A new report from New Climate and Carbon Market Watch finds that corporations are not meeting their published pledges on carbon goals. No companies qualified for their “High Integrity” rating and just one, Maersk, for the “Reasonable Integrity” category. Apple, Sony, and Vodafone achieved “Moderate Integrity.” The bottom of the list included Novartis, Unilever, Nestle, CVS Health, and Accenture.

From the introduction:

Net zero targets commit to reduce the analysed companies’ aggregate emissions by only 40% on average, not 100% as suggested by the term “net zero”. All of the 25 companies assessed in this report pledge some form of zero emission, net zero or carbon-neutrality target. But just 3 of the 25 companies – Maersk, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom – clearly commit to deep decarbonisation of over 90% of their full value chain emissions by their respective target years of their headline pledges. At least 5 of the companies only commit to reduce their emissions by less than 15%, often by excluding upstream or downstream emissions. The 13 companies that provide specific details on what their headline net zero pledges mean, commit to reduce their full value chain emissions from 2019 by only 40% on average. The other 12 companies do not accompany their headline pledges with any specific emission reduction commitment for their that target year. Collectively, the 25 companies specifically commit to reducing only less than 20% of their 2.7 GtCO2e emission footprint, by their respective headline target years.

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Targets for 2030 fall well short of the ambition required to align with the internationally agreed goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid the most damaging effects of climate change. Among the companies we assessed, 15 of the 25 prominently report interim climate targets. However, our analysis finds that the average emission reduction commitment of full value chain emissions between 2019 and 2030 is just 23%, if we exclude the 5 companies for which we could not identify any commitment for emission reductions post 2019. This compares to the need to cut global GHG emissions by 40-50% between 2010 and 20301, equivalent to approximately half of 2019 emission levels, to be in line with the goal to limit global temperature increase to 1.5°C.