The 2026 Global 100 list puts speed in the spotlight

As the global economic transition accelerates, more companies are recognizing that sustainability isn’t just good marketing – it’s good for business, too. The global effort to align our economic systems with the planet’s carrying capacity has lately acquired newfound urgency. We need to transition faster.

This was the animating spirit of the new methodology behind the Corporate Knights Global 100 ranking. The revised methodology introduces “sustainable revenue momentum” to measure how fast companies are growing their sustainable revenues. This metric now accounts for one-third of a company’s score, with overall sustainable revenues and sustainable investments accounting for the other two-thirds.

“We’re firing a shot across the bow that speed matters,” Corporate Knights CEO Toby Heaps says.

A change of method

The new momentum metric marks a broader shift in the ranking methodology. Last year, sustainable revenues and investments together accounted for 50% of the score, and the other 50% was scored across 22 common environmental, governance and social performance indicators (KPIs) such as water use, emissions, workplace fatalities, and diversity on the board and among executives.

The change has reordered the deck in a big way. The revenue growth criteria helped Pandora, a popular Danish jewellery manufacturer, shoot up from 48th spot in the 2025 rankings to number two.

The companies in fourth and sixth place, the Texas-based machinery manufacturer Fluence Energy and the Denver-based healthcare company DaVita Inc., are both new to the ranking. Seven other U.S. companies joined the G100 this year, bringing the U.S. total to 20, the most of any country. “[It’s] an interesting rebuttal,” Heaps points out, “to the noise that the United States is bailing on the sustainable economy.”

For fairness, some energy companies were granted a temporary act-of-war exemption from the momentum criteria. The provision is necessary, Heaps says, to prevent companies from being penalized for distortions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which drove prices sharply higher in 2022 before they fell again in 2024.

The G100 leader, ERG SpA, an Italian power generation company, rose dramatically from 18 to number one. Even amid the extreme wartime volatility and the sale of all its fossil fuel assets, ERG managed to increase its power output from wind and solar sources by more than 2,000 gigawatt-hours between 2022 and 2024.

Overall, 33 companies from last year’s ranking failed to make this year’s list, and four were no longer eligible either because they went private or their revenues fell under $1 billion, while 37 new companies entered the ranking. Only one company – Ørsted, the power generator out of Denmark, ranked ninth – retained its position from last year.

A dramatic departure?

The big changes may seem to signify a dramatic departure, but the designers of the methodology disagree. The rankings retain the same exclusionary screens and flags captured by many of the previous KPIs. For example, companies that register workplace fatalities, fines, et cetera, are penalized or excluded as they were in the past. The ranking also retains quotas for various industries so that manufacturers compete on the same sustainability terms as other manufacturers, banks against banks, wind and solar companies against other renewable-energy providers, and so on.

“What really matters to us is the contribution [these companies] are making to the low-carbon economy,” says Michael Yow, the director of rankings for Corporate Knights. According to Yow, the new streamlined methodology at once simplifies and standardizes reporting while differentiating the rankings from other international lists.

“In terms of performance, the G100 companies are back in top form, beating the benchmark MSCI AWCI index over the past year,” Heaps says, referring to a stock market index of 85% of global investable equities across almost 50 countries. He adds that the G100 underperformed the financial benchmark in recent years because of the Russia/Ukraine war, which led to spikes in oil prices, higher interest rates and increased military spending, improving the fortunes of companies excluded from the G100 list.

Sustainable revenues account for up to 61% of total revenues for ranked companies, versus just 17.3% for all other publicly listed companies. And despite it being a much larger chunk of their business, sustainable revenues for G100 companies are growing on average at double the rate of all their other revenues.

That momentum matters more than ever. The target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C has fallen conclusively out of reach, and the consequences from each additional 10th of a degree of warming are compounding exponentially. At the same time, the race to seize the opportunities from the green transition is heating up. G100 companies see the future and they’re moving toward it – some faster than others.

Tristan Bronca is a magazine writer and editor based in Newmarket, Ontario.

Not applicable: Companies in the CKPG asset management, banks and insurance companies are not scored on the sustainable investment KPI.

N.A.: Companies were not scored on the sustainable revenue momentum KPI because of the absence of 2022 sustainable revenue data. In the case of EU-based CKPG power generation and power transmission and distribution, the sustainable revenue momentum KPI was not applied because of high volatility in electricity prices in 2022 due to the Russia-Ukraine war.