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The Sustainability Consultant Network is presenting a new series about how the climate crisis is affecting us here in the GTA in the present time. Using a Kitchen Table format we will look at the many different issues that are making our community and city undergo many interrelated threats.

The first part of the series is about food security, food prices and food nutrition, all of which are affected by the climate crisis.

Join us for a lively discussion on June 22, 2021 7 pm (EDT).

Canada has a very high standard of living, and is one of the richest countries in the world. Unfortunately, as individuals this leads us to use more resources and buy more products than needed. These actions produce climate-changing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and further burden and pollute our environment. With an increasing population growth (in the Greater Toronto area alone population is predicted to be over 9.5 million by 2046), the stress on the environment will be even higher.

It is crucial that we decrease our consumption, not because we can’t afford things, but because we realize how important it is for our future and generations after us.

Consumption is unequally distributed around the globe, with developed countries spending more than developing countries. Because of the scale of our consumption in Canada, individuals can make significant changes. We also have the power to influence large companies through our buying decisions.

Here are five areas where we can make improvements:

1. Shopping habits. In our consumer society, we are taught to buy lots of new things which we don’t need. We are flooded with advertising, but it is still us who decide what we buy. When we start buying only things we really need, and the ones with the least ecological footprint, we can make a real difference. The packaging of products, where they were produced, the ingredients and materials used, and whether they are disposable or reusable, are all important factors in buying decisions.
   
   
2. Diet and food waste. A plant-based diet uses far fewer resources than a meat-based diet, so, it is important to limit or avoid meat consumption. Buying meat from smaller local producers can help too. We can see this shift in the official guidelines of several countries around the world as well.
   Food worth more than 40 billion dollars is wasted every year in Canada. Households create half of it – 2.2 million tons worth 17 billion dollars. Food waste is the world’s dumbest problem. Conscious buying and proper food storage are essential for improving our food waste situation.
   
   
3. Energy consumption. Canadians are among the top per capita consumers of energy in the world, with an even larger consumption rate than Americans. Switching to renewables alone will not be enough, we need to reduce consumption as well. There is no direct relationship between electricity consumption and human development,  and a high standard of living can be maintained without excessive energy consumption. Using energy-efficient appliances, tracking phantom power, turning off lights, etc. can make a big difference. There are many programs and incentives to make your home more energy-efficient, including some offered by The City of Toronto.
   
   
4. Transportation. 25 percent of GHG emissions in Canada come from transportation. The most environmentally friendly forms of transport are active transport (walk, bike) and public transport. Many people still need to use a car, so sharing rides can be another way to reduce our collective emissions. Switching to electric vehicles is among the other options, but, that still drives increased energy use.
   
   
5. Water consumption. Canadians use approximately 300 L of water every day, which makes us the third biggest consumers of water on the planet. Even though Canada has 7 percent of the global renewable freshwater supply (20 percent of global freshwater supply in total), the country is already experiencing water scarcity in some areas. In recent years Canada’s freshwater exports have increased and we should closely watch the effects on national water security. It’s worth mentioning that in late 2020, for the first time in history, water began trading on the stock market as a commodity.
   So, what can we do to reduce water consumption in our homes? We can start by switching to low or dual-flush toilets (4.8 L), low-flow showerheads (under 7.6 L/min) and faucets (under 5.7 L/min), and faucet aerators, which can reduce water use up by 25 percent.
   There are many other tips, which can be found on the City of Toronto website. You can also start tracking your water consumption through MyWaterToronto app to better understand your usage.
   
   FunFact: According to the WorldCounts website, we will run out of fresh water on our planet in 18 years, 206 days and 7 hours (as of this writing) if we don’t dramatically  reduce its consumption.

We can start adapting to the ‘new normal’ now, and reverse many effects of climate change, or we can wait another ten years and deal with more drastic government enforced cuts. It all depends on us and what actions we take in the next few years. These are minor changes in our daily habits, which will have a big impact globally. And together we can make that change.

