The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) will continue to insist that corporations seeking validation under its climate-plan accreditation – considered an international gold standard – must set a 1.5°C climate target, as set out by the Paris Agreement.

Scientists have warned that the 1.5°C goal has likely already been breached, after multiple record-setting temperatures. But newly appointed SBTi CEO David Kennedy said the 1.5°C goal is the basis of a science-based approach to corporate climate planning and forms the foundation of a new SBTi corporate net-zero standard. Kennedy said the science shows that there are large planetary risks in going higher than 1.5°C. “That is why in the Paris Agreement we have agreed internationally to aim for 1.5 degrees, and that is the central scenario that underpins the draft [SBTi] standard,” he said in an SBTi webinar last week.

Speaking directly to corporate representatives on the webinar, Kennedy said a 1.5°C goal implies a range of activities and objectives for corporate transition plans. “Decarbonize heat. Decarbonize electricity. Decarbonize transport. Decarbonize those things not only in your own operations, but do that in your supply chains as well.”

By firmly supporting the 1.5°C goal, SBTi is drawing a red line against corporate and financial interests moving to loosen their climate targets and plans. The new draft standard, released in March, also addresses weaknesses in SBTi’s process that have permitted many companies to achieve validation without implementing credible climate transition plans.

The SBTi draft standard will be out for consultation until June 1 and finalized later in 2025. Its publication comes at a time when fossil fuel companies like BP are pulling back on their climate commitments, the Net Zero Banking Alliance is moving away from its target of 1.5ºC global warming and many banks are casting doubt on whether 1.5°C is achievable. In addition, many large corporations are counting carbon credits and offsets as a way to report lower emissions.

The document also settles a rancorous debate over carbon credits and offsets that gripped the organization last year.

Carbon credits rejected

Under the new standard, SBTi will not validate the use of carbon credits as offsets against a company’s carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon removals through efforts such as reforestation or direct-air-capture projects will be accepted, but only for a company’s so-called residual emissions, the estimated 10% of emissions that cannot be abated when a company reaches net-zero. Removals are different from credits from sources such as renewable-energy projects, which are based on “avoided” emissions.

Last year, the SBTi board set off a major controversy when it suggested the organization would accept credits to offset carbon dioxide emissions. After staff pushed back, the organization reversed itself, saying an earlier policy against offsets had not changed. Shortly after, SBTi published a study that cast doubt on the efficacy of credits, setting the stage for the policy released last month. “Everybody knows we had a difficult situation with the position on credits last year,” Kennedy said. “I hope you will see in the draft standard that we have moved on, and we have a very good position on credits.”

By firmly supporting the 1.5°C goal, SBTi is drawing a red line against corporate and financial interests moving to loosen their climate targets and plans.

Kennedy said SBTi welcomes companies that want to invest in credits and will recognize their leadership in this area, even if they won’t be considered as offsets against emissions. “Credits are never an alternative to reducing carbon footprints, but they can be a very useful complement.”

Validation from the London-based SBTi is recognized as the gold standard for corporate climate plans. The non-profit organization – funded with charitable and corporate donations and validation fees – has reviewed more than 10,000 companies with targets or commitments. It has validated targets for more than 7,000 companies, including 1,700 with net-zero targets, and has recognized more than 3,000 companies committed to developing targets. The SBTi validation is used extensively by investors to assess portfolio companies.

No credible transition plans

Yet, SBTi has struggled to push corporations to move from targets to firm net-zero plans. A recent study by Morningstar Sustainalytics of 1,450 companies with SBTi-validated targets found that none had a transition plan aligned with a 1.5°C scenario. Only 25% of the companies were found to be on a 1.5°C to 2°C pathway, while 56% were on a 2°C to 2.5°C pathway.

However, Morningstar said 55% of the SBTi-validated companies do demonstrate strong management practices on climate risks and emissions, more than double the 24% of the broad universe of companies in the Morningstar database that score high on climate management. Forty-five percent of SBTi-validated companies had average or weak management practices.

