non-proliferation treaty campaign, says that “we applaud the valiant efforts of generations of Polish climate activists [who] demonstrated that climate progress is attainable through collective action.”

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The company’s founder, Lo Kwee-seong, started off selling soy milk door-to-door as a low-cost source of protein at a time when the then-British colony was in the grip of food shortages and malnutrition. Today, Vitasoy is leading the charge to take the cow out of the milk business.

“The original intent of the company was to help make protein affordable,” current CEO Roberto Guidetti told Well magazine in May 2021. “Eighty years later, with the rise of climate consciousness, this story is extremely relevant.”

Guidetti, an Italian who previously headed Coca-Cola’s operations in China, has elevated sustainability goals into what he described to Forbes as “core corporate purpose work, as opposed to just adequate compliance to Hong Kong Stock Exchange guidelines.”

Vitasoy has extensive guidelines for suppliers, covering sustainable farming and fair labour practices, among others. One priority has been to cut the inputs that go into making Vitasoy products, reducing water usage by 22% between 2014 and 2021, fuel by 18% and electricity by 12%. Solar energy systems have been installed at Vitasoy plants in Hong Kong, Singapore and Foshan, China.

The company is also piloting the recycling of its Tetra Pak cartons, though Guidetti acknowledges that “there are some gaps to be addressed … as not every market has the full infrastructure for carton recycling and circularity.”

Vitasoy has been named best in class both on sustainable revenue and sustainable investments in the 2023 Corporate Knights Global 100. Annual revenues doubled to 7.52 billion Hong Kong dollars from 2011 to 2021. While China makes up more than four-fifths of its business, the company also has growing operations in Australia (Vitasoy is Australia’s top plant-based milk brand) and exports to several dozen other countries.

Much of Vitasoy’s growth is explained by shifting consumer preferences as plant-based items like tofu, soy and oat milk gain popularity outside Asia. But Guidetti is confident that his sustainability drive has sharpened Vitasoy’s competitive edge.

“We are not obsessed by short-term growth at the expense of long-term results,” he told Well. “We want to grow faster than the market growth rate, but [to] do so sustainably.”

Find out which company we named Zero of our 2023 winter issue.

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Firms such as Cargill, Conagra and Tyson Foods would all make worthy winners of a Zero award. However, we’ll opt this time for the largest of them all, Brazilian-owned JBS, which employs around 250,000 people in more than 20 countries. It’s hard to think of any business with a more eye-popping record of scandal.

JBS faces frequent accusations that it sources cattle and poultry from illegally deforested land in the Amazon and the Cerrado, a vast swathe of grasslands in the east and south of Brazil. In 2022, the company admitted it had bought almost 9,000 cattle from farms belonging to notorious businessman Chaules Volban Pozzebon, who prosecutors have described as “one of the biggest deforesters in Brazil” and who is serving a prison sentence for conspiracy, extortion and illegal logging.

The company claimed it was the victim of a cattle laundering fraud and said it has since fired several of the executives responsible for this purchase, but the episode was just the latest in a string of reports linking the company to deforestation. A 2022 investigation by Repórter Brasil, a human-rights group, and Ecostorm, a U.K.-based investigative agency, concluded that JBS chickens fed with corn and soybeans grown on deforested land have ended up in British supermarkets.

And the shenanigans don’t end there. In September 2022, JBS agreed to pay US$20 million to settle a U.S. lawsuit alleging that it conspired with other meat producers to inflate pork prices. (Several of the other companies faced similar charges.)

JBS claims to be the first global meat company to commit to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. However, it might be challenging for it to reach its climate goals, particularly after the company announced last fall that it’s pulling out of the plant-based market in the United States. And a study released by environmental groups last spring found that the company’s carbon emissions increased by 50% in the previous five years.

“We care about our role in the world and our responsibility as a global food company,” the company’s latest sustainability report proclaims.

True or not, JBS has much work to do to prove it means what it says.

