As the United States backtracks on federal climate commitments, many companies are reassessing their ambitious net-zero targets and other climate commitments. The current administration has begun to systematically dismantle federal climate regulations and undercut states’ emission reduction and disclosure policies. Some companies are walking away from their climate commitments, no longer publicizing information about targets or progress toward them, or weakening their emissions reduction goals. We need better data to understand how companies are responding to this shifting landscape and to design future policies that drive emissions reductions and enable robust corporate climate disclosures.
The Corporate Climate Targets Database — produced by the Salata Institute at Harvard University’s Corporate Climate Targets Project — is the most comprehensive effort to date to track corporate commitments and their implementation across Russell 3000 companies. This dataset and online tool cover climate targets and emissions trends over the past 25 years. It draws from primary sources such as annual reports, 10-K filings, and sustainability reports. This information provides transparent data to investors, advocates, companies, and others, helping them assess the value of corporate targets and consider their efficacy against alternative approaches to driving emission reductions. Users can also assess how shifting regulatory regimes, including federal and state disclosure efforts and state renewable energy mandates, affect net-zero commitments and emissions reductions.
Climate-Related Risk Disclosure Policies
Disclosure policies that require companies to publicly share information about their greenhouse gas emissions, climate-related risks, and other information allow stakeholders to better understand a company’s emissions profile and climate strategies. Many companies are beginning to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate risks and impacts under mandatory reporting regimes, notably in California and the European Union. Other U.S. states are also considering these types of disclosure requirements. As a result, there is a shift from primarily voluntary disclosure to required public disclosure of company emissions and climate risks in some jurisdictions. Lessons from these policies can inform future federal disclosure requirements, with the goal of driving investment in sustained emissions reductions.
In California, hundreds of companies have reported on their climate-related risk despite a court ruling that paused the new requirement’s enforceability. The reporting companies include a mix of private and public companies across a range of sectors, including technology, health care, real estate, consumer goods, and hospitality. While many of these companies have been disclosing climate risk voluntarily for some time even without the legislation, California’s new requirements appear to be inducing a surge of first-time reporters. The data show that over half of the reporting companies — many of them private or smaller U.S.-based companies — are disclosing their climate risks publicly for the first time.
At the same time, the federal government is expected to cease emissions reporting programs, which will limit the data available to track emissions and make informed decisions. The Trump administration has proposed to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting program, which requires companies in many high-emitting sectors to report their emissions annually. The SEC has initiated its rescission of Biden-era climate-related risk disclosure requirements, which had not taken effect because of litigation, but with which some companies were preparing to comply. The loss of federal data will result in a patchwork of information as companies report different content in different jurisdictions using different formats, leaving investors and advocates with inconsistent and piecemeal data on corporate climate risks and impacts. The information environment is deteriorating just as the federal government is rescinding federal greenhouse gas reduction rules for major emitting sectors, including vehicles and power plants. It will be important to understand the effect of these policy shifts on corporate climate commitments.
The database will fill a gap by providing interested parties with more complete information on corporate climate commitments. We hope it will help researchers design meaningful disclosure policies that achieve emissions reductions while avoiding unintended consequences, like chilling compliance in the face of litigation risk. The database also incorporates state clean energy and climate policies to help users analyze how state policies affect corporate climate ambition. This state-level data can help shed light on the extent to which certain policies shape corporate behavior and enable researchers to explore this interaction between state policy and corporate decision-making. In the long term, however, federal disclosure requirements will need to fill this information-forcing role.
Looking Ahead
As climate-related risk and greenhouse gas emissions reporting gets underway in California and continues in the EU and elsewhere, we will assess how well these policies are working and whether the pressure of public disclosure compels decarbonization within companies that would not have happened otherwise. These lessons can inform both federal policymakers seeking to design effective climate-related disclosure requirements and corporations working to achieve their climate commitments by investing in the highest-impact reduction strategies. For the latest information, check the project website and launch announcement.