World's Largest Companies Not Doing Enough

An excellent report,The Carbon Chasm , has just been released by the Carbon Disclosure Project. In the interests of full disclosure I should say that the work for the report was conducted in conjunction with BT and that our Chief Sustainability Officer, Chris Tuppen, wrote the excellent foreward to the report !

The report is very readable and only 14 pages. The primary focus is the significant gap between the current commitments of the world’s largest companies with what is required to avoid catastrophic climate change. the report concludes that, overall, companies need to double the pace of their carbon reduction activities.

Also identified is the broad range of different target methodologies across corporations, in particular comparing absolute approaches with intensity based approaches. (At BT, targeting has evolved from an absolute target for UK operations to an intensity based target for entire global operations. The target is linked directly to climate stabilization.)

The report also contains some interesting comparisons on the percentage of companies with carbon reduction targets. Here are a few factoids from the report; 84% of European companies, 71% of American companies and 66% of Asian companies have carbon reduction targets. 100% of Electricity Utility companies have targets compared with only 54% in the Energy sector.

Many quotes in the report, including IBM, PepsiCo, Boeing, The Coca-Cola Company, Johnson and Johnson and Chevron.

Would be great to hear what others think on the 'chasm' and the contrast between absolute and intensity based reporting.

Postscript: November 2009 - Autodesk has announced an approach using a demanding intensity based target called C-FACT - Corporate Finance Approach to Climate-stabilizing Targets. Read a guest post from Autodesk's Emma Stewart on their new target