Innovate

New mechanisms and applied technology for organizations navigating the challenges conventional frameworks were not built to solve.

Disclosure matters, but it does not by itself change what happens on the ground. The environmental and social challenges facing Canadian businesses — and the extractive sector in particular — require mechanisms that go further: instruments that redirect capital, alter incentive structures, and produce verified outcomes rather than reported intentions. That is the territory CHC’s innovation work occupies.

Our most developed current initiative is the Environmental Liability Units project. Canada’s mining and resource extraction sectors are essential to the green energy transition, yet the full environmental and social costs of extraction — degraded ecosystems, community impacts, long-tail remediation liabilities — are routinely externalized onto taxpayers and affected communities. ELUs offer a different architecture: a financing mechanism tied directly to a company’s demonstrated performance across the full lifecycle of an extraction project, from site development through to restoration. The instrument is designed to align the interests of capital providers with verified impact mitigation, treating environmental commitment as a condition of capital access rather than a reporting exercise. The ELU initiative has its own governance structure, advisory board, and development roadmap, detailed in the sub-pages below.

A separate challenge — one that affects the entire non-financial disclosure landscape — is the fragmentation of reporting frameworks. The proliferation of standards is not inherently a problem; different frameworks serve different purposes and audiences. The practical difficulty is that completing any one of them demands significant time and expertise, particularly for small and mid-sized enterprises, and the outputs rarely translate meaningfully across schemes in ways that support confident decision-making by investors, regulators, or supply chain partners.

We are developing a response to this through the AI Rosetta Stone Project: an AI-assisted application with two connected functions. The first is to guide organizations through the completion of individual reporting frameworks — using AI to help users work through sections methodically, reducing the expertise barrier and the time burden of disclosure. The second is to treat the data generated by completing one standard as an asset that can be carried into others: where frameworks share underlying concepts or datapoints, the AI Rosetta Stone approach allows that work to do double duty, rather than requiring organizations to answer substantially the same questions multiple times in different formats. Taken together, these functions are designed to make comprehensive non-financial reporting genuinely accessible, and to make the outputs of different schemes comparable in ways that currently require significant manual effort to achieve.

The AI Rosetta Stone Project is at an early stage of development; we will update this section as it progresses. Artificial intelligence also opens up applications relevant to non-financial capital management that go well beyond reporting — spatial analysis of nature-related risk, scenario modelling for social impact, and others currently being explored. We will add information on these as they reach a stage of development relevant to Canadian organizations.