Advertisement
Canada markets open in 8 hours 53 minutes
  • S&P/TSX

    21,837.18
    -12.02 (-0.06%)
     
  • S&P 500

    5,149.42
    +32.33 (+0.63%)
     
  • DOW

    38,790.43
    +75.66 (+0.20%)
     
  • CAD/USD

    0.7382
    -0.0007 (-0.10%)
     
  • CRUDE OIL

    82.58
    -0.14 (-0.17%)
     
  • Bitcoin CAD

    88,976.22
    -3,244.92 (-3.52%)
     
  • CMC Crypto 200

    885.54
    0.00 (0.00%)
     
  • GOLD FUTURES

    2,164.60
    +0.30 (+0.01%)
     
  • RUSSELL 2000

    2,024.74
    -14.58 (-0.72%)
     
  • 10-Yr Bond

    4.3400
    -4.3400 (-100.00%)
     
  • NASDAQ futures

    18,190.25
    -41.25 (-0.23%)
     
  • VOLATILITY

    14.33
    -0.08 (-0.56%)
     
  • FTSE

    7,722.55
    -4.87 (-0.06%)
     
  • NIKKEI 225

    39,799.24
    +58.84 (+0.15%)
     
  • CAD/EUR

    0.6788
    -0.0004 (-0.06%)
     

What's your job? Karen Clarke-Whistler connects the dots between driving profits and going green

Karen Clarke-Whistler, TD Bank chief environmental officer

Karen Clarke-Whistler knew from an early age that she wanted to pursue a career that gave her the power to help protect the natural world.

She never dreamed back then she would find herself fulfilling that life ambition from a glass tower in downtown Toronto.

Clarke-Whistler is chief environmental officer at TD Bank, a role she’s held since 2008. It’s a unique position in North America. While other people may hold a similar title within the corporate world, few, if any, have the kind of direct access or input to the senior executive levels that Clarke-Whistler enjoys.

It’s not an easy job description to parse. On a practical level, Clarke-Whistler is there to share her expertise as an ecologist and land resource scientist with the banking industry. The higher goal – gleaned through Clarke-Whistler’s years of work as a strategic consultant on multi-million-dollar energy and development projects in Canada, Europe and Africa – is to help the organization’s leaders, staff and even clients gain a deeper insight into how the environment and the economy are fundamentally linked.

ADVERTISEMENT

TD has gone on to become the first North American bank to be carbon neutral and the first Canadian financial institution to issue a green bond.

“I have always been very interested in how to use strong environmental performance as a business driver, a driver of innovation, or a driver of revenue generation from a business perspective,” she said in a recent interview with Yahoo Canada Finance.

We spoke with Clarke-Whistler recently at her Toronto office, and asked her how she believes a big bank can help benefit the natural world in the years to come. The following transcript is an edited version of that conversation:

Maybe it’s because I’m from Western Canada, but I didn’t expect to find many environmentalists in Toronto. You’re going to prove me wrong?

(The natural world) has been a life-long interest. It really started really as a kid. My grandfather was a great outdoorsman, as was my father. I’ve always been a bird watcher. Really, I got my first pair of binoculars when I was eight years old. I have always been surrounded by nature. When I started my university education, I thought I would go into medicine and then I realized that I would much rather fix the world than focus on just fixing people.

Of course, not to suggest there isn’t beautiful places in Ontario.

Just to give you a flavour, my husband and I spent our Honeymoon in Indonesia collecting bats for the Royal Ontario Museum.

Bats?

Yup. The flying kind. There is still a bat cave in the Royal Ontario Museum, if you ever go there, you can see some of my bats.

Do you consider yourself to be an environmentalist?

I don’t, actually. I think that word has, in my view, a negative connotation — at least it does in the corporate world. We want to just be careful that we are always presenting an objective view on things and I think with anybody who has a cause there is a sense with that word that you are so committed to the cause that you may not be objective. When people ask me, I always say I am an environmental scientist who happens to be working a bank.

Your access to senior executives in the bank is the most interesting part of your job, in my view. I wondered how your recommendations are affecting the direction of the bank.

I didn’t really have any sort of job description when I started. It has allowed me to really shape something and, so far, no one has said no. The premise going in was that we needed to have this deep insight into how the environment and economy are linked and we also needed to understand what our customers actually thought about it because we are very much a retail bank. My going in game plan was: If you want to really understand this, you just have to dig into the business strategy of the bank. For every element of our business, you have to understand what the environmental context is, and develop your business strategy from there.

The first thing we needed to do was we are going to be carbon neutral. That was in 2008. Most people don’t even know what that meant at the time but my feeling and our senior executives feeling was that if we at the bank learned what it took to be carbon neutral, we would learn an awful lot about carbon that we could apply not only internally but externally, as well.

