Companies around the world are increasingly alert to the climate emergency, facing calls from a growing range of stakeholders to take responsibility for the environmental impact of their activities. Most large companies now have public climate strategies and targets, many of which include pledges that, on the face of it, appear to significantly reduce, or even eliminate, their contributions to global warming.

The rapid acceleration of corporate climate pledges, combined with the fragmentation of approaches means that it is more difficult than ever to distinguish between real climate leadership and unsubstantiated 'greenwashing.' This is compounded by a general lack of regulatory oversight at national and sectoral levels. Identifying and promoting real climate leadership is a key challenge that, where addressed, has the potential to unlock greater global climate change mitigation ambition.

The Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor evaluates the transparency and integrity of companies’ climate pledges. The objectives of the Monitor are:

• Identify and highlight good practice approaches that can be replicated by other companies, recognising that companies are experimenting to work out what is constructive and credible practice.
• Reveal the extent to which major companies’ climate leadership claims have integrity, and provide a structured methodology for others to replicate such an evaluation.
• Scrutinise the credibility of companies’ plans for offsetting their emissions through carbon dioxide removals or emission reduction credits, recognising that voluntary carbon markets are highly fragmented and there remains a lot of uncertainty on credible good practice.

The Monitor focuses on four main areas of corporate climate action: tracking and disclosure of emissions, setting emission reduction targets, reducing own emissions and taking responsibility for unabated emissions through climate contributions or offsetting. Finally, it evaluatates 25 major global companies’ transparency and integrety across these four areas.