Why top companies are starting to back away from green targets

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In the past year, many of the world’s biggest companies have dropped or missed goals to cut emissions or to loosen ties with polluting sectors.

At a recent address to investors, the former BP chief executive Lord John Browne urged them to consider Aesop’s fable of the rider who stops feeding his horse in peacetime, only to find it lame when war comes.

But it’s not just companies finding it hard to hit climate targets – some governments are, too. Scotland’s devolved government ditched its 2030 decarbonisation target in April, saying it was out of reach following delays to its draft climate change plan. Germany’s climate adviser said this month that it believed the country’s 2030 goal was also likely to be missed.

More than 10,000 companies globally committed to cut emissions under the auspices of a UN campaign, the Race to Zero. In some industries, technology is cited as a barrier to action. Barend van Bergen, chief sustainability officer at Roche, says heating buildings and powering manufacturing processes in a clean way remains a challenge for the Swiss healthcare group. Its engineers and suppliers are exploring the potential of biomass, biogas and other fuels.from China to Europe has meant automakers planning to shift away from combustion engine production have, in some cases, slowed their efforts.

Kimberly-Clark, the US maker of Kleenex tissues, says “chronic grid delays” are slowing its transition to clean energy. This could make its goal of powering its UK production facilities with only renewables by 2030 more difficult to reach. Murray Auchincloss, BP’s new boss, echoes Shell’s approach, saying last month that BP was “really, really driven by returns”.

Partly as a result of this shift in tone, building climate targets into debt structures has become less appealing than it was a few years ago.Sustainability-linked bonds were meant to bring rigour to green claims by tying companies’ borrowing costs to whether they could achieve their climate promises.

The Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, which has broad corporate backing, has said companies can offset up to half of their indirect emissions. The NewClimate Institute report found that this would allow most companies to hit their targets without actually making cuts to their own supply chain and client-related emissions.has no plans to bring down the overall carbon footprint of its supply chain on a percentage basis.

New data from the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, a London-based non-profit, shows that more than two-thirds of annual revenues across the world’s largest companies are now aligned with net zero, representing an increase of 45 per cent in two years.

 

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