A recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change concludes there is limited accountability for corporations that fail to achieve their climate change mitigation targets. Lofty sounding initiatives like “carbon neutrality” or “net zero emissions” goals are often met with positive fanfare, but when companies eventually fail to reach them, there are scant consequences. According to the analysis, 9% of company decarbonization plans missed their goals, while 31% simply “disappeared.”
Despite this, around 60% of companies studied met their targets. On its face, one might call this good news. But is it leading to real climate action?
No, says this week’s podcast guest, who tracks such commitments and says the hype generally doesn’t add up. Ketan Joshi, a consultant and researcher for nonprofit organizations in the climate sector, explains that many corporations buy renewable energy certificates instead of directly decarbonizing their operations and purchase carbon credits to “offset” additional carbon emissions from their business.
However, in the case of carbon offsetting, there is no verifiable way to track how much of this money is going to climate action projects on the ground. Typically, credits are purchased from a broker, and 90% of these intermediaries arranging such deals on the voluntary carbon market don’t share their data.
How much of that cash is ending up reforesting an area of land, for example? It’s almost impossible to tell, Joshi says, but other independent analysts say not much at all.
Despite their claims, his analyses of corporate spending suggest they may not be leading to deeper systemic decarbonization along supply chains, either, as in the case of the more difficult to manage emissions that come indirectly from doing business, known as “Scope 3.” Emissions data from these are often not considered in companies’ climate commitments.
While carbon offset providers say companies investing in carbon offsets are more successful at decarbonizing, Joshi disagrees with this conclusion when renewable certificates are taken into account.
“Those analyses don’t exclude renewable energy credits from counting as real climate action. So, the real trend is that companies that tend to buy carbon offsets also buy certificates for their electricity generation. And neither is really making a systemic or deep adjustment to a company’s way of doing business,” he says.
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Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Jiang, X., Kim, S., & Lu, S. (2025). Limited accountability and awareness of corporate emissions target outcomes. Nature Climate Change. doi: 10.1038/s41558-024-02236-3
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
Ketan Joshi: Are companies actually changing their emissions to meet their targets or promises or aspirations that they set out? So, in around 21, there was this huge surge. If you look at a chart of net zero promises, it was, it’s like this huge peak that sort of occurred like just before COVID during it and a little bit after as well of companies basically saying, you We are promising to tackle our climate responsibilities. Often it came in the form of net zero targets, but not exclusively. And this paper actually says, Okay, let’s just do a check in and see what happened with a lot of the, biggest companies that, set these targets and made these promises. And so, what they found is that a decent percentage of them, I don’t actually remember the exact number off the top of my head, I think it was 8% simply did not meet their targets
Mike DiGirolamo (narration): Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your cohost, Mike DiGirolamo., bring you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the Newscast, I speak with Ketan Joshi, a researcher and communications consultant working with organizations, activists, and academics in the climate focused, not for profit sector. His work largely centers on corporate accountability. carbon markets, and greenwashing. In our conversation, Joshi discusses a recent paper in the journal Nature Climate Change that examines the corporate climate commitments hundreds of large corporations make and whether they meet them. The results, perhaps unsurprisingly, show there is limited accountability. But Joshi expands further on the unexamined aspect of corporations that actually do meet their targets. And he explains why their actions may not be leading decarbonization of their business practices. And, how there is little way to actually measure how the money corporations use to purchase carbon offsets is being used in things like reforestation projects versus ending up in the pockets of intermediaries taking a piece of the pie.
Mike: Ketan, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.
Ketan: Hi, very nice to be here.
Mike: The first thing that I want to breach with you is that, generally speaking, we’re starting to see corporations start to abandon their climate targets. And there was a paper that just got released, , but what can we glean from this? What are you seeing happening and why are they doing this?
Ketan: Yeah, so this paper that was released in Nature examines something which I have been yearning to see examined for many years. This is something that hasn’t really been properly investigated, and the exact question that it looks at is Are companies actually changing their emissions to meet their targets or promises or aspirations that they set out? So in the, in around 21, there was this huge surge. If you look at a chart of net zero promises, it was, it’s like this huge peak that sort of occurred like just before COVID during it and a little bit after as well of companies basically saying, you We are promising to tackle our climate responsibilities. Often it came in the form of net zero targets, but not exclusively. And this paper actually says, ‘Okay, let’s just do a check in and see what happened with a lot of the, biggest companies that set these targets and made these promises.’ And so, what they found is that a decent percentage of them, I don’t actually remember the exact number off the top of my head, I think it was 8% simply did not meet their targets.
Mike (narration): 8. 5 percent or 88 companies, if we’re being exact.
