2026 Sustainable Finance Summit

Sustainable finance after the ESG reset

A senior opening interview on the new reality for sustainable finance in Canada. The conversation will frame the forces reshaping the market: energy transition, energy security, physical climate risk, regulatory expectations, investor scrutiny, AI-driven electricity demand, and the growing need to connect sustainability directly to capital allocation, risk management, and competitiveness.

Canada’s bid to turn transition risk into economic advantage

Canada has the resources, financial institutions, energy assets, talent, and infrastructure base to compete in a lower-carbon global economy. But competitiveness will depend on whether transition finance can move beyond policy ambition and into investable projects, bankable revenue models, and scalable capital formation. This panel will examine where Canada can win, where it is falling behind, and what financial institutions need in order to support climate-aligned growth.

Can Canada define transition finance without losing credibility?

A credible taxonomy can help unlock capital, reduce greenwashing risk, and create a common language for investors, lenders, issuers, regulators, and companies. But Canada’s transition economy is complex, particularly across energy, mining, transportation, infrastructure, agriculture, and heavy industry. This session will examine whether Canada can define transition finance in a way that is practical enough to attract capital and rigorous enough to maintain market confidence.

From disclosure burden to decision advantage

Sustainable finance is increasingly a data challenge. Institutions need better information to assess climate exposure, emissions, supply chains, asset-level risk, portfolio alignment, and resilience. AI has the potential to improve climate analytics, underwriting, reporting, monitoring, and investment decision-making. This session will explore how data and AI can move sustainability from compliance reporting into better financial decisions.

Practical applications for risk, disclosure, underwriting, and portfolio decisions

AI is becoming a powerful tool for sustainable finance, but institutions need to separate practical use cases from hype. This workshop will examine how AI can support climate data analysis, ESG due diligence, credit risk assessment, insurance modelling, disclosure preparation, portfolio monitoring, and investment research. The focus will be on implementation: what works, what is risky, and what institutions need to build responsibly.

How data moves credit, insurance, pricing, and portfolio decisions

Sustainable finance and environmental and social risk have become data problems. Institutions need climate data that is reliable enough for credit, insurance, capital markets, disclosure, stress testing, and portfolio construction. This workshop will examine what data is actually needed, where current data falls short, and how financial institutions are integrating climate information into underwriting, pricing, portfolio management, and board-level risk oversight.

The next investable climate market

Mitigation has dominated sustainable finance, but adaptation and resilience are becoming central to credit quality, insurance availability, municipal finance, real estate, infrastructure, agriculture, and public-sector balance sheets. This workshop will examine resilience as an emerging investment category and explore how financial institutions can finance assets, communities, and infrastructure that are better prepared for a changing climate.

Environmental and social risk, competitiveness, and proportionality

A focused interview with a prudential, securities, accounting, or market regulator on how Canada can maintain financial resilience while avoiding a compliance regime that is too complex, too fragmented, or too slow to support investment. The conversation will examine proportionality, disclosure expectations, institutional readiness, systemic risk, market integrity, and the need to balance credible oversight with economic competitiveness.

Environmental risk, real estate, infrastructure, and the rising cost of protection

Acute and chronic climate events are becoming balance sheet issues. Banks, insurers, asset managers, municipalities, mortgage lenders, and real estate investors increasingly need to understand how climate risk affects collateral values, loan performance, insurance availability, infrastructure resilience, and community affordability. This panel will examine the financial consequences of physical climate risk and the emerging role of insurance signals in credit and investment decisions.

AI, data centres, electricity demand, and the next clean-energy bottleneck

AI is changing sustainable finance in two directions at once. It can improve climate data, risk analytics, reporting, monitoring, and portfolio construction. But it is also driving massive demand for electricity, data centres, cooling, water, land, transmission, and clean power. This panel will examine whether Canada can meet the energy demands of the AI economy while maintaining credible climate commitments and building the infrastructure needed for long-term competitiveness.

Bonds, loans, labels, covenants, and credibility

Sustainable debt markets are maturing. Green bonds, sustainability-linked loans, transition finance instruments, blended finance, and labelled debt still matter, but investors are demanding stronger use-of-proceeds discipline, clearer KPIs, better covenants, and more credible reporting. This panel will examine where the sustainable debt market is heading, what borrowers and issuers need to know, and how credibility will shape access to capital.