A new study has proposed the development of industry-specific net-zero blueprints to improve the credibility and consistency of corporate climate commitments.
Published in Nature Sustainability, the study suggests that current approaches to corporate emissions accounting enable companies to report significantly different emissions results using existing accounting rules.
As the latest Net Zero Stocktake notes, just 7% of corporate net-zero pledges demonstrate ‘genuine integrity’, despite more than 2,000 companies, together representing $36.6 trillion in annual revenue, committing to net zero.
Industry-specific blueprints
Researchers at the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) Berlin, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Bauhaus Earth and the University of Sussex, have called for the creation of industry-specific blueprints that would establish a common scientific basis for net-zero claims.
Each blueprint would cover four elements – consistent emissions accounting, industry-calibrated target setting, progress tracking, and governance of residual emissions – and would support corporate value chain emissions reporting under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, voluntary commitments through the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), and regulatory reporting under frameworks including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), they note.
“Beyond sectoral pathways, current Scope 3 guidance advises companies to decarbonise what they can and neutralise what’s left over, without quantifying them,” commented lead author Ramana Gudipudi, from ESMT Berlin.
“This pushes collective over-reliance on a contested carbon credit market and on removal capacity that has planetary limits. Industry-specific blueprints would close that gap. They convert planetary science into the real economy: benchmarking corporate ambition that fosters innovation, a shared scientific foundation for investors, and targeted policy support for regulators.”
Climate policy
The research comes amidst a reshaping of global climate policy – the US recently withdrew from the Paris Agreement, while the EU’s Omnibus package reduced the scope of the CSRD. Other recent developments include revisions to the GHG Protocol’s Scope 3 guidance, the release of the SBTi’s Corporate Net-Zero Standard v2.0, updates to European Sustainability Reporting Standards and the continued adoption of ISSB disclosure standards in more than 25 countries.
As the authors note, with this level of change underway, these blueprints would ‘give this converging landscape a common scientific foundation’ for companies, investors, policymakers and standards organisations.
“Industry-specific blueprints, grounded in physics and aligned with planetary boundaries, are a scientific and practical necessity,” added retired professor Jürgen Kropp, guest senior research fellow at IIASA and partner of Bauhaus Earth. Read more here.
