Conference Agenda

To limit average global heating to 1.5/2C, net atmospheric additions of greenhouse gasses will need to reach zero by 2050. Non-state actors, such as businesses, investors and civil society organizations play a crucial role through their own mitigation targets and advocacy for public policies that align with net-zero goals. Recent years have seen a great number of non-state actors stepping up with net-zero targets. However, scholars and civil society have warned against greenwashing, questioning the credibility of non-state net-zero pledges and calling for high integrity standards. Accordingly, a High-Level Expert Group on the Net Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities convened by the UN Secretary General has offered recommendations to ensure high integrity of net-zero commitments by industry, financial institutions, cities, and regions.

This panel gathers researchers from academia and expert organizations, with the aim to steer voluntary climate action towards high integrity. The papers and panelists will discuss the credibility and integrity of net-zero action, including: the alignment of commitments with climate and sustainability goals; transparency, monitoring and accountability; creating more trustworthy compliance frameworks; the role of offsets and credits; just transition; and climate-nature linkages. The panel will pay particular attention to corporate net-zero commitments in food, agriculture and land-use, and carbon markets.

Many companies have set net-zero emissions targets in recent years to help keep global warming below 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels. However, the potential impact of these targets on future emission levels is unclear and uncertain. Food and beverage companies have a crucial role to play in cutting emissions not only because they are vulnerable to climate change themselves but also because the global food and beverage sector is a major driver of emissions, accounting for approximately 30% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions directly and indirectly. This study analyses corporate net-zero targets in the global food and beverages sector and the potential impact of the targets on their value chain emissions. We also assess the possible scale of offsetting and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) assumed under their targets, and shed light on the role of various contentious CDR and offsetting strategies arising in the agrifood sector.

We estimate that 20 major food and beverage companies with net-zero targets collectively accounted for well above 1 GtCO2e of emissions in 2019. Our preliminary findings indicate that, on average, less than a third of the total estimated emissions footprints are covered by the targets. This is mainly due to the poor coverage of scope 3 emissions, either in their net-zero targets or in their self-reported emission inventories.

Almost all companies intend to rely on CDR within or outside their value chains to realise net-zero targets, but few companies specify to what extent. When excluding the role of offsetting and CDR, our first assessment shows that the net-zero targets of these food and beverage companies only translate to 10-20% emission reductions by 2030 and considerably less than 50% emission reductions by 2050, compared to value chain emissions in 2019.

Overall, only a minority of the assessed companies has targets that are in line with global benchmarks for the sector, highlighting that the food and beverage sector is currently not on track to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Our preliminary findings thus suggest that the food sector companies’ net-zero targets cannot be taken at face value and are not consistent with the emerging standards on corporate net-zero target integrity (e.g. UN High Level Expert Panel, ISO). Finally, we discuss how these net-zero integrity standards could be operationalised in the food and beverages sector.

Corporate climate commitments are an important part of the global response to climate change. However, critics have warned that many of these pledges constitute greenwashing – empty commitments whose credibility is difficult to assess at best. Government regulators in the European Union and United States Securities and Exchange Commission have taken initial steps to regulate corporate climate behavior and disclosure, but they have demonstrated little appetite for robust regulation of corporate climate pledges. The weakness of the contemporary regulatory framework means that there is little confidence that companies will fulfill their pledges. This Article responds to this regulatory challenge by developing two novel financial instruments that will enable companies to make credible commitments by entering into irrevocable forward contracts with third parties. The two instruments, which we term: a carbon letter of credit and a climate pledge green bond create a mechanism that binds the company far into the future and ensures that its past commitment will be executed. By providing a costly mechanism that allows companies to issue a binding climate pledge, we enable climate leaders to credibly distinguish themselves from greenwashers, facilitating the emergence of a separating equilibrium. Public and private regulators can insist on the use of these instruments, and corporations can use them to support their reputation and gain access to green finance. Our focus is on corporate climate commitments, but the instruments we propose can also be used by other organizations and can also be used to back commitments on non-climate topics.

The paper seeks to critically review the current shortcomings of voluntary carbon markets and discuss strategies on how regulatory initiatives that involve both hard and soft law instruments can address current weaknesses. The objective of the paper is to develop the constituting elements of a governance framework that can assure the credibility of carbon markets.

Voluntary carbon markets hold signification potential to channel funds into climate mitigation action. However, voluntary carbon markets in their current form lack regulatory oversight to ensure the quality of generation and use of carbon credits. Investments are held back by insecurities among buyers, investors, and consumers as to whether a carbon credit represents a true, additional and real emission reduction. Spurious corporate claims compound the problem. The misleading use of carbon credits as offsets and their association with wide-spread corporate greenwash limits the value of carbon credits in the eye of corporates and consumers.

To ensure that carbon markets can play a role in effective climate action, the lack of quality assurance in carbon credit supply and demand must be addressed. While carbon crediting programs and standards seek to assure the certification of emission reductions and removals, the certification processes suffer from methodological weaknesses and conflict of interests undermine the confidence in the relevant certification procedures. The use of carbon credits, so far, lacks any assurance that would ensure compliance of corporate climate claims with the pre-requisites and principles established by regulators or private standard setters.

The proposed paper will propose the core elements of a governance framework for voluntary carbon markets with the goal to enhance confidence into the market. In doing so, it will discuss the complementarity of private and public regulatory efforts and the need for a meta-governance that ensures harmonization of efforts internationally and facilitates a convergence of various efforts towards recognized product and use standards. This includes the development of (i) options to improve the quality assurance in the supply of carbon credits, and (ii) assurance options for corporate climate claims.

The rise in global temperatures have made it imperative for cities to take action to reduce their carbon emissions and combat climate change. As a result, many cities around the world have announced "net-zero" targets, meaning that they aim to balance the amount of greenhouse gasses they emit with the amount they remove from the atmosphere.

While there is growing concern about the integrity of these net-zero commitments, there is still a lack of research that has aimed to explain the adoption of more net-zero commitments. This study uses computer-assisted text analysis to examine the focus of 4966 climate policies from 106 cities reported by the Carbon Disclosure Project between 2019-2021. The research aims to review the current state of net-zero commitments and uncover the key factors that influence the adoption of net-zero targets. The findings contribute to the active literature on urban climate policies by shedding light on cities’ net-zero targets. Moreover, the study encourages the fruitful use of quantitative text analysis methods in climate policy research, especially when dealing with large corpora of documents produced by local bureaucratic agents who are influenced by both organizational and political pressures.