Corporate Knights

Is Telus’s future worker-friendly? Recently, you provided [a Global 100] award to Telus Communications. I wanted to make sure you were aware of the recent union negotiations taking place. Telus has tabled many concessions, including no wage increase from the expiry of the previous collective agreement, which means no retroactivity during the most inflationary period, the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. They are withholding any raise until ratification, which could be many months out still. To make matters worse, they have pension and health benefit concessions, as well as many more. Despite their activity in the environmental, social and governance (ESG) space, and their insistence that they are committed to Canadian communities, they have reduced their workforce by 5,000 unionized jobs in the last six years alone.…

With apologies to Charles Dickens: It was the best of times (never had so many lived so well), it was the worst of times (never had our home been more imperilled). If we’re going to hit our 2030 targets to stave off runaway global heating, we needed to dial down global emissions by 4% in 2022. Instead, they went up by almost 1%, reaching record levels of 36.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. We are not too late to safeguard a future worth living in. Every second and fraction of a degree matters. The solutions to climate change are taking off. A new growth story is beginning. Over the next five years, the world will meet more than half the tipping points for green tech, according to British economist Nicholas…

Despite claims by many countries that they’re ramping up efforts to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, a first glimpse at emissions data for 2022 shows otherwise. A March report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) reveals that global emissions rose in 2022. That means major emitters such as the U.S. and China are falling further behind in meeting their climate targets. The IEA said that CO2 emissions last year would have been nearly three times higher without growth in clean energy, but this doesn’t let governments off the hook for their failure to bring down emissions meaningfully. “A smaller increase than ‘initially feared’ is a far cry from the rapid emission reductions the world needs to see to avoid the worst impacts of global warming,” Daniel A. Lashof, the director…

For many, the clean energy transition has seemed a bit like a desert mirage. If you squint you can see it, but it never seems to get any closer. Well, it’s finally coming into focus. A recent report from climate statisticians at BloombergNEF (BNEF) says global investment in low-carbon energy technology totalled a record $1.1 trillion (all figures in U.S. dollars) in 2022 – up 31% in a year. Better still: for the first time, global investment in green energy technologies – such as renewable energy, electrified transport and energy storage – has reached parity with the total capital deployed to produce new fossil fuels. The strong growth in green came as a surprise, given last year’s energy squeeze in Europe and iffy financial markets. In a press release, report…

The amount of plastic consumed in G20 countries is on course to nearly double by 2050, unless a legally binding global plastic treaty succeeds in curbing waste trends, according to a report released in late February by Back to Blue, a research group run by the Economist Impact think tank and the Nippon Foundation. Environmentalists are hopeful that the second round of negotiations for the UN Global Treaty to End Plastic Pollution set to begin in Paris in May will be more fruitful than the first. The inaugural plastics summit (Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, or INC1) closed in Uruguay at the end of last year without a huge amount of progress, as it was largely focused on procedural issues, but the fact that the negotiations happened at all was reason enough…

In Canada, 2022 will go down as the third-worst year for weather-related insurance losses in history – so far. Catastrophes spanned the country, from late-winter storms in the Atlantic provinces to Manitoba’s spring flooding, Ontario/Quebec’s derecho windstorm in May, summer storms on the Prairies, Hurricane Fiona in September, and B.C.’s “king tide” winter storm in December. Aware that climate change is increasing the severity and frequency of extreme weather, governments are developing strategies to mitigate the damage caused by future floods, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, heat events and rising seas. Closely watching this situation are Canada’s insurance companies, which shouldered weather-related claims last year of $3.1 billion. “Canada is increasingly a riskier place to live, work and insure,” said Craig Stewart, vice-president of climate change and federal issues for the Insurance…