The webinar on Sustainable Investing with Sucheta Rajagopal was very successful, and provided valuable information on how we can invest according to our values.

You can watch the recording of the webinar below. Followed by Sucheta’s presentation.

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Join us on Tuesday, May 25 from 6 – 7 pm for a webinar on Sustainable Investing with Sucheta Rajagopal. To join, use the QR code on the poster above or click here to go to Airmeet .

Sucheta Rajagopal has been involved in Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) for over 20 years, advising clients on how to integrate environmental, social and corporate governance issues into their investment portfolios.

 A Portfolio Manager and Certified Financial Planner at Research Capital Corp., Sucheta manages one of the largest exclusively SRI books of business in Canada. Using plain English and a practical approach, Sucheta helps clients align their investments with their values.

A trailblazer in Canadian SRI, Sucheta is excited to be helping build capacity and community in Impact Investing. She is currently a member of the Advisory board of Marigold Capital, a Toronto based investment firm focusing on impact investing & gender lens investing strategies, and she also serves on the Board of the Catherine Donnelly Foundation.

Sucheta has an LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School. She is a graduate of the Canadian Securities Institute’s Professional Financial Planning Program, a Certified Investment Manager (CIM), a Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute (FCSI) and a Certified Financial Planner (CFP). Sucheta has also earned Canada’s Responsible Investment Advisor Certification (RIAC).

Food is an essential component in our lives. Without nutritious food in sufficient amount, we can’t live our lives fully. Food gives us energy, nourishes our bodies and can elevate our mood. Yes, the food we eat has a tremendous impact on how we feel and think.

Current food production and distribution systems are a major component in the accelerating world environmental and climate crises. We grow cash crops in places which are not suitable for it, depriving people living in the area of their basic needs such as clean water, space to live and a fair livelihood. Then we ship this food around the world, while losing a huge part of it due to handling throughout the transport and distribution processes, and leaving an enormous footprint on our planet.

Extreme weather events such as wild fires, flooding, heat waves and droughts are becoming more frequent and more intense year by year. Unpredictable weather patterns make it very hard for agriculture to adapt and create more losses. Our unsustainable way of growing and transporting crops, with billions of dollars in losses in food waste along the way, are driving the prices of food to new highs. This trend will continue unless we start rethinking and managing the food chain in much more sustainable and regenerative way.

 In Canada alone, food costs for an average family increase by hundreds of dollars every year. Increased food prices, along with an overall rising cost of living and stagnant wages, are at the root of another big issue which needs to be tackled– food security.

Food insecurity is affecting all communities, without exception. We live in a connected world and the idea that this problem is not ‘our’ but ‘their’ problem is flawed on many levels. It is true that the primary reason of food insecurity is income insecurity. However, due to wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, ice storms and other extreme events, more and more people will become food insecure from disruptions in the food chain.

In the Greater Toronto Area, food access is considered to be the weakest link in the food security field. By bringing fresh food production closer to, or within urban areas, and educating residents about growing their own food, not only can the issue of food insecurity be addressed, but a lesser known problem – food that provides insufficient nutrition.

It’s known that levels of CO2 predicted in the atmosphere for 2050 will cause major deficiencies in the nutritional value of crops. Crops such as wheat, barley and rice will lose up to 10% of their protein content. These and other mineral deficiencies will cause malnutrition and other health issues, adding additional pressure to already challenged healthcare systems.

Food is at the center of our lives. We need healthy nutritious food to live, as we need clean air to breathe. The solutions and technologies are already there, we just need to start collectively with their implementation. The speed of change really depends on us, on our commitment and will to reverse the damage we’ve caused and to create a healthy thriving world.

Written by Veronika Kosova

Some twenty years ago, I wanted to invest in companies that reflected my values. It wasn’t that easy to do. While the concept of socially responsible managed funds has been around since the seventies, by the nineties there still weren’t that many out there, and generally they didn’t have a long or stellar track record. And there definitely weren’t any tools allowing me to evaluate companies myself.

