Net-zero vows suffer ‘credibility gap’

Photo taken on Sept. 21, 2019 shows the United Nations Youth Climate Summit held at the UN headquarters in New York, Sept. 21, 2019. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Saturday said he saw a change in the momentum of global climate action thanks to the ongoing youth movement. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

While countries, cities and companies have massively ramped up net-zero emissions promises in recent months, there remain "major flaws" in many plans, according to an analysis published Monday that raises fears of potential large-scale greenwashing by businesses.

Faced with mounting urgency and public pressure as deadly and costly climate impacts increase, governments and corporations issued a proliferation of net-zero pledges in the runup to the UN's key climate summit in Glasgow in 2021. 

Most rich countries have announced they will be net-zero by 2050.

"The use of that concept has simply been booming," said Frederic Hans, climate policy analyst at NewClimate Institute and the report's co-lead author.

But the devil is in the details. 

"If you set a net-zero target and you do not communicate in any way what emission reductions are implied by the targets, then nobody knows, you cannot be held accountable," said Hans. 

The report draws on a database of over 4,000 governments, cities, states and major companies and comes as climate negotiators are meeting in Germany to prepare for major UN talks later in 2022. 

It does not drill into exactly how each net-zero plan will negate the amount of greenhouse gases it emits, instead focusing on monitoring how robust the targets are and whether they are followed up with a specific pathway to action.  

It found that more than 90 percent of the world's economy is now covered by promises by governments to reach net-zero - a near six-fold increase in three years. 

One third of the world's largest publicly traded companies also now have net-zero goals - 702 firms, up from 417 in December 2020 - they said, while the number of major cities with these emissions reduction targets has doubled to 235.

"We are now at a watershed moment where peer pressure to hastily set net-zero pledges, especially in the business sector, could result in either a mass flow of greenwashing - or a fundamental shift towards decarburization," said co-author Takeshi Kuramochi, senior climate policy researcher at NewClimate Institute. 

The Net Zero Tracker analysis looked at a range of factors, like if detailed plans are published - or, for governments, enshrined in law - and included key interim targets that would ensure early carbon-cutting action.

The report found that 65 percent of national net-zero targets had been set in domestic law or included in policy documents by May 2022, up from just 10 percent in December 2020. 

But even among the 702 firms that had net-zero promises, the report found that only around half had some kind of interim target, which it deemed "unacceptably low." 

AFP