Clean200 companies hit $2.8 trillion in sustainable revenues

For anyone tracking the growth of the clean economy, the annual Carbon Clean 200 list provides a striking perspective. Since 2016, the shareholder-advocacy non-profit As You Sow and Corporate Knights have zeroed in on total sustainable revenues at public companies worldwide in order to show both the share and scale of sustainable revenues in absolute terms.

“The Clean200 follows revenues, not rhetoric,” Toby Heaps, CEO of Corporate Knights and report co-author, said in a statement. “Even when politics turns hostile, markets continue to reward companies that are supplying what the global economy is structurally demanding – clean power, electrification, efficiency, and resilient infrastructure.”

For the 200 companies that made this year’s list, revenue from sustainable activities reached a record high of US$2.8 trillion, up 12% from last year and 710% from 2017. On average, more than half the revenue (53.7%) at Clean200 companies is sustainable – roughly 15 percentage points higher than five years ago – whereas companies in the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) generate only 16.7% of their revenue from sustainable activities.

“In 2016, we created the Clean200 in response to investors who asked, ‘As we shift away from fossil fuels, what should we invest in?’” Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow and report co-author, said in a statement. “A decade later, the Clean200 continues to demonstrate that the global economy is increasingly driven by companies delivering solutions that reduce dependence on fossil fuels and resource-intensive systems.”

Over the past decade, investors in Clean200 companies beat the benchmark by a wide margin. From July 1, 2016, to January 26, 2026, the Clean200 portfolio returned 282.9%, compared with 221.3% for the MSCI ACWI. The fossil fuel benchmark, meanwhile, returned a much slimmer 111%. In other words, the Clean200 produced about 2.5 times the gain of the fossil fuel benchmark.

The Clean 200 is selected from 8,229 eligible companies, of which 103 were excluded. The list employs a wide range of negative screens to exclude: for example, fossil-fired utilities or big banks and insurers financing fossil fuel companies, as well as for-profit prisons, weapons makers and others.

Looking back five years, the Clean200 demonstrates the increasing economic weight of all-in sustainability firms known as “pure plays,” such as electric-vehicle makers and renewable-power generators. Since 2021, the share of pure-play sustainability companies – those for whom more than 99% of revenues are sustainable – has increased by 175%, from eight to 22. Near pure-plays, or those with greater than a 90% ratio, increased 216.7%, from 12 to 38. And those with more than 80% sustainable revenue also increased dramatically, from 22 to 49.

The United States and China have 69 companies on the list between them, 41 and 28 respectively. Five years ago, the United States had 46 companies on the list, and China had 17, which suggests a subtle but marked rebalancing trend. About half the list consists of “middle power” countries: Japan (15), France (12), Canada (11), Germany (11), Spain (8), Brazil (8), South Korea (7), Denmark (7), United Kingdom (5), Sweden (5) and India (5). Sixteen other countries share the remaining 14.5% of the list, underscoring how widely distributed the clean‑economy opportunity has become.

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