As a result, I ended up in an uncomfortable mish-mash of solar power companies, clean water plays, and other greenish investments, with mixed results that I’d rather not talk about.

But the age of sustainable investing for everyone appears to have finally arrived.

What is sustainable investing?

Broadly speaking, sustainable investing is an investment strategy which puts your money into assets consistent with specific ethical principles, presumably yours. However, it’s not just an exercise in feeling good about yourself. Sustainable investing can reduce long-term risk and enhance financial performance.

Sustainable investing can be a blanket term for related strategies, including values-based investing, ethical investing, ESG investing, socially responsible investing, and impact investing.

Why so many terms, and what’s the difference between them?

While these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there are differences.

Socially responsible Investing (SRI) typically involves negative screening on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria – depending on the investment manager, this may mean excluding a wide variety of investments; for example, fossil fuel producers, firearms manufacturers and tobacco companies. This is the oldest and most common form of sustainable investment.

Impact investing uses positive screening – instead of just avoiding companies that have a poor track record on ESG issues, impact investors seek out firms that are actively looking to do good. This strategy is necessarily more risky than negative screening, but you get the warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing that your money is advancing society.

Why would I do it?

Why wouldn’t you? You and your money can do some good in the world (or at least less bad) and get rewarded with the above-mentioned feel-good dopamine release.

But what about my returns?

Returns matter. Unless you’re Warren Buffett or Mark Zuckerberg, you likely can’t afford to gamble away a million here or there (and if you are Buffett or Zuckerberg, thanks for reading and please like or share this article.)

Fortunately there’s a lot of evidence that companies with high ESG scores perform better in the marketplace.

Fund rating company Morningstar says that “funds that explicitly embrace ESG as part of their prospectus… tend to have better star ratings. That means their risk-adjusted returns within their category tend to be a little better than what you’d expect for the overall universe.”

Research from the Harvard Business School found that “firms with good performance on material sustainability issues significantly outperform firms with poor performance on these issues, suggesting that investments in sustainability issues are shareholder-value enhancing.”

And a 2015 metastudy in the Journal of Sustainable Finance and Investment looked at 2200 other studies linking ESG with Corporate Financial Performance and concluded that “Investing in ESG pays financially.”

It makes sense. Ethical considerations aside, paying attention to environmental, social, and governance factors is a means of avoiding risk that may not emerge from traditional analysis.

For example, a company whose supply chain is vulnerable to disruptive weather events could be adversely impacted by climate change. Companies which demonstrate unethical behaviours such as poor treatment of workers, or who engage in environmentally unfriendly practices like rain forest destruction have seen their brands punished in the market. Firms with fossil fuel assets in the ground may see their value plummet due to regulatory changes or substitute technologies that emerge from the fight against global warming.

These kinds of issues can be flagged by ESG analysis before they hit the P&L and the share price.

If this is such a great idea, why isn’t everyone doing it?

More and more, they are, especially at the institutional level. In the US, assets managed sustainably grew by a third from 2014 to 2016, covering about 20% of professionally managed assets. In Europe over half of professionally managed assets qualify, and in Canada it was 38% at the start of 2016.

Recently Larry Fink, founder and head of fund giant BlackRock, said in his annual letter to his CEOs “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.”

The times are changing, and quickly.

So how do I invest sustainably?

Mutual Funds and ETFs: As a retail investor, the easiest way to get involved is to buy sustainable mutual funds or ETFs, of which there are many.  They come in all kinds of flavours, from funds which track indices but with particular industries filtered out, to impact funds specializing in certain sectors, so it’s important to understand what you’re looking for. Check with your current financial services provider or try a Google search.

Robo-Advisors: Many automated investing services, aka robo-advisers, such as WealthSimple in Canada or Betterment in the US, offer sustainable portfolio options. A growing number of American firms like Earthfolio specialize in socially responsible investing.

