For me, this moment is not just for mourning, but for deep gratitude. We have been fortunate to witness a rare kind of leadership. At a time of widening divides – among nations, within societies, and between humanity and the planet – he offered a steady hand and a moral compass.

His 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti remains one of the most profound moral blueprints of our time. A rallying cry for unity, compassion and solidarity. In a world increasingly fractured, he reminded us of something simple but profound: we belong to each other. Migrants, the poor, the marginalized – he made no distinction. He asked us to look into the eyes of the “other” and see not a stranger, but a neighbour – not a threat, but a reflection of ourselves.

He made us feel we were working not just on policy, but on purpose.

He was never afraid to hold a mirror to power – reminding us often that political and economic systems should serve the common good, that true leadership means service, and that peace is not simply the absence of war, but the presence of justice.

I remember clearly the first time I met him. It was shortly after his election, and we were presenting the Better Growth, Better Climate report. He listened carefully – then gently reminded us: “Don’t forget who suffers most from climate change.” He asked us to go beyond the science and put people, especially the most vulnerable, at the centre of our work. Later, he showed us his modest room – having declined the grand papal apartments. That small act spoke volumes about his values: humility, solidarity, simplicity.

He cared deeply for the protection of nature – fitting, given that St. Francis is the patron saint of ecology. His 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, a passionate appeal for the care of our common home, marked a turning point in how faith, science and society could come together.

I will not easily forget the moment he stood before the 2015 United Nations General Assembly, when the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals. His presence brought a kind of stillness – and then, motion. He made us feel we were working not just on policy, but on purpose.

As the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Global South, and the first to take the name Francis, he disrupted centuries of convention, not for the sake of change, but to reflect a different kind of leadership – one that opened the doors of the church a little wider. As he said in one of his final letters, “Love builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” It’s a reminder we would do well to carry forward. The work is not finished. If anything, it begins anew.

He would often end our meetings with a simple request: “Pray for me.” And we did. Today, we return to that prayer. Rest well, dear brother. May your example continue to guide us, and may we be worthy to continue on the path you forged.

Now it falls to us to carry the light forward.

This article was originally written for LinkedIn. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. See the original post here.

Paul Polman is the former CEO of Unilever, a long-time climate campaigner and the author of Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More than They Take.

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On a frosty January day in 2006, a dozen inspectors from Quebec’s environment ministry, accompanied by a dozen members of the Sûreté du Québec, rolled into the farm of Clément Roy, in the Beauce countryside south of Quebec City. Together, they loaded all of Roy’s livestock – 585 sows, hogs and piglets, plus 12 cows – onto a fleet of transport trucks and drove them to the regional auction house to be sold. Vast quantities of the pig slurry and manure stored in Roy’s barns were sucked onto 50 tank trucks and removed.

The bill for this unprecedented “nettoyage,” plus a stiff fine, went to Roy. For more than a decade, the intransigent farmer had been violating environmental and agricultural regulations, ignoring repeated requests from the farming union and the environment ministry to clean up his act.

The message was clear: rules are rules. And the messenger was Tom Mulcair. The decision to put Clément Roy out of business reflected Mulcair’s conviction that for sustainable development to be anything more than a lofty goal, it needed to be codified in law, and that law needed to be enforced. This belief led to the crafting and passing of Quebec’s Sustainable Development Act, which anchored the principles of sustainable development in all facets of the provincial government’s administration while also adding the right to a healthy environment to the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. It was the first legislation of its kind in Canada.

This year, Corporate Knights is honouring Mulcair’s efforts with the 2024 Award of Distinction, announced in June. Past recipients include former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell and Adèle Hurley, co-founder of the Canadian Coalition on Acid Rain.

From the outset, it was clear that the government of Jean Charest, elected in 2003 after two terms of Parti Québécois rule, was going to make the environment a priority. Having served as federal environment minister in Brian Mulroney’s government, Charest had led the Canadian delegation to the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992 – where 154 countries signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreeing to work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and where Agenda 21, the action plan for achieving sustainable development, was launched. As premier, he renamed the Quebec portfolio the Ministry for Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks – the first and only of its kind in Canada – and appointed Mulcair, a whip-smart jurist and feisty parliamentarian, minister.

