Corporate Knights

The recent high-profile duck deaths in Syncrude’s tailing ponds are a tragic reminder that environmental risks matter in business. Environmental carelessness can affect corporate profits through fines, bad publicity and regulations that increase a company’s operating costs. Information about a given company’s environmental risks, including climate change risks, should now be more readily available from Canada’s publicly traded companies following new guidance from Canada’s securities regulators. This may get more companies and their investors thinking about climate change and its relationship to business

Can states and provinces go it alone? As the federal governments of Canada and the United States struggle to get climate legislation off the ground, states and provinces stepping up to the plate and working together to address climate change.

Many consumers wonder if they should believe products’ environmental claims. Consumers are educating themselves and fighting back against greenwashing, and lessons from these fights can help inform consumers about climate claims—claims made about the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted or avoided in the production, use and disposal of a product.

Numerous financial tools have been proposed to help de-carbonize the global economy. Cap and trade, the carbon tax, and subsidized technology upgrades are the best known, but another idea, the “Green Bond”, has recently received a lot of attention as a way to complement cap and trade.

Most of the world will feel the effects of climate change through the medium of water. We all need it to live. It is also a necessary component of food and consumer products. Too much or too little of it in one place is devastating.

A simple fact—trees take in and store carbon dioxide—has turned into a complex legal issue. While some may think trees can easily hold most of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before we can legally encourage forest sequestration there are a number of important questions to ask. Who owns the land? Who has the right to the trees? Are there First Nations rights/claims involved? Does law already protect the lands in question? What are the risks and liabilities associated with forest disturbances such as forest fires?