Changes to the standard should improve the organization’s ability to validate company transition plans, SBTi’s head of standards, Emma Watson, told the webinar.

These changes include detailed transition metrics and methods to track emissions, including the percentage of revenue that companies derive from net-zero-aligned products and services. Larger companies and those located in high-income countries will face more stringent standards, while there will be flexibility to impose less stringent standards on smaller companies and those located in low-income countries. She also said SBTi will encourage companies to start investing in removal of residual emissions immediately rather than wait until the end of the net-zero period.

Kennedy also said SBTi expects companies to start transitioning on energy use. The organization has set 2040 as the year when companies will need to rely on low-carbon electricity for their energy needs.

Kennedy said the conservative backlash in the United States has made it more difficult for all businesses and organizations to manage the net-zero transition. “The political situation in the U.S. is not helpful,” he said. “It has changed the mood music and some of the perceptions and discussions in boardrooms and C suites.”

The draft changes are meant to focus SBTi and its validated companies on executing transition plans, not just setting targets, Kennedy said. “I think SBTi can have a huge impact going forward on the net-zero transition for business. To do that, we have to focus on action and implementation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting out of our judgment box

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damned if you’re doomed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No mud, no lotus

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

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

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

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

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

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Thirty weeks out from this year’s COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, an advance brief of a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) finds that doubling down on global efforts to keep planetary heating to 1.5°C will lead to a significant net gain in global gross domestic product.

The economic benefits of climate action will accrue rapidly, UNDP administrator Achim Steiner said last week at the 16th annual Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin.

“Over the next 20 to 25 years, you’re talking about growth rates that translate into literally billions and billions of additional economic investments and returns on investments,” Steiner said.

With serious collective climate action, some wealthy countries will see their per capita GDP growth increase by more than 60% by 2050, while some poor ones could see that same metric soar by a “remarkable“ 124% from 2025 levels by the end of the century, Steiner says.

On the other hand, business-as-usual approaches to the climate crisis could see global GDP reduced by 33% by 2100.

Existing climate commitments won’t deliver

Titled “Investing in Climate for Growth and Development: The Case for Enhanced NDCs,” the brief claps back against claims that aggressive climate action is an economic non-starter.

First submitted in 2015, and due every five years, NDCs (nationally determined contributions) are voluntary plans that signatories to the Paris Agreement submit to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change outlining how their domestic policies will contribute to global climate action.

Countries are being urged to submit “enhanced” NDCs this year because the current trajectory of emissions is insufficient to keep warming to the Paris target of 1.5°C.

While Paris-aligned NDCs would provide a rapid and rising boost to global GDP, weak or unclear policies “risk delaying private investments and reducing GDP by 0.75% as early as 2030,” the brief’s authors say.

And those costs will multiply. “We’re actually talking about losing perhaps up to a third of global GDP this century,” Steiner warned his audience in Berlin.

When avoided climate impacts are factored in, the economic case for Paris-aligned climate action – beginning with a projected net GDP gain of 0.23% by 2040 – gets even stronger. “By reducing the risk of climate-induced events, an enhanced NDC scenario could prevent significant economic losses and increase global GDP by up to 3% by 2050 and up to 13% by 2100,” the OECD and UNDP say.

A (narrowing) window of opportunity

Most of the countries that signed on to the Paris Agreement missed this year’s February 10 deadline to submit their NDCs.

As of the end of February, only 18 of 195 NDCs had been submitted, and of those, only the United Kingdom’s is “in the right ballpark for a cost-effective path to 1.5ºC,” writes Climate Action Tracker. (Canada submitted its not-in-the-right-ballpark NDC on February 12.)

Countries are dragging their feet on their NDCs because of “shifting priorities” amidst “mounting economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions, and rising public debts,” the OECD and UNDP note.

That so many countries have yet to submit their NDCs means there is still time to change the global climate-action script, U.K.-based climate think tank E3G observes. “Key players still in the consultation phase – notably the EU, China, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, and Mexico – have a chance to lead the way ahead for the next decade and signal a cycle of positive reinforcement for other countries to follow suit in their ambition,” the think tank writes.

