The authors dove deep into carbon-neutral programs byAmazon, Maersk, BMW, CVS, and IKEA to see if the companies were actually substantiating their sustainability claims. What they found was that none of the 25 brands they studied received a “high integrity” rating. Maersk’s net-zero by 2040 pledge ranked the highest with “reasonable integrity”; Apple, Sony, and Vodafone followed behind with “moderate integrity”; the rest fell under “low or very low integrity”.
“We set out to uncover as many replicable good practices as possible, but we were frankly surprised and disappointed at the overall integrity of the companies’ claims,” Thomas Day of NewClimate Institute, and lead author of the study,“As pressure on companies to act on climate change rises, their ambitious-sounding headline claims often lack real substance, which can mislead both consumers and the regulators that are core to guiding their strategic direction.
Only three of the companies analyzed, Maersk, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, have actually committed to decarbonizing most of their full value chain emissions . Some of the other companies have skirted by with net-zero pledges that only cover direct emissions, which only include the fossil fuels the company uses to run their facilities and vehicles.
According to the study, leaving out downstream and upstream emissions from net-zero promises leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to hard emissions cuts. For example, eight of the companies exclude the upstream and downstream emissions that typically account for around 90 percent of their de facto emissions, according to the new research. Five of those companies crafted sustainability plans that, in reality, would only drop their emissions by under 15 percent.
Unfortunately, for these people, money is more important than anything else. The dark side of the capitalist fairy tale.