Big companies keep increasing their climate commitments—especially when governments tell them to

It’s climate week in New York, and aside from unrelenting traffic, that’s brought a new report this morning from Climate Impact Partners that shows big companies continue to increase their commitments to combatting climate change. Among the Fortune Global 500, 63% of companies have now set 2050 targets for emissions reductions, up 12 percentage points in the last year, and 47% have set more ambitious 2030 targets.

I found the geographical breakdown particularly interesting. Of Fortune Global 500 companies based in Europe, where many governments require net zero targets, 78% (101 out of 129) have committed to 2030 targets, up 7 points from last year. In the U.S., where there are no government requirements, 53% (66 of 125) have committed to 2030 targets, up 6 points from last year. And in China, which has committed to neutrality by 2060, only 5% of Fortune Global 500 companies (6 out of 127) have set 2030 targets. Climate Impact Partners treats 2030 goals as more serious than 2050 goals, because the later fall far beyond the likely tenure of current management.

“It’s encouraging there are still growing commitments from corporates,” Vaughan Lindsay, CEO of Climate Impact Partners, told me yesterday. “But it is still not enough…And many of those who haven’t taken action are the heavy emitters.”  

The report notes that only about a third of the Fortune Global 500 have set targets for so-called “Scope 3” emissions—those that come from their suppliers or users of their products—despite the fact that Scope 3 emissions account for about 80% of the companies’ total carbon footprint.

Separately, ServiceNow today is announcing a new tech platform to help companies measure and manage their greenhouse gas emissions. ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott explained to me:

“The best business leaders want to be accountable. What they don’t know is how to instrument their progress. That’s why we built a platform to aggregate every conceivable metric into a single view. A great leader I know said it best: if it counts, count it. It’s time we let the outcomes do the talking.”

More news below. And be sure to spend time today with Fortune’s own new product, launched yesterday, Fortune Crypto. Despite the volatility in crypto markets, we at Fortune believe, as editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell put it, that “crypto is here to stay, both as an asset class and as a technology.” Under the editorial guidance of Jeff John Roberts, Fortune Crypto aims to get the story straight—navigating between the unabashed boosterism of crypto-native sites and the unrelenting skepticism of much mainstream media coverage. On the site today, Leo Schwartz dives into how Coinbase’s billion-dollar effort at philanthropy went sour.

Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

TOP NEWS

Russia mobilizes

Vladimir Putin has ordered a partial mobilization, drafting 300,000 reservists to go fight against the surprisingly successful Ukrainian counteroffensive. He also raised the specter of nuclear war, claiming sans evidence that NATO officials had said it would be acceptable to nuke Russia. The country is preparing to run sham annexation referendums in the Ukrainian territory it has seized. The idea seems to be that once the referendums pass, Ukrainian efforts to retake that territory would be an attack on Russian soil, allowing for a harsher response with the buy-in of the Russian populace. But Putin is on shaky ground, both domestically and among his allies. Fortune

Fed rates

The Federal Reserve today will likely raise its benchmark policy rate by 0.75 points to a new target of 3%-3.25%. This would be the third bump of that magnitude in a row, and a fourth may well come before the year is out. Financial Times

Musk in Iran

Elon Musk is trying to get a sanctions exemption that would allow SpaceX to offer Starlink satellite-internet services in Iran, which is currently being rocked by protests over the death of a young woman in police custody. Wall Street Journal

AROUND THE WATERCOOLER

‘Ideology is trumping the economy’: Top European business group in China blasts Beijing’s COVID zero policies and ‘inward turn’, by Grady McGregor

The Volkswagen heirs have staked their entire $42 billion fortune on the carmaker. The Porsche IPO will force them to double down on the risky bet, by Christiaan Hetzner

A Dutch-Norwegian startup wants to open ‘a whole new frontier’ of renewable energy with solar farms that float on the ocean’s surface, by Ian Mount

Europe’s energy system has become a ‘market that doesn’t function,’ Spanish Prime Minister says, by Tristan Bove

Long COVID might be a lot more common than we think, as symptoms linger 2 years later for 20% of survivors, new study finds, by Erin Prater

This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.