Financial Advisors: If you work with a financial advisor, ask him or her about sustainable investing. Some advisors work with companies like Sustainalytics or MSCI ESG Research, who provide in-depth data and analysis on the ESG performance of specific companies to a largely institutional client base.

Self-Directed: For self-directed investors looking for ESG analysis of individual firms, some tools are available. In Canada, Scotia iTRADE offers a suite of tools to evaluate companies on ESG criteria, while in the US, Merrill Edge provides sustainability rankings and information for their clients. 

Is sustainable luxury an oxymoron? Depends on your definition.

The word luxury connotes excess; at the highest end, you’ve got super-yachts with heli-pads and champagne hot tubs, towing mini-yachts behind them like million dollar ducklings.  At the lower-but-still-pretty-high end, you can buy $100,000 watches and $600,000 bottles of Scotch at the airport when the spouse doesn’t need another Eiffel Tower snow globe.

It’s hard to argue that this kind of conspicuous consumption, except for possibly the Scotch, can be deemed sustainable or even useful.  

But luxury has another face.

In the waning decades of the last century, the upscale purse-mongers and sweater-slingers of the world recognized that they couldn’t rely on a handful of mercurial billionaires to keep them afloat. They started downgrading the product line, er, extending the brand, to appeal to people who were willing to spend more to buy stuff they would have gotten anyway, but with nicer fonts  (that this has often been a spectacularly successful strategy is remarkable and reflects poorly on humans, but that’s a separate discussion. ) Now instead of having to be humiliated and impoverished at their local equivalent of Rodeo Drive, any suburban aspirationista could take the minivan to the mall and pick up a 150 dollar Prada keychain  or 50 dollar Armani Exchange t-shirt.

Around the same time, newer companies like Coach and Starbucks emerged to offer this group of newly empowered consumers an affordable cachet, with products occupying price/quality points somewhere between their mass market competitors and traditional high end goods. (A 2004 Harvard Business Review article coined the cringey portmanteau “masstige ”  or mass prestige, to describe the phenomenon; the term never caught on and is repeated here principally for the amusement of the reader.)

This type of luxury product has the most promise in terms of achieving true sustainability. Excluding the hardest core of activists who define purchase of anything that would have been unfamiliar to a medieval peasant as environmental  crime, it’s fair to assume that people are going to need handbags, shoes, sweaters etc, and that those things can be manufactured and sold with some degree of sustainability.

The data suggest that it’s in the interests of companies to do just that.  A 2017 Nielsen survey in the United States found that while all age groups thought it was important that companies work to improve the environment, an overwhelming 83% of the millennial cohort (defined as born between 1982 and 1996) agreed with the statement.

And while that group may currently be cutting back on the avocado toast in the wake of the pandem-cession™, they and Gen Z after them are in line for the biggest wealth transfer in history as their boomer parents and grandparents shuffle off to communes and discos in the sky.   

Whether it’s altruism or self-interest, or most likely some combination, luxury goods companies are responding.

In 2019, a group of fashion houses and textile manufacturers, including big names like Adidas, Ralph Lauren,  and Hermes, signed on to the Fashion Pact, an agreement to work towards specific goals around climate change, biodiversity, and other environmental issues.   Not uncommonly for high-minded, well-publicized agreements, the details on how these goals will be achieved or measured are fuzzy, but it’s a step in the right direction.

More luxury goods companies are emerging with sustainability as a core value and not just a page on the website. NAK (No Animal Killed) shoes emerged in 2018 selling cruelty-free vegan footwear into the mass luxury market. Misadventure Vodka in San Diego (“Hedonistic Sustainability”) distills their premium product from expired baked goods. And in the automotive industry, Tesla has famously emerged as a luxury brand on a high profile mission to fight climate change.

