Voluntary corporate emissions targets not enough to create real climate action

 Companies' emissions reduction targets should not be the sole measure of corporate climate ambition, according to a new perspective paper.

Relying on emissions can favour more established companies and hinder innovation, say the authors, who suggest updating regulations to improve corporate climate action.

The paper, published today in Science, is by an international team led by Utrecht University, which includes Imperial College London researchers.

Lead author of the study Dr Yann Robiou Du Pont, from the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, said: "Assessing the climate ambition of companies based only on their emissions reductions may not be meaningful for emerging companies working on green innovation."

Companies can set individual climate goals, typically commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their activities -- not unlike national governments. To indicate how ambitious these voluntary commitments are, businesses can get them validated as 'Paris-aligned' under the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a collaboration that started in 2015.

This validation means SBTi considers their targets to be aligned to the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global temperature increase to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.

The new paper says this approach may inadvertently favour larger existing companies, stifling innovation and skewing the playing field against emerging competitors. This is because Paris-aligned targets for larger, established companies often assume that they can simply keep their current market share of emissions, leaving no capacity for emissions from the activities of emerging companies.

For example, a new solar panel manufacturer that needs to grow its emissions ten years from now while it scales up a new, highly efficient method of building those panels, may be squeezed out of the market because, in this model, their operation would mean overshooting the Paris-aligned climate goal.

Source: ScienceDaily