Mulcair was 49 when he joined the Charest cabinet; he had previously served two terms as a Liberal MNA for a Laval suburb and, prior to that, ran a private law practice and worked in legal capacities for multiple government ministries. His first priority as minister was to address two major – and related – environmental problems in Quebec: the blue-green algae blooms that were causing major ecosystem die-offs in many of the province’s lakes and rivers, and the agricultural run-off that was feeding them.

Having established itself as a major pork producer and exporter, Quebec had seen its pig farms grow in size and number and become a major source of leaked manure. Mulcair describes the relationship between pork producers and the government when he took office as “open warfare.” In an effort to bring the parties together, he agreed to lift the moratorium on new hog farms that had been declared by the previous government, on condition that all farms meet clearly established environmental standards. He also made it clear that there would be zero tolerance for violations, which is what led to that morning in mid-January, and the order that Mulcair now calls the toughest decision he made as minister.

“Sustainable development is not something you pound over people’s heads,” he says on the phone from his lake home in the Laurentians north of Montreal. “You have to work with people, to accompany them in their challenges. But you also have to enforce the rules.”

Mulcair’s determination to cultivate widespread understanding – and support – for the idea of sustainable development was reflected in the four-month road tour he took in 2005 with the first draft of his Sustainable Development Act. In a series of public hearings held in 21 municipalities across Quebec, Mulcair listened to Quebecers’ suggestions and concerns. He says the “super worthwhile” process resulted in a much stronger piece of legislation.

“It’s not Moses and the tablets,” he says of effective environmental policy. “This can’t just be the work of parties and bureaucrats.”

The Sustainable Development Act baked the idea of sustainable development into every aspect of the public service. It made “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” the government’s goal and enumerated 16 principles to guide it in getting there. Among them are the precautionary principle, which requires actors to err on the side of caution with respect to potential environmental impacts; polluter pays; and the internalization of costs, which insists that the value of a good reflect its entire life-cycle cost – including disposal. Mulcair considers the principle of “subsidiarity,” which delegates decision-making authority to the level of government closest to the citizens and communities concerned, to be a critical one. It has enabled Quebec municipalities to take a lead role in climate action. Key to the legislation’s effectiveness was the establishment of the position of sustainable development commissioner: a senior bureaucrat who evaluates each ministry’s implementation of the act and reports back to the auditor general.

It’s not Moses and the tablets. This can’t just be the work of parties and bureaucrats.

 

-Tom Mulcair, 2024 Award of Distinction

“There were lots of initiatives at the time,” says legal scholar Corinne Gendron, a professor of strategy and social and environmental responsibility at the Université du Québec à Montréal, “but they weren’t coordinated. The act meant that all ministries had to use the same strategy. The government had to change its practices to actually engage. It made sustainable development a core preoccupation.”

It also made it a human right. The Quebec charter was amended to include the clause “Every person has a right to live in a healthful environment in which biodiversity is preserved, to the extent and according to the standards provided by law.” It would be 17 more years before the federal government added this right to the Environmental Protection Act; it has yet to amend its own Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

It seems unfortunate, but fitting, that Mulcair stepped down from his ministerial position on a matter of principle. When he objected to the Quebec government’s proposal to sell a good chunk of Mont-Orford, a large national park in the Eastern Townships, to private developers, Charest shuffled him out of his ministry. The two had already done battle over Mulcair’s insistence that a developer restore a wetland in Laval that he had built on illegally. Clearly Mulcair’s convictions were, at times, inconvenient. So he packed them up and left provincial politics for the federal stage.

In 2007, he was elected MP for the Montreal riding of Outremont, representing the New Democratic Party, which had never made inroads in Quebec. As lieutenant to party leader Jack Layton, Mulcair helped grow support for the NDP in Quebec to the point that the party won the majority of Quebec seats in the 2011 federal election. This “orange wave” put the NDP in Official Opposition in Ottawa. Following the death of Layton, Mulcair was elected leader of the federal NDP, a position he held until 2017. As leader of the Official Opposition, Mulcair opposed the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines, pushed for an end to fossil fuel subsidies, and called for a cap-and-trade system for emissions and more rigorous environmental review processes.

