April 21, 2022
Reach for the Stars: How Universities Rank on Their Endowments’ Climate Change Commitments
- In 2020, 16 major Canadian universities signed the “Climate Charter for Canadian Universities,” a commitment to manage their assets while considering climate change. However, despite this pledge, a concerted effort to understand how Canadian university endowments are responding to the rising risks presented by climate change and their commitments to alleviate them has not been undertaken to date.
- In a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute, authors Catherine Jackson, Abhishek Kumar and Ramisha Asghar evaluate the governance and accountability mechanisms of these public institution’s endowments – assigning them stars based on three categories: governance, policy and disclosure.
- McMaster University and University of British Columbia tied at the top with four stars and overall scores of 4.2, but did not achieve the top mark of five stars.
