Supporter bonus: What’s going on with corporate ESG?

Nat Bullard does a huge slide deck presentation every year outlining the massive forces shaping the economic terrain on which climate and corporate action are enacted. It’s a 200-page deck and for a lot of people that’s too much to wade through, so as promised in last Friday’s GTG Links, I have picked out my favourites for some of the dynamics they illustrate. They’re mainly to do with corporate climate strategy, clean tech, and ESG reporting – but there are a couple of funky bonus ones at the end as well.

Corporate climate commitments have largely followed a pattern where they start “at the top” of the largest companies, and trickle down to smaller and smaller companies. We seem to be reaching a saturation point when it comes to these largest companies and their climate commitments. What are the holdouts? My guess is they’re the ones most heavily reliant on the old fossil fuel economy – but I don’t have any data to point to for that conclusion, it’s just a hunch.

NB: the chart also doesn’t specify what these commitments are, or whether they have any real integrity – are they credible net zero, or are they the wishy-washy “carbon neutral”?

The next chart, from the SBTi org, shows much more confidence-inspiring change, with a staggering growth in targets, including Net Zero targets submitted.