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This is why some investors are taking the fight inside companies contributing directly to climate change, first by investing in those very companies and then by using that stake to try to influence decision making. Investors have various opportunities to influence a company’s climate-related decisions, whether by writing letters to the board about tying executive compensation to emissions cuts, talking to CEOs about plans to align the business with a net-zero world, or voting on shareholder proposals at annual general meetings. Jamie Bonham, the director of corporate engagement at Toronto-based NEI Investments, says his company works to leverage its influence to spur emissions-reduction projects in oil-and-gas companies, for example. This pressure could have the added benefit of helping commercialize and scale up technologies like carbon capture and storage. “And, ideally, we’ll see them transform their business,” says Bonham.

However, the classification of funds can complicate this approach. In the absence of regulations or standards, it falls to individual investors to try to understand what exactly a fund is promising and whether it’s delivering. Morningstar is part of the Canadian Investment Funds Standards Committee, an industry group working to standardize how Canadian mutual funds are classified in order to create a framework for categorizing sustainable funds. But, for these types of classifications to be most effective, there needs to be a global standard for what constitutes sustainability, says Ian Tam, Morningstar’s director of investment research in Canada. There are signs that this could be on the way.

For the moment, the lack of standards even extends to requirements about reporting a company’s climate impact: currently, publicly traded companies are under no obligation to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. Of the 222 largest companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, only 150 did so in 2020, according to an Institute for Sustainable Finance report. Just sixty companies had released emissions-reduction targets, and only nine had detailed plans to reach them. In its April 2021 federal budget, the Canadian government said it would work with the provinces and territories to make climate disclosures “part of regular disclosure practices for a broad spectrum of the Canadian economy.” In October, the Canadian Securities Administrators, an umbrella organization of provincial and territorial securities regulators, published proposed rules that would require companies to disclose both direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions or explain why the information isn’t being released. Even if the regulations allow companies to opt out of disclosing, capital markets may decide, Riordan says, with firms that choose not to make climate disclosures finding it harder to raise funds.

Bains says standardized reporting could help prevent greenwashing by making it easy to monitor and compare a company’s progress against its competitors’. Companies that can’t back up their climate rhetoric with data, he says, may then have trouble accessing capital. “Traditionally speaking, capital market investors reward companies that do what they say.”

Roopa Davé, a partner in KPMG Canada’s sustainability services practice, based in Vancouver, is part of a team working with companies to develop sustainability strategies and determine what ESG data, including climate-related data, companies should ideally report and how. Assessing a company’s greenhouse gas emissions alone can be a complex process requiring expertise in science, engineering, and accounting. In a 2020 KPMG survey of sustainability reporting among Canada’s top 100 companies by revenue, 62 percent of respondents acknowledged that they face financial risks from climate change. But only 3 percent quantified those risks, says Davé.

Financial institutions are grappling with some of these challenges as they seek to understand the extent of their financed emissions the greenhouse gases tied not to their direct operations but to their loans and investments. Vancouver City Savings Credit Union, or Vancity, has set out to reach net-zero emissions across everything it finances by 2040. It also committed to offering only responsible investment opportunities that meet certain ESG criteria. While the financial co-op doesn’t finance or invest directly in fossil fuels, it does issue loans for houses, commercial buildings, and to a lesser extent, vehicles. In Canada, buildings alone account for nearly 13 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2020 annual report, Vancity estimated that the assets covered by its loans and the investments it manages on behalf of its members accounted for almost 160,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases that year more than fifty times higher than the direct emissions from its operations.

The greatest costs would be from failing to stop the climate crisis, but companies do face risks as they transition toward a low-carbon world. According to an online post by the Bank of England about the risks of climate change to financial stability, “If government policies were to change in line with the Paris Agreement, then two thirds of the world’s known fossil fuel reserves could not be burned. This could lead to changes in the value of investments held by banks and insurance companies in sectors like coal, oil and gas.” At the same time, fossil fuel infrastructure, such as pipelines, could become stranded assets, meaning their worth could decline faster than investors expected it would.

For pension funds, which manage the money millions of Canadians will rely on in old age, understanding the financial risks of climate change and opportunities in the transition to a low-carbon economy is critical. University of Victoria finance professor Majerbi and her colleague Michael King are working with one of those funds, the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI), to better understand the implications of climate change for its investments. The work could ultimately help guide BCI’s investment decisions and potentially lead the corporation to shift money from riskier fossil fuel bets to new opportunities in clean tech. This type of analysis will only get better, Majerbi says, with more climate-related disclosures from individual companies about their climate risks and how they are managing them.

While some investors are further along the ESG-investing gangway than others, Tam, Morningstar’s director of investment research in Canada, sees reason for optimism. “It’s a new approach to valuing stocks and understanding risk,” he says. “Eventually, it won’t even be a conversation, everyone will just be doing it.”