Canada, already the world’s second-largest uranium producer, is experiencing a renewed surge in uranium mining. This momentum is driven by a global shift to nuclear energy as a cleaner solution to climate change. Canada’s resources, which supply over 20% of the world’s uranium demand, are vital for fueling nuclear energy worldwide.
Historically, most of Canada’s uranium output came from the eastern Athabasca Basin. But now, the western region is flourishing. Promising projects like Fission Uranium’s PLS and NexGen Energy’s Rook 1 are advancing quickly making the western Basin a future hub of Canadian uranium production.
Some other top companies ruling this region are IsoEnergy, Uranium Royalty Corp, and Cameco. These players are investing heavily in exploration and development, leveraging the Athabasca Basin’s rich uranium deposits to secure Canada’s role as a major nuclear fuel supplier.
Speaking about the nuclear sector, it is equipped with Canadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactors and SMRs. They support global emission reduction and energy security goals. By integrating all non-emitting energy sources, most significantly nuclear, Canada aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
Check out Canada’s nuclear profile highlights according to IAEA :
Canada’s Uranium Comeback: NexGen Energy CEO Shares Insights
BBC recently rolled out a report where NexGen Energy CEO and Director, Leigh Curyer has analyzed the Canadian uranium potential and expressed his opinion.
He notes that several key moments helped drive nuclear energy’s resurgence in Canada and NexGen Energy’s success. In 2018, Bill Gates publicly endorsed nuclear power as “ideal for dealing with climate change,” drawing widespread attention to its low-carbon benefits. Four years later, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson championed a policy aimed at generating at least 25% of the UK’s energy from nuclear sources.
Moving ahead, uranium prices have surged by more than 200% making it the world’s top-performing commodities. Consequently, NexGen’s Rook 1 project, located in the Athabasca Basin, could soon push Canada to become the world’s leading uranium producer. The company anticipates that once its mine is operational, it will boost that to 25%, which can surpass Kazakhstan’s uranium potential.
Curyer and other leaders in the uranium mining industry strongly believe that the next few years are crucial for the thriving uranium industry in Canada. The approval process for new mines is lengthy, sometimes taking a decade from exploration to production.
They estimate that failure to bring these projects online could lead to a uranium shortage. Consequently, driving up power costs globally.
Source: Natural Resources: Govt of Canada
Athabasca Basin: Canada’s High-Grade Uranium Hub Sees New Investment Surge
The Athabasca Basin’s appeal has attracted major players, including Cameco and Uranium Royalty Corp, as well as numerous newcomers to the region.
A recent significant event was Uranium Royalty Corp.’s acquisition of a royalty on the Millennium and Cree Extension Uranium Projects located in Saskatchewan. The company purchased this royalty from a third-party industrial gas firm for $6 million.
Canadian mining companies like NexGen and Cameco are highly optimistic and they aim to meet rising uranium demand as many countries commit to tripling nuclear energy output by 2050.
Saskatchewan’s uranium-rich terrain is attracting investors which is pushing Canada to the nuclear forefront. The industry, along with its investors, remains hopeful that this time the demand will be sustained in the long-term. With rising interest and substantial backing, the western Athabasca can be a global hotspot for uranium production.
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Uranium Royalty Corp.: Powering Decarbonization with Nuclear Efficiency
The only pure-play uranium royalty company is focused on capturing value from uranium price shifts through strategic investments. These include royalties, streams, debt, equity in uranium companies, and even physical uranium holdings. Notably, the company is growing with the rising demand for uranium.
- IEA revealed that in the U.S. alone, nuclear energy supplied roughly 19% of total electricity in 2022 and accounted for 55% of the nation’s carbon-free electricity.
- This nuclear output mitigated around 482 MMT of CO₂ emissions, which is equivalent to taking 107 million gasoline-powered vehicles off the roads.
More Power per Punch: Nuclear Energy Outshines Fossil Fuels
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“With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”
Nuclear power, even though has minimal carbon emissions has faced resistance from environmentalists.
The BBC report also explained the existing and forthcoming challenges that might cross the path of Canada’s nuclear journey. Critics argue that nuclear projects take too long and cost too much, often making them an unviable solution for urgent climate needs.
Over the past two decades, more than 100 nuclear plants have closed, including several in Canada and the U.S., mainly due to high costs and environmental concerns. Even British Columbia having substantial uranium deposits has banned nuclear plants and mining since 1980 voicing similar worries.
Environmentalists are also concerned about the radioactive waste and the risk of accidents like Fukushima, which released radioactive material and caused mass evacuations. However, experts, advocates, and mining veterans argue that modern technology has significantly improved nuclear safety.
In this perspective, Cameco CEO Tim Gitzel insists that the industry has learned from past mistakes and is prepared to meet growing energy demands safely and more responsibly. This is why the saying goes “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Rafael Mariano Grossi Director General, IAEA at COP29’s Nuclear Energy for Clean Energy Transitions session said,
“Pro-environment and pro-nuclear, they are already changing minds with science, courage, and a clear call for climate action. It’s high time all leaders listen — and more than that, act.”
Source: IAEA
With its high-grade uranium deposits in the Athabasca Basin, Canada is well-positioned to meet the growing global demand for clean energy. Furthermore, this could reduce reliance on Russian imports and establish Canada as a nuclear “superpower.“ Overall, the potential is clear, and the path forward is promising for both Canada’s energy future and sustainability goals.
Disclosure: Owners, members, directors, and employees of carboncredits.com have/may have stock or option positions in any of the companies mentioned: UROY.
Carboncredits.com receives compensation for this publication and has a business relationship with any company whose stock(s) is/are mentioned in this article.
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Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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