The speaker, then a young Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, predicted that the enormous costs of fighting pollution would test politicians’ will and the public purse. “Are we all prepared to accept these price increases for the sometimes dubious advantage of seeing our environment improved? Are we prepared to discipline ourselves to restrictions and regulations that we feel we ought to impose for our own good?” 

Sadly, Charles proved uncommonly prescient. As heir apparent, he fought climate complacency for 50 years, proving himself to be one of the world’s most consistent – if unlikeliest – eco-activists. The road, however, has been bumpy. At the start, Charles recently recalled, he was considered “dotty” for harping on such uncomfortable truths. Later, he enraged Cabinet members for exposing Britain’s odious habit of dumping sewage in the North Sea. 

Charles has harangued and fatigued his subjects over topics as varied as conservation of wetlands and wildlife, urban design and architecture, organic farming, sheep-shearing, green buildings, socially responsible business, personalized healthcare and electric vehicles (his own Aston Martin runs on surplus wine and whey from cheese-making).  

As he explained in the introduction to his 2009 book, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, “What I have actually been trying to demonstrate is that all of these subjects are completely inter-related and that we have to look at the whole picture to understand the problems we face. For not only does it concern the way we treat the world around us, it is also to do with how we view ourselves.” 

His solutions have also been remarkably consistent in encouraging creative leaders. In that 1970 speech, he launched a new “Countryside Award” for organizations that enhanced the environment of Wales. Half a century later, he launched the Sustainable Markets Initiative to rally global companies to accelerate the energy transition; at COP26, the 2021 UN climate summit in Glasgow, Charles handed out the Terra Carta Seal to 45 global companies leading the way (a project on which Corporate Knights offers advising services).  

But while Charles has been heralded for his climate advocacy, some climate activists from countries colonized by England are hoping the new king will do more to acknowledge the links between colonialism and the climate crisis. In a report released in April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change named colonialism as a driver of the “vulnerability of ecosystems and people to climate change.” 

But as king, Charles will likely have to curtail his activist instincts. Centuries of convention forbid the British monarch to interfere in political decision-making (Charles I lost his head in 1649 for insisting on the divine right of kings). “It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply,” said Charles in a televised address in September.  

Jonathon Porritt, former head of the U.K. Green party and Charles’s sometime advisor, notes that his reticence may not carry over into private conversations – and that the monarch meets with the prime minister every week. As Porritt told The Guardian, “Whoever is prime minister should probably anticipate a pretty lively set of conversations.”  

In any event, William, the new Prince of Wales, seems set to carry on his father’s work. In 2020, he cofounded, with biologist and broadcaster David Attenborough, the Earthshot Prize, a 50-million-pound organization to recognize individuals or organizations that create impactful solutions to big environmental problems. In announcing the first winners last year, William courted controversy by criticizing billionaire entrepreneurs for funding space travel over climate solutions: “We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.” Sounds like a chip off the old block. 

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The list of companies that qualified for this royal “seal of approval” includes Amazon, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, HP, IBM, PepsiCo and Unilever. All of the recipient companies hold leadership positions within their industries and have credible transition roadmaps underpinned by globally recognized, scientific metrics for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 or earlier.

The Terra Carta Seal, launching in Glasgow November 3, comes out of the Prince of Wales’s recent Terra Carta initiative, a recovery plan for the private sector that prioritizes nature. 

The name Terra Carta (“Earth Charter”) derives from the Magna Carta, a charter of rights developed by King John and his barons 800 years ago that marked the first step in limiting monarchical power in England. The Prince of Wales believes we’ve reached a similar turning point in the battle against climate catastrophe, praising these organizations “who have made a serious and action-orientated commitment to prioritise the transition to a sustainable future while putting Nature, People and Planet at the heart of the way they operate.”

The Canadian firms on the list are Cogeco, Stantec and Telus. Adding to that Canadian content, Corporate Knights played a role in vetting and offering counsel on the companies under consideration. SMI used the Corporate Knights Global 100 ranking as the starting point for its list in combination with SMI’s active task force members. Corporate Knights researchers helped evaluate individual companies’ qualifications.

Prince Charles, a long-time environmental crusader, provided opening remarks at the Global 100’s virtual launch last January. “We talked in the back room on Zoom,” says Corporate Knights co-founder and chief executive Toby Heaps. That’s where His Royal Highness asked Heaps if Corporate Knights could use its experience in ranking – and reading between the lines on companies’ sustainability commitments – to help establish an authoritative list of companies to receive the Terra Carta Seal. “There are no perfect companies” when it comes to sustainability, says Heaps. “But we have a pretty good red-flag detector.” 

Heaps hopes the program will help other business leaders push harder for more sustainable futures. “We need to see businesses flow money into climate solutions,” he says. “The solutions are ready. This is the kind of thing that can get a CEO’s attention.”

The Terra Carta Seal is awarded to companies that have documented plans to halve their greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 or achieve net-zero by 2050. They have also committed to adopting standardized reporting metrics.

“The real opportunity is to see what this group of companies can do together.”

–Steve Fleck, executive vice-president, Stantec

Stantec, an Edmonton-based engineering and construction firm, was the highest-ranked North American company on this year’s Global 100. Vancouver-based telecom Telus has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 31% since 2010 and has purchase agreements that power all its activities in Alberta with renewable electricity. Cogeco, a Montreal-based cable and internet supplier, has committed to reducing its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 65% by 2030. All three companies have had their emissions-reduction plans approved by the Science Based Targets initiative as meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Two days before the announcement of the Terra Carta Seal, the executive team at Stantec learned they had made the cut. “It’s quite an honour but not a surprise,” says executive vice-president Steve Fleck. “Sustainability is part of Stantec – it’s in the water.” 

