Scientists have assessed whether corporate climate actions are sufficient and their rankings favour 49 brands, from Astra Zeneca to Volkswagen.
The nonprofit group Climate Counts has taken a science-based approach to answering the question “how good is good enough” when it comes to corporate action on climate change.
A new study, just released, analysed the greenhouse gas emissions of 100 companies against science-based targets that seek to limit climate change to two degrees Celsius above the levels prevailing in the pre-industrial period.
Environmental website GreenBiz.com reports that is the threshold scientists (and most world leaders) have agreed we must not cross to avoid catastrophic impacts.
Comparing company targets to science is a novel, even radical move.
GreenBiz reports companies don’t typically cite scientific consensus in justifying the targets they’ve set for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, some of which seem, well, arbitrary.
So, this study offers a rare look at how corporate commitments square with what’s needed to address the climate challenge at the scale and scope it demands.
The good news is that 49 of the 100 companies studied rated sustainably in the study, with Autodesk, Unilever and Eli Lilly earning three top spots in the ranking.
Of those 49 companies, 25 saw their revenue grow during that same eight-year period, showing that decoupling of growth and emissions is possible.
The companies were chosen from among those that submitted data voluntarily through sustainability reports and through organizations such as CDP and the Climate Registry.
That means 51 of the 100 companies failed the test: they are reducing emissions at a rate insufficient to meet the two-degree hurdle.
GreenBiz reports companies at the bottom of the list included UPS, Molson Coors and Weyerhaeuser.
“Our goal with this study is to take what we know about climate science and apply it to what we know about the current state of corporate greenhouse gas emissions as a means of informing a pathway forward,” said Mike Bellamente, Climate Count’s executive director.
GreenBiz reports the study was conducted by Climate Counts in partnership with the Center for Sustainable Organisations (CSO), an organisation that uses context-based sustainability, which it defines as “an approach for measuring, managing and reporting the sustainability performance of organisations that takes contextually relevant social, economic and environmental limits and thresholds explicitly into account.”
The study relies on a metric developed by CSO called the Context-Based Carbon Metric in 2006 in close collaboration with Ben and Jerry’s.
Embedded in CSO’s metric were science-based emissions targets developed by Tellus Institute in Boston.
Importantly, the Tellus targets allocate the burden to mitigate emissions “in a justice-based or equity-sensitive way,” the researchers explain.
“Emitters in the developed world, that is, are assigned a disproportionately higher share of the burden to reduce global emissions than emitters in the still-developing world receive.”