But again, much is at stake. Speaking at the Petersberg conference, UN climate secretary Simon Stiell warned that Europe’s economy will not survive the decades of extreme weather that are in the offing should strong global climate action fail to materialize, The Guardian reports.

By 2050, climate impacts would be shrinking Europe’s economy by 2.3% per year, Stiell told his audience. “Although those figures may appear small, the crucial point is that the economic contraction would continue year after year,” The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey writes. “By the end of two decades of such damage, the EU economy would cease to exist.”

All NDCs must be submitted by September if they are to be included in the UN’s next global synthesis of climate action, due out ahead of COP30.

The full OECD/UNDP report on the economic case for enhanced NDCs will be released in May.

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

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Early analysis suggests that global warming increased the likelihood and intensity of the extreme downpour, caused in this case by clashing warm and cold air over the Mediterranean Sea. In Paiporta, a town where at least 60 people died, residents digging themselves out of the devastation hurled mud from the storm at the king and queen of Spain who came to pay a visit, screaming out “killers” as a balm to their impotence and grief. 

If a picture is still worth a thousand words in our hyper-visual societies, then these fragments of environmental destruction, and those demanding accountability, represent powerful ammunition in the climate-messaging wars swirling around us. 

While outright climate denialism is waning as the direct evidence of global warming mounts around the world, new and more pernicious forms of denial are gaining ground. The election of powerful climate skeptics in 2024 – including Donald Trump, whose new energy secretary is a former fracking CEO who has talked up the benefits of a warmer planet and who just pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord – shows just how fragile the gains made are. 

Last year was exceptional for global democracy. More voters than ever in history headed to the polls in at least 64 countries, representing nearly half the world’s population. That’s why the “super election year” was also considered crucial for climate change – a chance for electorates to install leaders who could shepherd the delicate decisions required to drive down our planet-heating emissions. And yet, climate concerns far from defined those votes, suggesting that the magnitude of the problem still eludes us. 

With 2024 going down as yet another hottest year on record, some scientists call the international target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels “dead as a doornail,” while the United Nations considers it to be “still technically possible.” Setting aside that abstract figures such as these mean little to the average person, the prescription depends on a massive mobilization to cut greenhouse gases, led by the industrialized G20 nations that have most contributed to warming. 

Yet even at the world’s largest annual climate talks, the messaging has grown increasingly murky, muddied by fossil fuel interests and, as UN climate chief Simon Stiell put it, a mix of “bluffing, brinkmanship and pre-meditated playbooks.”

So where do we go from here? What’s the story we should be telling about climate change to produce concrete action that staves off its worst effects? With increasingly polarized public discourse, rampant disinformation and a democracy deficit driving a wedge between leaders and the communities they lead, can messaging make a difference?

1.5 degrees of separation 

“What we know is we can get people to care.” That’s Sergio Velasquez-Rose, head of strategy, insights and analytics at the Potential Energy Coalition, a non-profit, non-partisan alliance of marketing agencies trying to shift the conversation on climate change. 

Polling suggests that much of the global public does, in fact, understand what is at stake. 

The largest stand-alone public opinion survey, known as the People’s Climate Vote, took the temperature of 77 countries – representing 87% of the world’s population – in 2024. It found that 86% of respondents want countries to work together to find climate solutions, even if they disagree on other issues such as trade and security. Eighty percent want their communities to strengthen their climate commitments, and 71% want their countries to replace coal, oil and gas with renewable energy quickly or somewhat quickly. A survey by Potential Energy of 23 countries came to a similar conclusion: more than three-quarters of respondents want governments to do “whatever it takes” to limit the effects of climate change. 

This suggests that crafting a climate message that resonates shouldn’t be that hard. But it has been. 

“We really see this as a major communication problem,” Velasquez-Rose says. “We have the policies, we have the solutions, we know what the problem is and how to address it – but we have not been able to connect with humans in the right way.” He adds, “We’re getting stuck in concepts.” 