Fleck believes the honour will be good for business. He says Stantec got into sustainability early through its clients in public–private partnerships, such as the 2007 Kelowna-Vernon hospital project in British Columbia. “There were specific energy criteria we had to meet,” he says. The company knew it would be held responsible if those standards weren’t met – but it also discovered opportunities to win when contractors exceed expectations. 

Today Stantec is regularly involved in building net-zero buildings, retrofitting older structures, enhancing coastal resilience for shoreline communities, and helping mining and oil firms shrink their carbon footprints. “It’s a big change from a few years ago,” says Fleck, “when some of these companies would have been leading the climate denial issue.”

Stantec looks forward to participating in the activist executive network Prince Charles hopes to build through the Terra Carta Seal. “The real opportunity is to see what this group of companies can do together,” Fleck says. “In many ways, private-sector entities are moving forward more efficiently and quickly than governments can do. So I have a lot of time for this institution.”

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A combination of pasta, hot dogs, oranges and green peppers got him through the month.

Some 30 years later, riding Tesla’s soaring stock, Musk passed Jeff Bezos to become the richest man on the planet, with a net worth of US$189.7 billion as of January 8, 2021.

In carrying out his mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, Musk has become a prophet for clean capitalism, with Tesla now ranked as the most sustainable and valuable car company in the world.

Musk is not alone. The Prince of Wales, the pope, and critically, a protest movement catalyzed by Greta Thunberg have all turned up the heat for businesses to get real about cooling the planet.

Prince Charles has long championed the environment and the central role industry and finance must play in its protection, but he’s dialled up the urgency significantly in the past year. In the fall, he said climate change poses such a severe threat that the world’s only option is to adopt a military-style response reminiscent of the U.S. Marshall Plan that helped rebuild post-war Europe 70 years ago.

In January, the prince looked back more than 800 years to the Magna Carta (which inspired a belief in the fundamental rights of people) to issue a companion document – the Terra Carta, or Earth Charter – that aims to enshrine the rights and value of nature in capitalism, inviting the world’s CEOs to make a sustainable future the growth story of our time.

Pope Francis once described unbridled capitalism as the “dung of the devil.” In a sign of the times, he recently gave his blessing to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a partnership between the Vatican and the leaders of some of the world’s largest businesses, including the chiefs of BP and Bank of America.

This seemingly unholy alliance seeks to make capitalism a more holy instrument for answering the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.

There are now more than 300 companies, representing more than US$3.6 trillion in market cap, that have committed to a net-zero-emission target in line with a 1.5°C future.

Some worry these are empty words that give the impression that sufficient action is being taken – a sort of delay tactic. Thunberg, the teenaged activist who kicked off a citizens’ climate movement, says, “We must forget about net-zero – we need real zero.”

She spells out what that means:

“Immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction. Immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies. And immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels. We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030 or even [next year]. We want this done now.”

She’s right, but defunding carbon bombs will not be enough; not even close. The real action is going all in on funding climate solutions. What gets funded gets done. How we invest our trillions starting right now will determine our future.

To paraphrase Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, the climate-solution revolution is today, not tomorrow. The litmus test for companies and countries (and anyone, really) is what percentage of your current budget is allocated with an intention to create a carbon-free sustainable world. If it’s less than 100%, you’ve got work to do.

The recently released Corporate Knights Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World is a list of companies that are, in the words of Prince Charles, who spoke at this year’s launch, “leading the way by putting sustainability at the heart of their products, services, business models and investments, helping to move the world onto a more sustainable trajectory.”

This year’s Global 100 companies rose to the top of a pool of 8,080 global firms that earn more than $1 billion a year, based on rigorous assessment of 24 indicators, including percentage of taxes paid and percentage of revenue and new investments aligned with a sustainable economy. Several new performance indicators reflect social concerns highlighted by both the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, including providing paid sick leave and executive and board racial diversity.

On average, one-third of new investments on the part of Global 100 companies are clean, in contrast to less than one-quarter for their peers, while the percentage of Global 100 companies that offer at least 10 days of paid sick leave (86%) is more than double that of their peer benchmark, the MSCI All Country World Index (41%).

Global 100 companies also earned on average 41% of their revenues from products or services aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, compared to just 8% for their peers.

But none of this would have legs if the good guys weren’t also faring well financially. On this score, the Global 100, which is calculated as an index, handily outperformed its MSCI ACWI peers by 10% over the last year, and 43% since the Global 100 index was launched in 2005.

What is needed now is for the rest of the business world, most importantly the big-money investors who have been sitting on the sidelines, to also lean into this more civilized form of sustainable capitalism.

Encouragingly, the largest pension fund in Ontario, the $205 billion Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, recently committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This marks a stark contrast to the Canada Pension Plan, which has no such target and has been singled out for its “troubling incrementalism” by Osgoode Hall pension scholars – while forgoing $6 billion in returns as a result of its fossil fuel investments over the past 10 years, according to Corporate Knights analysis of its equities portfolio.

But now that BlackRock, the largest investor in the world, with a whopping $8.7 trillion under management, has jumped on the net-zero-emissions bandwagon, it is only a matter of time before it becomes the standard, placing a 100% sustainable and zero-carbon economy within our grasp.

The good news for our species is that the forces of pride and profit have shifted in favour of those on the right side of climate history, with shame and economic shambles awaiting those who cling to the wrong side.

Just four of the 13 Canadian companies on the Global 100 have committed to align their businesses with net-zero science-based targets, compared to more than half of Global 100 companies in general, though there is still time for them to get on board in the lead-up to global climate talks this fall in Glasgow.

With the sun shining on climate solutions, companies are free at last to shed their carbon cloaks.

A version of this article appears in the Winter Issue of Corporate Knights as well as the Toronto Star.

Toby Heaps is the CEO and editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights.

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