Biggest Polluting Firms Failing on Short-Term Emissions Goals: Investor Pressure Group

Fewer than one in five of the world’s biggest polluting companies have short-term emissions reductions targets in line with keeping global temperature rises below 1.5 degrees Celsius, an investor pressure group said on Wednesday.

The number of companies pledging to hit net-zero emissions by 2050 has jumped in recent years, but these long-term aspirations are not backed up by shorter-term plans including on capital expenditure, François Humbert, chair of Climate Action 100+’s (CA100+) steering committee, told Reuters.

“Capex is the reality check, and it’s still behind,” Humbert, who is also engagement manager at Generali Investments, said. “We want to move from commitments to action and it’s much more challenging to trigger action.”

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Just 2% of companies plan to phase out investments in unabated carbon-intensive assets by a specified year, CA100+ said, while not one of the 32 upstream oil and gas companies it speaks to have capex plans aligned with the global climate pact agreed in Paris in 2015.

CA100+’s more than 700 members manage a combined $68 trillion in assets and aim to use their financial weight to get big polluters to cut their emissions and disclose more detail about their efforts.

The group’s latest annual assessment on Wednesday showed that, overall, just a quarter of its focus companies were cutting emissions fast enough to align with a 1.5C pathway – an aspirational target agreed by countries in Paris in 2015 – based on reductions in their emissions intensity over the past three years.

According to CA100+, 77% of the world’s largest emitters have a net-zero target, up from 75% last October and less than 5% when the group launched in 2017. More than four-fifths have also set reduction targets for the 2036-2050 period.

As well as shorter-term targets and capex planning, corporate lobbying against climate policy was also a significant problem, it added.

Using data from InfluenceMap, CA100+ said just 4% of companies fully align their climate policy engagement with the Paris agreement goals, while only 31% have committed to Paris-aligned lobbying, though that is up from 24% last year.

(Reporting by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes and Simon Jessop; editing by David Evans)

Photograph: Smoke emissions from an industrial coal burning electric power plant. Photo credit: James Jordan/Getty Images