In its climate marketing guide called “Talk Like a Human,” Potential Energy lays out tips and traps – the latter of which this article has already fallen victim to. Words including “decarbonization,” “net-zero,” “anthropogenic” or “carbon footprint” don’t work. Instead, lean into pollution, overheating and extreme weather. Don’t exaggerate, it says – terms like “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” work much better with people who are already alarmed but not with people who aren’t, Potential Energy has found. Even something like “fight climate change” has pitfalls, its research has discovered. Instead, “fight pollution” is far more effective, accurate and a framing that people are already familiar with. 

We talk to people’s heads, but we forget to talk to people’s hearts.

—Mark Hertsgaard, co-founder, Covering Climate Now

Too often, climate change coverage is locked in scientific abstractions, such as 1.5 degrees or parts per million, notes Mark Hertsgaard, who co-founded Covering Climate Now, a partnership of now more than 500 media outlets (including Corporate Knights) that share content and expertise over how to cover climate change. Most people don’t know about the Paris Agreement, let alone the significance of 1.5°C.

“We talk to people’s heads, but we forget to talk to people’s hearts,” says Hertsgaard, who has reported on climate for 30 years, from 25 countries. When he launched Covering Climate Now five years ago, the goal was to break the “climate silence.” Through a collective effort that stretches beyond his organization, he believes that has largely been achieved. But coverage is still driven by the “weather story” and occasionally by climate change conferences, with little intersection with political and economic desks. “That reflects a misunderstanding, to put it mildly, of what climate change is and what it means: that this is an existential threat comparable to nuclear war and nuclear weapons, just on a different time frame,” he says. 

India, for example, went to the polls in the midst of a ferocious heat wave in June that claimed the lives of dozens of election workers and set off protests about water shortages – but climate was hardly at the forefront for presidential contenders. A feedback loop was missed. “Had candidates talked more about it, then media would have talked more about it, and had the media talked more about it, candidates would have talked more about it,” Hertsgaard says. 

Therein lies another issue: the messengers. The fact that politicians are currently the main communicators of climate action is a problem, Velasquez-Rose says, given their lack of credibility in large swaths of the planet. In the United States, which Potential Energy research shows has the greatest polarization on climate issues in the world, climate action is mostly associated with just one party, alienating those who support the other. 

Before the pandemic, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish youth environmentalist, had hit a nerve, mobilizing millions of young people from Argentina to Iceland to skip school and join marches to demand greater action from their governments with her Fridays for Future movement. But by 2024, some of the most visible climate messengers were critical of climate policies: European farmers driving their tractors into cities, pelting police with beets and dumping potatoes in front of legislative buildings in a standoff that led legislators to roll back environmental policies on the fastest-warming continent on the planet. 

“We need new voices to be the face of climate,” Velasquez-Rose says. He points to the success of a campaign they have run called “Science Moms,” which features scientists who are also mothers speaking about the impacts of climate change. In the five years since the campaign launched, it has increased support for climate policies by 20% among the target audience of moderate suburban mothers, Velasquez-Rose says. The Science Moms have credibility, and they are relatable, which is part of the secret sauce. 

Climate messaging bubbles and the new denialism

It’s not just what is being said, and who is saying it, but how that messaging is being funnelled and funded. For decades, the right-wing media machine in the United States has been building a powerful amplification system that stretches across evangelical churches, radio talk shows, podcasts, influencers and YouTube streamers, with massive amounts of funding from oil and gas interests and beyond pouring into anti-climate messaging that spreads disinformation like wildfire. “Nothing like that exists on the left,” Hertsgaard says. “Instead, there is a mainstream media that is still trying to play by the old rules that we’re going to be so-called objective and we’re not going to take sides. We sure as hell should be partisan as hell on behalf of the truth.” 

New fronts have also opened in the messaging wars that are reflected in a reframing of who bears responsibility. Richard Brooks, the Toronto-based climate finance director of Stand.earth, an environmental organization, notes the slippery shift from big banks. “There is this term that we keep hearing over and over again, which is that the energy transition that needs to happen has got to be ‘orderly’ – I’m going to put that in quotes,” he says. “And that is code for ‘We will stay invested in oil and gas companies.’ It will continue to be business as usual.” 