TD was the first bank in Canada to become carbon neutral. Is that correct?

We were the first North American bank. It’s something that we are really proud of. Now, seven years on, when I talk to analysts, they say, ‘Yeah, yeah. You’re carbon neutral.’ But it is actually a pretty big deal. It’s something that still informs our thinking, our understanding and our research around how do we get energy? How do we use it? How do we reduce it? Where do we get our best bang for our buck? How do we offset our impacts? Those are very, very topical issues today.

How difficult or easy was it to get such a big organization onboard with your goals?

Coming into the bank as the “environmental scientist”, you can imagine that there were people who were like, ‘What the heck is this? Is someone going to turn up in a hemp skirt and sandals and tie themselves to a tree and tell us you can’t do any financing?’ It’s been a progressive experience educating people within the bank and for myself being educated around how banking actually works and what are the key areas we can actually have influence in.

Can you talk to me how the bank has evolved from taking the step to be carbon neutral to directing policy that could trigger some difficult conversations within an organization that has profit as one of its foremost goals, if not the foremost goal?

It’s a fallacy that strong environmental performance means giving up profitability. I actually think the opposite is true. For us, I feel that everything I do and that we do should have a strong business case.

Just to take you very briefly on our carbon journey. We became carbon neutral, so what does that mean? It meant that we totally transformed the way we design, build and operate our over 3000 facilities, which was a very big cost savings, but also a brand builder because suddenly our customers are looking at these TD buildings and they are different. We were able to take what we had done basically using TD as a living laboratory and walk it across the our commercial and wholesale bank and say, ‘Look guys, we have been doing a lot of work around energy retrofitting and renewable energy on our own facilities, and there is a great opportunity here from a financial perspective to be an early mover. Here is what we recommend that we really focus on and what we don’t focus on.’

As a result of that, 25 per cent of our energy financing portfolio is now low-carbon energy and that is from a very small percentage only about five years ago. So we were able to move it into the financing side of things. Last year we were able to take it up a further notch and create a new investment product on the capital markets which was our $500-million green bond, which is dedicated to financing projects in the low-carbon economy. It has been a very methodological approach. When people ask me how much it cost us to be carbon neural, I say, so far, we`re about eight billion dollars to the good. I think we would do well to stop acting as though strong environmental performance equates to taking a financial loss.

Does that mean the bank is willing to take a different stand on environmentally sensitive issues like the Alberta oilsands, Keystone?

We have actually built in due diligence questions around issues like climate change, carbon policy performance, free and fully informed consent of aboriginal people. Those are part and parcel of our due diligence procedures in financing any non-retail transactions.

We will walk away from projects. We won’t get into them in the first place if we think that there isn’t appropriate consideration to due diligence around the issues that are important to us and we will work with our clients and stakeholders to try and show leadership.

Just so I am clear, there are a number of questions that get asked to ensure projects meet TD’s set of core beliefs?

Each and every non-retail transaction goes through a due diligence process. Obviously, if it is in an environmentally sensitive sector, it is an intense due-diligence process. And then, each and every client portfolio is reviewed on an annual basis.

Where to next?

I think really, at the end of the day, the big thing that has to be tackled is consumer behaviour. We are only going to be moving the dial in any direction if consumers adjust their behaviour patterns and demand.

Here we see we have low oil prices. What is the response? I can drive my car further and cheaper. To me, you could almost look at the low oil prices as probably one of the worst things that could happen to renewables. I do think until the average person “gets it” — and I don’t say that in any sort of negative way – it’s just that the way we live, with increasing urban densification, and expecting to just be able to turn on the thermostat and not really know where things come from and not really care as long as they are at our fingertips, that has got to be tackled. At the end of the day, industry is responding to the demands of society. Energy demand keeps increasing and, honestly, the use of coal keeps increasing. We have a lot of work to do.

What would you say to people who are cynical when they see your job title in combination with a big bank?

A lot of the interaction between the environment and the economy does not get solved in a Tweetable solution. It is pretty complex and if you want to be part of the solution the first step is getting yourself in the market.

Sometimes the whole environmental issue seems too much, that we are moving in the wrong direction. What’s your feeling?

I certainly don’t have a crystal ball but whenever I feel a little bit down in the mouth about this, I remind myself that when I was at university, we were only just starting to really understand that pesticides had a negative impact on the environment and we were measuring contaminants in the range of parts per 100. Look at where we are now. We have a very high sensitivity around contaminants. We know that the earth is not an infinite renewable resource and civil society is, at least, aware of that and is concerned. I think we have made a lot of progress in awareness in 30 years and I actually think we’re right at the beginning of major transformation in terms of how we live and how our technology supports this and I am actually pretty excited about this.

#author: darahhansen