Now retired from politics, Mulcair has made sustainable development the focus of his academic career. Having taught for several years in the political science department of the Université de Montréal, he is now expert in residence at the Université du Québec’s École nationale d’administration publique in Quebec City. This year he stepped down as chair of the board of Earth Day, a position he held for seven years.

As a political commentator, Mulcair disparages all the “emoting” he hears from politicians over the climate. What’s required, he says, is action. Easier said than done, some might say. To which Mulcair would doubtless respond: better said and done.

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The first time I went to the annual Woodstock for capitalists in the Swiss village of Davos back in 2005 (to launch the inaugural Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World ranking), Dylan’s lyrics would have been the last theme song in the universe chiming in my head.

I remember then asking Steven Schwartzman, co-founder of the giant investment firm Blackstone, if he was doing any investments in renewables or green companies. He replied, “Nah, that stuff is too small for us.”

How the music has changed. In 2019, it’s not just Corporate Knights crooning about sustainability in the Swiss alps. Now, the world’s biggest investors are dancing to the same beat, even if they still look a little awkward on the dance floor (anyone who made the McKinsey soiree at the Belvedere Hotel will know what I am talking about).

On Tuesday, François Riahi, the CEO of Natixis, a French bank with assets under management of $1 trillion, told guests at a dinner in the Belvedere Hotel, hosted by Corporate Knights and Climate Bonds Initiative, that his bank has introduced a Green Weighting Factor.  Weighting factors go to the heart of how bankers allocate money and this one aims to promote finance deals with a positive impact on both the climate and the environment at large by adjusting the expected profitability threshold on various transactions according to their effects on climate change. Riahi said that he sees a point not far off where two companies with the same financial profiles will have different costs of financing based on their alignment with a 2° C or less world.

We also heard from an executive at BNP Paribas (one of the ten largest banks in the world) that the bank has set – and met – a target of 15% of its corporate loans being dedicated to furthering the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in part because they link executive bonuses to achieving the target.

After dinner, I swung by a reception hosted by Steve Forbes of the eponymous Forbes magazine (otherwise known as the bullhorn for red-blooded capitalism), whose main (and most read) story published that day was a feature on Corporate Knights’ Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations. Whereas past incarnations of the Forbes Davos shindig showcased magazine covers celebrating the wealthiest people on the planet, this year the blown-up cover on display beside the champagne flutes was for the Just 100, a ranking of America’s most just companies.

Wednesday morning on the way to breakfast, I picked up one of the many free copies of the Financial Times on offer. As I was leafing through the paper at breakfast, I couldn’t help notice two of the largest investors in the world (UBS $3.2 trillion, and Amundi with $1.5 trillion) had taken out prominent ads extolling that they were going all-in on sustainable investing.

As I pondered this, a friendly-looking woman with a Northeastern U.S. twang asked if she could join me for breakfast. It was Barbara Novick, vice-chair of Blackrock, the world’s largest investor with $6.4 trillion assets under management. The week prior, Blackrock had been the target of a brilliant Yes Men campaign, which distributed the 2019 annual letter ostensibly from Larry Fink complete with a faux-web site announcing that the world’s largest investor was going to dump companies failing to comply with the Paris accord: “To make good on the threat I issued last year, we will begin this work by divesting from coal companies in our actively managed funds. Within 5 years, more than 90% of our 1000+ investment products will be converted to screen out non-Paris compliant companies such as coal, oil, and gas, which we see as declining and endangered.”

The remarkable part, and sign of the times, was that the venerable Financial Times fell for it, publishing a story that the world’s largest investor was going to dump companies failing to comply with the Paris accord, before Blackrock clarified it was hoax. The fact that such a story could be deemed plausible by the world’s financial newspaper of record tells us how far perceptions on sustainable investment possibilities have come in just a short time.