Since the Paris Agreement, Canadian bank investments in fossil fuels haven’t significantly changed, Brooks notes, with the “Big Five” banks funnelling nearly $1 trillion into the industry between 2016 and 2023, according to Stand.earth. “Slow-walking on climate action is really the new climate denialism,” he says. 

Brooks is part of a wave of longtime environmental activists who have shifted away from climate-messaging campaigns that try to get the public on side and instead have set their sights on the finance sector, fuelled by the belief that money is the message. Some, like the founders of Investors for Paris Compliance, are now working as shareholder activists, directing their messaging to hold Canadian publicly traded companies accountable to their net-zero promises. A number of environmental groups have established climate finance arms, including Stand.earth, which calls out inconsistent messaging from banks that claim to be net-zero aligned while still financing fossil fuels. 

“We need to challenge any corporate leader [or] CEO of a bank or pension fund who says we need to go orderly on this and slow,” Brooks says. “There’s nothing orderly about wildfires forcing thousands to evacuate [or] Toronto, the financial centre of Canada, flooding twice this summer.” 

From ‘greenwashing’ to ‘greenhushing’

Fear of getting caught in the crosshairs of the climate-messaging wars has contributed to a growing number of companies going quiet. A Republican-led backlash against corporate climate policies, under the banner of ESG (environmental, social, governance), has given rise to “greenhushing” – rather than aggrandizing environmental initiatives through “greenwashing,” companies are shying away from publicizing their green efforts. 

“In a polarized political environment, communicating about climate can feel risky for a publicly-traded company,” writes the Potential Energy Coalition, which teamed up with the We Mean Business Coalition to develop a new messaging guide for businesses. Across the globe, research shows that consumers want companies to reduce planet-warming pollution and invest in clean energy. In fact, they are more likely to spend their money on, speak well of and want to work for corporations that do so. The key, Potential Energy has found, is to frame climate action around materiality – not morality. 

“One thing is the messaging, the other thing is the business reality,” says María Mendiluce, CEO of We Mean Business and co-founder of the Women Leading on Climate coalition. “We see that the business community across the board is moving to clean energy because it makes business sense.” Still, language matters, she says. “In general, it’s quite simple: simple messages that people understand, that they can relate to.” 

“I think the left has been very good at complicating things to a level that many don’t understand and disconnecting with the base, with people who may not have that level of understanding of something that is really complex,” Mendiluce says. “We talk about ESG. And people are like, what is this? Even for me, and I come from the energy world.” 

One person who is adept at distilling a message so it resonates with a wide audience is once again president of the United States. The Democrats may have shied away from making climate change a focal point of their campaign, but Donald Trump used it. In the battleground state of Michigan, the Trump campaign ran ads that demonized the electric vehicle industry and cut to the heart of U.S. sensibilities about personal freedom and government overreach. “Kamala Harris wants to end all gas-powered cars. Crazy but true,” one commercial said. “Michigan auto workers are paying the price. Massive layoffs already started. You could be next.”

The climate change message has become so toxic to right-wing voters that some advocates for climate action believe the key is finding approaches that sidestep the topic and engage on different terms. For Joe Sacks, a Democratic political strategist, that means finding “friendlier terrain.” He is executive director of the EV Politics Project, a venture launched by EV-owning Republicans “frustrated by the growing EV bashing” and looking to foster more productive discussions around electric vehicles. His group found that US$35.5 million was spent nationwide on EV advertising during the presidential campaign. Some 94% of that money was spent in Michigan, the automotive heart of America, and the vast majority of the messaging was anti-EV.

Sacks thinks that Democrats should stop messaging along climate lines when it comes to EVs. “That’s just not how this is going to work. We need to find messaging that brings people in, that meets them where they are,” he says. Right now, he says, that message needs to revolve around manufacturing jobs. “Jobs that you often don’t need to get a college degree for, jobs that are often unionized, and when they’re not unionized they still pay really well, jobs that are spread across this country.” 