Ketan: So, they kept them they kept their climate promises, they didn’t delete their aspirations or ambitions, but they didn’t meet the targets. I think if I remember correctly, an even larger percentage actually deleted or very quietly erased their climate commitments.
Mike (narration): That number is much larger. 30.7%, or 320 companies targets, completely disappeared.
Ketan: And so recent bit of news from a few days ago, just to provide an example of this is a company called Equinor. Equinor is the state-owned, or mostly state-owned oil and gas company based here in Norway. And they have been one of the leaders, I’m doing air quotes for those listening in the oil and gas industry in terms of promising to deal with their climate responsibilities. And Equinor specifically promised to deal with their own emissions during the process of extracting oil and gas, but they also promised to deal with their, what’s called scope three or the emissions from when the fossil fuel products they sell are burned. And they did a big announcement last Thursday, which was essentially, they’re deleting. Their ambition to invest a certain percentage of their total capital expenditure in renewables. They also said we’re going to reduce the. installed capacity, the target for the installed capacity of renewables. And this really struck me as interesting. And I haven’t actually published this yet, but I’ve done a little bit of analysis on what they’ve promised. And what I found is that Equinor have never met any target that they’ve set. What they essentially do is they create a target for renewables, for CCS. And they just ignore it. So, it just sits there. Every quarter, every annual report you open up their PDFs, and it always has the same target, or it has like even an improved target sometimes. And the percentage of renewables that they sell just remains like this sort of measly about 0. 5 percent of total energy that they sell. The amount of CCS that they actually use to, to sequester, capture and sequester carbon. That remains at a very low level. I think it was, it’s 1 percent if I remember correctly, compared to their total emissions. And so, this isn’t, this is a nice example of what it really means for a company to set or to delete a target. And so, this nature paper basically says, this is a bit of a problem that companies like set a target and they ignore it or that they set a target and then it disappears. But what I find particularly interesting is that when companies do have targets. They actually tend to ignore them, and they just very brazenly miss their emissions targets, or they’re completely off track. And there isn’t a lot of scrutiny or attention paid to that and so there aren’t really many of us, like people who do corporate accountability analysis or work on trying to pick these apart. Kind of calling them out on setting and forgetting their target and then just brazenly breaking the promise And so the other thing that’s worth noting about this nature paper that came out that I found really interesting about it is A lot of us who do this kind of work analyzing corporate climate targets we have a good idea of what it means for a company to claim that they actually are on track. And so, the first question that I had, and the first question that many others had when we saw this major paper, was like, okay, this ad, this paper is actually saying a decent percentage of companies Set the target, and it was more than the majority of the companies in the paper examined. Set a target, and then just met it.
Mike (narration): Yep, most companies in the study met their target. 60. 8 percent of them, or 633 companies.
Ketan: They kept the target, and then they achieved their goals. And you could look at that as a positive story when you look at the paper. But then, of course, I opened the methodology, and what they do is they use this database called the Carbon Disclosure Project database, or CDP. And CDP is, really one of the primary sources for target setting data for actually homogenized or accessible version of corporate emissions data. So, what they claim that they emitted. And then, this is the important part, you also have a line in there for what companies claim to have bought as renewable energy certificates, which are a special type of certificate that you claim, that you purchase and then claim that you’re power electricity purchases off a grid are zero emissions. And then you also have data on the amount of carbon offsets that a company has bought which are a type of certificate that you buy, but you can use it for anything to claim that your emissions have gone from whatever you emitted actually down to zero because you’re undoing it by having purchased this carbon offset. And so of course, my question was like for the companies that actually say that they’ve met their targets in this paper, how many of them shut down the coal plant, the steel mill, and how many of them kept that coal plant going but actually bought carbon offsets or bought renewable energy credits. And that is something that the paper does not go into. And this is an interesting little nuance, right? Because we’ve seen this in, different contexts. So, what we saw last year, and I think the year before a little bit as well, is that some pro carbon offsetting lobby groups released a set of analyses that claimed companies that tend to buy carbon offsets are actually seeing a lot of success in directly reducing their emissions, which sounds like a good story. You think, ‘Oh, cool. So, actually carbon offsets aren’t really that much of a greenwashing tool,’ but actually those analyses don’t exclude renewable energy credits from counting as real climate action. So, what, the real trend is that companies that tend to buy carbon offsets also buy certificates for their electricity generation. And neither is really making a systemic or deep adjustment to a company’s way of doing business. they’re not changing the machinery or they’re not changing their suppliers or making any deep change to how they’re doing business to decarbonize or remove high emissions activities from what they’re doing.
