July 2025
By Anik Islam, Colleen Kaiser, and Marena Winstanley
Canada is working to build a clean, innovative and climate-resilient economy. Achieving this ambitious objective requires access to comparable, reliable and decision-useful climate-related financial information to inform sound policy and investment choices. While progress has been made to advance climate information, implementation remains slow and fragmented. This situation adds to the cost of doing business and contributes to broader policy and investment uncertainties at a time when Canada is trying to deepen economic relationships with countries that have more advanced climate information frameworks.
To resolve this challenge, the Smart Prosperity Insitute’s (SPI) latest policy brief Aligning Canada’s Evolving Climate Information Architecture explores the case for an aligned and cohesive climate information system—a climate information architecture (CIA)—that enables different organizations to collect, manage, analyze and share climate-related information in a unified, decision-making framework.
The brief identifies the key components or building blocks of the CIA, explains why they need to work together, analyzes the risks if they fragment and offers actionable recommendations for aligning the system to achieve positive environmental and economic outcomes.
Key takeaways:
- The building blocks of the CIA—transition plans, scenario analysis, taxonomies, disclosures and data and analytics—depend on and reinforce each other.
- Canadian governments, regulators and standard setters have advanced several components of the CIA. But these tools are being developed in silos by different institutions with varying operational mandates.
- The CIA building blocks must be aligned and made coherent to maximize the effectiveness of these tools, reduce policy and investment uncertainty, and improve competitiveness.
- Governments, regulators, standard setters, financial institutions, industry, academics and civil society need to work together to strengthen alignment through standardization of frameworks, coordinated regulatory action and strategic public-private partnerships.
Canada needs to improve its decision-making and implementation capacity to effectively respond to the climate and economic challenges of today. To do so, there is a need to change the status quo, where climate data is difficult to access, inconsistent in quality and not comparable across datasets. Aligning the building blocks of the CIA is a critical first step to address this gap. By developing a robust information and governance system, tools like the climate finance taxonomies can be used to rapidly embed climate data into policies (e.g., crackdown on greenwashing) and investment strategies (e.g., issue green and sustainability-linked bonds). In doing so, Canada can accelerate its transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy and strengthen its competitive position globally.