It remains to be seen whether plant-based boots and electric limousines will save us from our self-inflicted existential crises.  As consumers grow more aware of the gravity of social and environmental challenges we face, will sustainability become effectively mandatory for companies selling into the luxury market? Or will we collectively shrug, buy more stuff, and document the collapse of civilization on Instagram?

In December 2020, the Sustainability Consultant Network team provided the following input to the ECCC discussion paper on a proposed plastics ban:

Dear Mr. Drouin,

Please find our response to the integrated management approach to plastic products below and attached as PDF.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on your discussion paper on the proposed plastic ban. We commend your integrated approach towards addressing this complex issue and we hope to see the elimination of plastic “waste” and pollution within the next 10 – 20 years. We believe this can best be achieved through a collaborative approach between relevant stakeholders and ensuring plastics are managed within a circular economy framework. 

Sustainability Consultant Network (SCN)  is an environmental grassroots organisation in Toronto.  Our mission is to help address environmental challenges faced in the communities that we live in and beyond.  We would like to contribute the following recommendations, pooled from our collective knowledge of the plastic situation in Canada and our diverse experiences around environmental sustainability. 

We recently hosted a webinar that featured key stakeholders in the plastic debate, specifically a representative from the Plastics Division at the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada, a progressive small business plastics recycler, and an expert on plastic litter from Western University. There were a lot of takeaways from the webinar which we have also used to inform our recommendations below:

1. The Federal Government should focus on reducing fossil fuel subsidies, including the fracking industry, to equalise the playing field between virgin and recycled plastics and thereby alleviate the problem at source. 
2. Whilst we support the reduction of unnecessary plastic items as proposed by ECCC, we are concerned that using Schedule 1 of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 (CEPA) may not be the most appropriate legislative tool for all plastics. It may be applicable for Plastics containing POPs (persistent organic pollutants) and other hazardous chemical additives. To this end, perhaps producers should be mandated to label their products with the aim of phasing out toxic additives.  

We suggest using Sustainable Materials Management or Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation for less or non toxic plastics. These plastics would be managed as a technical resource that becomes part of a circular economy. Use of EPR would ensure plastics producers are held accountable for what they produce, which will hopefully lead to standardized non toxic plastics that are capable of being continuously recycled or recovered.
Government should drive the industry to set realistic timeframes and goals to implement EPR. Products ending up as litter or in landfills/incinerators after
a certain date should be traced back to the producer who will in turn be held accountable. 
We urge the Government to work closely with the Provinces and plastic industry experts (industry representatives, recyclers and producers) to incentivise and leverage innovative technologies for reduction, reuse, recycling and advanced recycling with the aim of recovering all plastics within a given timeframe. 

3. The Federal Government should work with relevant stakeholders to set the industry standards, and incentives, for recycled content in plastic products.
4. Increase subsidies to municipalities to upgrade technologies and capacities so as to facilitate an increased recycling rate for plastics.
5. Use local and international best practice tools to increase recycling and recovery rates of plastics throughout Canada. Examples include a standardised container deposit systems, standardised blue box systems, redesign of certain plastic products and incentives to support innovation and technological solutions. 

We are grateful for this opportunity to voice our views and recommendations and stand ready to engage in further dialogue.  We will also be happy to discuss how we could use our organisation and network to contribute towards your plans to address the plastic issue.

Sincerely,

The SCN Webinar on the future of plastics and recycling sparked vigorous discussion around the future of plastic in society. Speakers were:

Elena Mantagaris, Vice President, Plastics Division, Chemistry Industry Association of Canada

Crystal Howe, Sustainability Manager, Ice River Springs & BMP Recycling

Dr. Patricia Corcoran. Associate Professor & Department Chair, Department of Earth Sciences, Western University

Speakers each presented on a particular aspect of the plastics dilemma – how do we trade off the utility of plastic against environmental harm? – followed by questions from the audience.

Join us for our webinar on December 3. To learn more or to register, go to:

https://www.eventbrite.ca/…/the-plastic-dilemma-does..
Or
https://www.meetup.com/