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York University’s Schulich School of Business, the top ranked school in Canada for sustainability, has joined forces with Corporate Knights, one of the world’s leading sustainable economy media and research companies, to develop one of Canada’s first climate finance indexes. The new national index will track and measure corporate spending targeted at accelerating decarbonization efforts.
The index will serve as a useful tool for companies to track and measure their climate performance against peers within their industries while also providing important information for governments formulating public policy decisions around decarbonization.
Professor Olaf Weber, the CIBC Chair in Sustainable Finance at Schulich, is spearheading the initiative on behalf of the school. According to him, the development of a climate finance index “addresses the uncertainties around what companies really do to achieve their climate goals.” Adds Weber: “An index that addresses how much companies invest to achieve their goals presents a more objective indicator than general announcements in sustainability reports.”
As part of the process of developing the index, Corporate Knights and Schulich hosted a session on June 26 involving two dozen leaders from the building, transportation and power sectors who engaged in a cross-sector approach to find ways to measure decarbonization. The session took place in the former Toronto Stock Exchange boardroom at Schulich’s Miles S. Nadal Management Centre and was moderated by public policy expert Diane Fox Carney.
Corporate Knights magazine will soon publish a synthesis report detailing Canada's climate investment gap and will unveil the new climate finance index, with index weightings by sector to show Canada's climate investments versus requirements. Sustainability experts from Schulich will provide in-depth analysis of the results.