The Net Zero Tracker initiative this morning expanded its work to track the net zero targets of companies and governments by referencing third-party assessments of climate targets.
The Net Zero Tracker initiative, a joint effort between the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), Oxford Net Zero, the NewClimate Institute and the Data-Driven EnviroLab, aims to increase transparency and accountability of the net zero targets set are promised by countries, states and regions, cities and companies. To do this, it collects information about net zero targets from companies and governments and then presents the data in a uniform manner on its free-to-access website.
Today the Tracker announced that it will now complement this work with an effort to provide greater transparency on the numerous voluntary initiatives that have emerged to track and assess net zero targets.
Profiles of companies and governments on the Net Zero Tracker website will now link to assessments of their climate plans by five third-party organizations.
“Today we take the next step toward greater coherence in the dizzying world of Net Zero,” said John Lang, project leader at Net Zero Tracker. “While we have been linking non-country profiles to the UN Race to Zero campaign for some time, linking them to the following five initiatives represents the start of an important new path for us.”
Initially, the Tracker will reference analysis from the ECIU, the NewClimate Institute, Influence Map, Climate Action Tracker, the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and Environment’s Climate Change Laws of the World project.
The Net Zero Tracker initiative said it would add other assessments over time, noting that the CDP, the Science-Based Targets Initiative, Climate Action 100+ and the Global Climate Action Portal are “just a handful of the obvious candidates”.
Lang said the rapid growth of net zero assessment systems was causing confusion that could hinder net zero targets. “The huge increase in net zero targets in recent years has been accompanied by an increase in voluntary initiatives scrambling to track and assess them,” he said. “But if greater transparency about the quality of companies’ goals was the intention, there would be greater confusion about who credibly assesses what the outcome has been.”
The Tracker announced the update on its website as campaign group InfluenceMap warned that corporate lobbying efforts continue to conflict with companies’ public climate goals.
Research from the group, released today, shows that 58 percent of the nearly 300 companies on the Forbes 2,000 list were at risk of corporate greenwashing due to climate policies.
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