Find out which company we crowned as the Hero of our 2023 winter issue. 

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Even as environmentalists slam soccer’s World Cup for fudging its green credentials, one obscure English team is winning applause far and wide for its eco-friendly practices.

On the very day that Dale Vince took over as owner of the Forest Green Rovers in 2010, he moved to ban the sale of beef burgers at the team’s stadium in Nailsworth, a village in the Cotswolds, the rolling hills of central-southwestern England. Even bigger changes followed, and not all to the liking of local fans.

The stadium menu soon featured only vegan items, and single-use plastics were banned. Fans were told that if they didn’t like what the stadium served, they were welcome to bring their own food. The pitch is now kept green with seaweed and captured rainwater instead of pesticides, and it’s mowed by a solar-powered robot. The team often travels in an electric bus. Charging stations have been installed at the stadium for fans who drive electric vehicles.

Forest Green competes in the lowly third division of the four-tier professional English football league, yet it has won recognition from the United Nations as the world’s first carbon-neutral football club and been honoured with a “momentum for change” climate action award.

The team was close to bankruptcy when Vince arrived, but, as he told Bloomberg earlier this year, “we’ve attracted a lot of sponsors in the last couple of years that other clubs at our level don’t get.”

Vince, 61, has been an ardent environmentalist most of his life. He quit school at 15, becoming a New Age traveller with a windmill mounted on his trailer. He went on to start a wind energy business, set up the U.K.’s first electric-vehicle charging network, and formed a vegan food company.

While his activism initially drove some fans away, many more new ones have arrived. What’s more, Vince says, “Our fans come here. They see what we’ve done. They go home and they start to change the way they live.”

Forest Green is also winning more matches. A local village team for most of its 133-year history, it was promoted to the third tier of the English league earlier this year.

“I just don’t think there has to be a conflict between the environment and economics and ethics,” Vince says. As if to make the point, work is due to start soon on a new stadium for the team, made entirely from timber. It will be named Eco Park.

Zeros: LIV Golf Investments

Serena Williams, Billie Jean King and Colin Kaepernick are among a growing band of brave sports stars who have shown that sport and politics do – and indeed should – mix. Sadly, that message is taking far too long to percolate into the cloistered world of golf.

It was not until 2012 that Augusta National, home of the Masters, admitted its first women members. Now, LIV Golf Investments, led by the retired Australian star Greg Norman, is thumbing its nose at human rights activists by launching an international tour in competition with the long-established PGA.

Doling out super-generous contracts and prize money, LIV – the Roman numeral for 54, the number of holes played in its events – has signed up almost a dozen of the world’s top 50 players, among them Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson.

LIV might deserve some credit if the new tour was just about ending a long-standing monopoly. However, it likely would not even exist without the backing of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which has put up US$2 billion of its oil-generated wealth to lure golfers away from the PGA. With assets of US$620 billion, the PIF is the world’s fifth-largest sovereign wealth fund.

Outsiders can only guess at the Saudis’ motivation. Is it their love of golf? A craving for power in the sports world (they also bought control of England’s Newcastle United Football Club in October 2021)? Or part of a wider strategy to flex their muscles on the international stage?

The widely held suspicion is that LIV is above all an egregious case of “sports-washing,” designed to distract from Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations, including the dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the war in Yemen, and the repression of Saudi women and the LGBTQ2S+ community.

Referring to Khashoggi’s murder, Norman told Sky Sports News, “We’ve all made mistakes.” The Saudis, he added, “want to change that culture and they are changing that culture, and you know how they’re doing it? Golf.”

We’re not so sure. As recently as August, a Saudi court sentenced Salma al-Shehab, a doctoral student and mother of two, to 45 years in prison for spreading “rumours” and retweeting dissidents.

Not that Canada is in a position to judge. This country exported more than $1.7 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia in 2021, according to Global Affairs Canada. Most of those exports were combat vehicles. No word on whether Canada is also exporting golf carts.

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