Democracy deficit

Tyrell Gittens, a climate change reporter in Trinidad and Tobago, agrees that the key is speaking to people in terms that hit closer to home. Issues like inflation or the success of their crops remain top of mind for many on his island nation, but the volatile climate’s role in that is still not clearly understood by many. “People want to understand; we have to meet them where they are,” he says. “An informed citizenry will create political will.” 

Inés Camilloni, a climate scientist in Argentina, notes a whole host of economic and geopolitical factors well beyond the scope of communication that make progress on tangible climate action complex, and, certainly, too slow. But “we have progressed.” And she credits messaging with helping usher in cultural transformations, including in places like her home country, where young people inspired by Thunberg helped push the government to enact new environmental legislation. That was, however, before the election of the current president, Javier Milei, a strong ally of Trump who echoes his denial that climate change is human-caused. In November, Milei pulled his delegation from the COP29 discussions and then revealed he was reconsidering Argentina’s place in the Paris Agreement, a move that raised the spectre of other countries following suit. “We are in uncertain times,” Camilloni admits. 

The biggest motivator 

For Hertsgaard, there are important levers still to be pulled in the messaging battle. “We have to be talking about solutions – not just what’s wrong,” he says. And drawing more attention to the gap that exists between what people say they want from their governments on climate action and what governments are doing.

The research is already painting a pretty clear picture of what works, Velasquez-Rose notes. Protecting one’s health and protecting our homes and families against extreme weather performs far better as a motivator for action against climate pollution. But fear versus hope is the wrong debate. The biggest motivator is protecting what we love. 

“The thing that ultimately gets us, that really core human truth, is protecting the future for the next generation,” Velasquez-Rose says. “When we think about communicating, we need to think about the humans. I can’t reiterate that enough.”

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

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Many of the world’s biggest banks face the enormous challenge of realigning their entire loans and investment operations in the coming years to put themselves on a credible path to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

“We want to see whether they are requiring all their clients to actually disclose their [greenhouse gas emissions],” said Danielle Fugere, CEO at As You Sow, a San Francisco–based shareholder advisory service, in an interview. “Ultimately, best practices come down to are we seeing year-over-year changes in their capital flows?”

Under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero forged for COP26, the banks have committed to not only decarbonize their portfolios but to adopt a transparent and rigorous short-term strategy that ensures they meet that 2050 target. The alliance, led by former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, comprises separate agreements for various financial sectors.

The banking agreement includes many of the largest financial players in North America, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup Inc., Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank.

Last week, the Bank of Canada and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) released the results of a pilot study on climate-related risk scenarios conducted with four Canadian insurance companies and two banks. OSFI said it will issue draft guidance for climate risk management for federally regulated financial institutions later this year.

All of the scenarios modelled by the government agencies and financial institutions showed that this transition will “entail important risks for some economic sectors,” a press release about the pilot study said. “Mispricing of transition risks could expose financial institutions and investors to sudden and large losses. It could also delay investments needed to help mitigate the impact of climate change.”

There is, unsurprisingly, considerable skepticism as to whether big North American banks can meet climate-related goals by weaning themselves off the fossil fuel sector and instead focusing on the loans and investment needed to finance the transition to a net-zero economy.

We want to see whether they are requiring all their clients to actually disclose their [greenhouse gas emissions].

-Danielle Fugere, CEO at As You Sow

Civil society research groups in the United States and Canada are determined to hold the industry’s collective feet to the fire. On December 16, Investors for Paris Compliance, a Canadian advocacy organization, released a “best practices” report that aims to guide not only banks but their shareholders, who are increasingly challenging business-as-usual practices at annual meetings.

The report calls on banks to put in place policies that will allow them to cut the carbon emissions of companies they finance by half by 2030, and to immediately end financing for new fossil fuel projects. The banks should adopt science-based targets for 2030 – aligned with the goal of limiting the average global temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – and tying compensation to progress on meeting the climate goals.