Later that evening at a dinner focused on financing the sustainable development goals, an academic from Cambridge University, Ellen Quigley, challenged Scott Mather, chief investment officer of Pimco, one of the world largest bond fund managers (with $1.8 trillion assets under management), to account for what his firm is doing to defund “zombie companies” out of step with a sustainable low carbon future. I was expecting a canned answer but was instead surprised by Mather, who between bites from his poached pear desert, noted that they are keenly aware of companies at risk of “zombification” and are already taking measure to reflect this in their credit ratings and in the make-up of their investment portfolios.

The Davos 2019 takeaway for me is that while the establishment capitalists are late to the sustainability party, they have finally shown up. Thank goodness, because we are running out of time, and we need all the help we can get. As Sir David Attenborough pointed out in his plenary address:

 The future of the natural world is in our hands. We can wreck it with ease. We can wreck it without even noticing.

 

-Sir David Attenborough

There is no question in my mind that we can find a way to reconcile humanity with a livable planet. The question is whether this happens smoothly within our current capitalist system or with great upheaval. If capitalism is going to adapt and survive as economies change to become symbiotic with the planet and society, it will require a new mindset which appreciates that healthy markets require healthy societies, and that serving society is not incompatible with serving shareholders—within reasonable limits.

I believe this ethic is taking root. In order to make capitalism dance for society, the below dos gleaned this week in Davos offer some instructive wisdom:

#1 Do focus on the big numbers. Plastic straws matter symbolically, but if China’s Belt and Road Initiative (China’s multi-billion Marshall-esque Plan for economic development along the old Silk Road route) doesn’t have sustainable design principles embedded, its impact will be on par with adding two China’s worth of carbon emissions to the planet, as Simon Zadek, the UN man charged with figuring out how to finance the SDGs, pointed out.

#2 Put your money where your mouth is. Let’s make sure major capital flows all go through the lens of sustainable development, including the sleeping giant, corporate pension plans. That could unlock trillions of dollars for green investment, as the heads of the world’s largest corporate and investor sustainability initiatives have called for.

#3 Hold investors to account. While corporate sustainability rankings abound, it’s time to rank the world’s largest investors on what they’re doing to bring about a sustainable world (stay tuned on this one).

#4 Put more women in charge. Dominique Reiniche (the chair of Chr. Hansen, the most sustainable corporation in the world), Angela Merkel (climate warrior and closest thing we have to a leader of the free world), New Zealand’s rock star PM Jacinda Ahern (who is going beyond GDP with a well-being budget to guide her government’s priorities), and the trailblazing heads of the world’s largest corporate (Lise Kingo) and investor sustainability initiatives (Fiona Reynolds) are all women. Notice a pattern.

#5 Scale bottom-up solutions. While the big institutions of yesterday are coming around, their inertia makes it more likely that transformational solutions will emerge from bottom-up sources that harness the better angels of human nature.

#6 Champion new visionaries for a sustainable economy. It’s time to replace yesterday’s capitalist icons with new heroes that point the way to a sustainable planet, like Mariana Mazzucato in her new screed, The Value of Everything, that lays out a powerful framework for purposeful capitalism and Oxford’s Colin Mayer, author of Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good.

#7 Do stay in touch with the nature. Its essence will sustain and inspire this journey, as Jane Goodall and 17-year old wildlife photographer, Skye Meaker (my bus-mate from the Zurich airport), emphasized. If the proprietor of local cross-country ski rental shop is any indication (“we are not big fans of the WEF because they’re too busy with their meetings to go skiing”), the Davos men and women still have some work to do here.

#8 Do swim against the current—it could be the best way to get ahead of the pack which is still extrapolating from the past to predict a future that is going to be radically different. As Bill Gates wisely reminded: We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

#9 Exercise persistence. Nothing worthwhile is easy.

#10 Get out of your comfort zone. That’s the best sign that you may be doing a jig that has legs.

Bottom line: CEOs who want to be on the right side of history will want to lead change rather than stand in its way. Although it would be hard to imagine him ever making an appearance at Davos (like Sting did this year at the Salesforce party), Dylan may have captured the zeitgeist best: Your old road is rapidly agin.’ Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times they are a-changin.’

The post 10 lessons from Davos on changing capitalism’s tune 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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