Almost no large companies meet UN’s target climate guidelines, says study

As many as 50% of the world’s largest companies have a net-zero target by 2050, but only 4% of major companies meet the UN’s target climate guidelines.

This is according to Net Zero Tracker, a consortium including Oxford University.

The number of companies in the Forbes 2000 Global that have set targets for net-zero emissions has risen by more than 40% to 1,003 since June of last year, said the consortium.

The results of the analysis are bad news. The major companies setting net-zero targets had an aggregate annual revenue of around $27 trillion as of last month.

The UN’s target campaign, Race to Zero, calls for covering all emissions, starting to slash them immediately, and issuing an annual progress report, reported Reuters.

Of the 50% to establish a target, just 37% had a plan that covered Scope 3 emissions, or those tied to a company's value chain, such as an oil company accounting for vehicle emissions.

Just 13% had a quality threshold for the use of carbon offsets, said the news service.

"A clear line in the sand on net zero has surfaced,” said John Lang, project lead, the Net Zero Tracker. “Countless net-zero targets are credibility light, but now we can say for certain that most of the world's largest listed companies are on the right side of the line on net-zero intent."

He continued: "With credible net-zero target-setting a proxy for forward-thinking, future-proofing companies, it begs a simple question: are the firms we’re investing in, working for and buying from on the right or wrong side of the line?"

"Not that countries are on track either. We have two years to fix the climate and reach the Paris accord emission targets, according to a UN global stocktake report issued in September, and we are not going to make it.

COP28 opens in Dubai on November 30, and the issue of how much companies and countries are doing to meet the Paris goals will be central to the debate.

This comes as respected climate scientist James Hansen, who testified to the US Congress on the dangers of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and global heating as long ago as 1988, told reporters last week that the world will reach the Paris Agreement 1.5 C threshold this decade.

Hansen, who in September warned about the Earth’s energy imbalance, said: "The 1.5C limit is deader than a doornail. And the two-degree limit can be rescued only with the help of purposeful actions."

He added: "The shortcoming of our scientific community is to not make clear to the political leaders what the situation is.”

Hansen was asked if this was evidence of the extreme warming of the five months, and he replied: "Yeah. Absolutely it is." 

A study co-authored by Hansen, of Columbia University's Earth Institute, about the earth’s energy imbalance was published on November 2 in the Oxford Open Climate Change journal. 

Some see Hansen’s view as too extreme. Another respected US climatologist, Michael Mann, has disputed the findings.

Mann blogged: "[Hansen] and his co-authors are very much out of the mainstream with their newly published paper in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change. That's fine; healthy scepticism is a valuable thing in science. But the standard is high when you're challenging the prevailing scientific understanding, and I don't think they've met that standard, by a long shot."