The report notes that the world is already seeing enormous costs from extreme weather events related to climate change, most recently with the catastrophic flooding in British Columbia and the searing heat and drought experienced throughout western North America last summer.

“Climate impacts are now material to investors and [are] set to become even more so,” it says. Banks “fail investors” when they finance that worsening climate picture, it adds.

In the United States, organizations such as the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility; Boston Common Asset Management, an ESG-focused investor; and As You Sow plan to engage with the signatories of the net-zero agreement both directly and at shareholder meetings to press them on implementation.

Banks face risks from the physical impacts of climate change as well as from government policies and emerging technologies that will disrupt their big customers in the carbon-intensive sectors. Still, they continue to allocate new capital to finance coal, oil and gas companies.

The world’s 60 largest commercial and investment banks provided US$3.8 trillion in financing to the fossil fuel sector worldwide between 2016 and 2020, according to a report, Banking on Climate Chaos, produced by a coalition of environmental advocacy groups. JPMorgan Chase and Citi continued to lead that list last year, while RBC and TD banks were among the top lenders to fossil fuel companies.

While short-term profits from financing the fossil fuel sector can be alluring as oil and gas prices soar around the world, credit rating agencies are also warning banks that climate change is a “major threat” to financial institutions. Analysis from Moody’s Investor Services recently concluded that climate risk is becoming a key determinant of banks’ loan quality and creditworthiness.

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Win or lose, Biden’s “Clean Energy Revolution” gave new hope to activists who have seen country after country (including Canada) pass the buck on climate change. At last a major-party candidate was acknowledging the crisis by committing himself to a detailed plan (19 pages long) that addresses not just carbon emissions but a whole ecosystem of related issues, including housing and social justice.

Best of all, Biden positioned his policy not as a gruelling struggle but as a shining opportunity to make the world healthier, fairer and more prosperous. In a phrase familiar to readers of Corporate Knights, he pledged to “Build Back Better.”

Biden’s plan, should he be elected, includes a pledge to sign, on day one, a series of executive orders “with unprecedented reach” to get America on the right track – starting with rejoining the Paris Agreement. As a president’s powers are limited, he also vowed to demand that Congress enact legislation to reach 100% clean electricity by 2035 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In his vision, America could become “the engine of the world’s clean energy economy,” developing cutting-edge technology to sell around the world.

Biden, the most “establishment” of all the candidates for the Democratic nomination, seemed an unlikely climate champion. As a senator, though, he introduced Washington’s first climate change bill back in 1986. (His bill died in the Senate, but a version later resurfaced and was signed into law by Ronald Reagan.) The Obama administration, in which Biden served as vice-president, talked the talk on climate issues but spent its first term addressing the 2008 financial crisis and afterward ran into opposition in Congress. Climate activists still begrudge Obama’s 2015 decision to allow Shell to drill for oil in Arctic waters.

When Biden began campaigning for the Democratic nomination, his proposed climate policies electrified nobody. The youth-oriented Sunrise Movement gave Biden’s plan just 75 points out of a possible 200 – far behind the scores of Bernie Sanders (183) and Elizabeth Warren (175). But after sewing up the nomination, Biden pivoted. He adopted the best ideas of his rivals (particularly those of Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee) and appointed outspoken Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and former secretary of state John Kerry to co-chair his climate task force.

By contrast, Trump’s re-election policies included breathless updates on the pipelines his administration had approved and the environmental and public health regulations he’d rolled back (more than 100 in total). A second term would give Republicans more clout to fight the many appeals of their anti-climate policies by advocacy groups and Democratic governors – and more time to appoint GOP judges to rule on those cases.

Worse, it would encourage other countries to ignore emission regulations, further eroding the world’s chances of limiting global warming to the Paris Agreement targets. “If Donald Trump is reelected,” wrote David Roberts at Vox.com, “the likely result will be irreversible changes to the climate that will degrade the quality of life of every subsequent generation of human beings.”

Either way, America seems likely to become a nation of informed, determined and increasingly motivated climate activists.

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