Mike (narration): It should be noted here that a study published the journal PLOS Climate found that companies often will not report what’s referred to as scope three emissions or rather emissions that are attached to their businesses through their supply chain and thus not accounting for the full breadth of their carbon emissions. Even if they are otherwise taking action on decarbonization elsewhere. For a deeper look into this, I recommend reading Manga Bay staffer John Cannon’s five-part series on forest carbon credits, which I’m linking in the show notes.
Ketan: And yeah, this paper came out and I was like, Oh, that’s pretty interesting. it shows that the most interesting part of it to me was the way companies. have talked about their climate commitments, right? So, it’s certainly true that there’s been a noticeable trend of companies just deleting their commitment or even making a bit of a big deal about it because they want to show that, like Equinor we’re doing last week, they want to show to investors, no, we’re getting serious now. We’re back to, we’re back to being adults. we’re going back to our core business. Shell did that, late last year and BP did it a little bit earlier than that. last year as well. However, all these ongoing problems around like greenwashing and the way emissions are reported, that stuff is ongoing, right? And the sort of exodus from, net zero claims is not that massive. And I think part of it is because companies have such consistent access to ways to fake action on climate change, that they don’t really feel the need to quit. they get more benefit from, keeping their net zero target on their website but actually claiming that they’re taking action in some other way when they’re not really.
Mike (narration): Hey listeners, thank you for tuning in as always. I want to take a moment to remind you that we are a nonprofit. The work we do is made possible by our readers and our listeners. We believe independent media is critical to societal well-being and the health of our planet. It’s one of the reasons we are able to bring you all of our content completely free. Help keep it that way, head to Mongabay.com and click on the donate button in the upper right corner of the screen. If you want to support us, thank you very much. And back to our conversation with Ketan Joshi.
Mike: We’re going to put a pin in that and come back to it. But I want to talk about another thread to pull on here, which is that corporations seem to be taking up more litigation against activists and, even environmental defense offices like happened here in Australia, the EDO. for those folks that don’t know.
Mike (narration): The Environmental Defender’s Office was ordered to pay court fees for oil and gas company Santos after a federal judge rejected the EDO’s application to halt the Barossa Gas Project on behalf of the Tiwi Islands. However, Santos requested a subpoena of four different organizations, some of them activist organizations, which were not a party to the case in order to inform their application. This request was granted.
Mike: So, all of this happened last year, I believe. What’s your take on this, Catan? What do you think of this happening in this moment?
Ketan: Yeah, something I’ve worked on a bit and pay close attention to is the inverse. So, basically fossil fuel companies. On the grounds of their climate claims or environmental claims, right? So, a lot of companies are being taken to court or being fined by regulators for making claims about what they’re doing on, climate or environment. And I feel like. Obviously, fossil fuel companies have used these really aggressive legal tactics, particularly against activists for quite some time. Exxon in the US, of course, have been doing this for a while, and Chevron have too. there are people who’ve been to jail, activists who’ve been to jail in the US. However, I think that in Australia, this is quite a new thing being legally aggressive directly, like the company, towards activists or environmental groups, I haven’t seen too much of it and I think part of it is because Companies like Woodside, for instance, have always relied on the actions of the police forces to come down on activists, right? There have been some actions against Woodside, against their headquarters in Western Australia and some activists went to the They went to spray paint the exterior wall of the CEO of Woodside, and the police were there before they even began they basically, that type of activism, they rely on the actions, the excessive actions of the police force, and then governments also creating very punitive excessive regulations against protest however, the What we’re seeing now in recent years is environment groups actually leading a push to sue companies. And so, during the planning process, they sue companies they sue companies for making misleading environmental claims or climate claims. 2022, I think, had the highest number globally. of climate cases involving fossil fuel companies ever.
Mike (narration): It was 2023 if we’re going by the number of cases brought against fossil fuel companies. The second highest would be 2020, but both 2021 and 2022 also had a relatively high number of cases. Source, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Climate Change Litigation Database.
Ketan: So, this is really, this is a really, a thing that’s been happening in the past few years, and I think, if I remember correctly, it was either 2022’s report or 23’s report, Australia was number one.
Mike (narration): I couldn’t confirm this, but I found that as of 2023, the United States is the country in the world by far with the most climate change litigation cases. And the second is Australia. Source, Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation from the Grantham Research Institute.
Ketan: And so, this could be related. I think this could be like a sort of, like pushing back on environment groups, obviously fossil fuel companies have a lot of money. And they know that they need to. really just hammer down on these groups. And it’s really quite shocking to see some of those, like you mentioned, the Santos and the EDO. It’s really quite shocking to see how successful that has been. Obviously. That raises a lot of issues for a bunch of different envir