An op-ed version of this blog post was published on Business Green on the 23 March 2026.

Four editions. 16 authors. 55 major companies across 15 sectors.   

In a world where terms like “climate neutrality” or “climate-friendly” are casually splashed across corporate websites or advertisements, one project was born out of a question: are companies truly serious about climate action? What would help raise their ambition further? 

Since 2022, the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor (CCRM), developed by NewClimate Institute in collaboration with Carbon Market Watch, has assessed the integrity, transparency and progress of corporate climate pledges to drive more credible corporate climate action.  

More specifically, the project has explored how the “rules of the game” – the standards and accountability frameworks that guide corporate climate action – could be improved to steer companies towards good practice and distinguish real climate leadership amid misleading claims and empty promises. 

Over four editions, the CCRM has contributed to discussions on corporate climate accountability. Its findings have been taken up by a wide range of stakeholders, including experts in corporate accountability standards, policymakers and company representatives. Many of them have engaged with the recommendations to improve strategies, standards and practices.  

"Not all stakeholders necessarily agree with all our findings and positions. But independent scrutiny of corporate climate action is more important than ever to raise the bar for genuine climate action, if companies are to contribute meaningfully to limiting warming to 1.5°C,” said Thomas Day, who has led the four editions of the CCRM together with Frederic Hans and Silke Mooldijk. 

In this piece, the researchers reflect on its impact on corporate climate accountability, the challenges that remain and the questions that will shape the next phase of this work. 

How it all began: a flood of vague climate pledges 

Around 2019, a wave of net-zero and carbon neutrality pledges swept through the corporate world. While it was encouraging to see companies stepping forward, many of these commitments appeared to be ambiguous. Earlier work by the team showed just how widely the credibility of these pledges varied, often depending on small but crucial nuances.  

“Good practice was out there,” noted Day, “but it was buried beneath a flood of empty or unclear claims. There was no way to effectively differentiate between true leaders and those with less credible strategies.” 

This gap sparked the idea for the CCRM: a new analytical framework designed to bring clarity to the grey areas of corporate climate action. By unpacking the nuances within corporate climate strategies, the CCRM has set out to better distinguish genuine ambition from misleading claims and to highlight good practice others can follow.  

But first, the team needed a clearer picture of what companies were actually doing. 

Each year, the team has taken a close look at 20 to 25 major multinational companies across sectors such as tech, fashion, automotive manufacturing and food and agriculture. The analysis examines how transparent corporate strategies are, whether their targets translate into meaningful business transformation and how broader trends have evolved across the corporate accountability space. Based on both good practice and systematic loopholes identified, the team has developed recommendations aimed at strengthening corporate climate accountability. 

“We were quite shocked to find serious credibility issues with most corporate climate strategies in our first assessment back in 2022,” Day said. “That realisation hardened our resolve to highlight the need for tightening the voluntary standards and regulations, to really encourage good practice and allow leaders to stand out.” 

Beyond the headline pledges: why nuance matters  

From the outset, the CCRM team has focused on systematically unpacking the nuances in corporate climate strategies, with its methodology updated each year to reflect changes in the corporate climate accountability context. Unlike other climate assessments that focus primarily on high-level trends across large samples of companies, the CCRM looked closely at how companies define their targets, what emissions they include or exclude, how they plan to meet their goals and whether these plans translate into real changes in business models.  

This attention to nuance is what has set the CCRM apart, explained Hans. 

“It’s often in the details, where credibility is gained or lost,” he noted. “By catching those nuances, we can show where standards and guidelines need to improve to encourage more ambitious action and close loopholes.” 

But that level of depth comes with challenges.  

Among the biggest was cutting through corporate communications to understand what a company’s climate strategy really meant. The team spent days sifting through annual sustainability reports, supplementary materials, CDP disclosures, press releases and independent analyses. Piecing together a full picture from fragmented and sometimes inconsistent information has not been an easy task.  

“Companies have lots of flexibility in how they present their data – from emissions disclosures and emissions reduction targets to the measures they plan to use to achieve them,” said Hans. “This makes it much harder to assess what’s credible and what isn’t.” 

From pushback to reflection, awareness has increased 

The CCRM’s annual assessments have not always been comfortable reading for companies and have, at times, triggered pushback. 

At the same time, the findings have been constructively received by others – particularly companies genuinely working towards more credible climate strategies, whose efforts are often hard to distinguish amid a sea of vague or misleading claims. Even when companies publicly dismissed the findings, sustainability teams sometimes engaged privately and constructively with the CCRM team. 

Standard-setting initiatives reflected on the recommendations when reviewing standards, while campaigns drew on good practice examples from the reports to call for higher ambition. Over the years, organisations not covered in the reports have also pointed to the CCRM’s methodological framework as a useful reference for reflecting on and improving the credibility of their own strategies. 

“Once, a former CSO of a European train operator told us that he used our recommendations on renewable electricity procurement to convince his management team to improve their renewable electricity procurement strategy, even though the company had never been analysed in our reports,” Mooldijk said. “We received similar feedback from other companies.” 

Since the CCRM began, awareness of what constitutes transparent and high-integrity corporate climate action has grown across companies, standard-setting initiatives, courts and policymakers. There are encouraging signs from some frontrunning companies – from substantiating their GHG emissions reduction targets to developing plans to transition parts of their business models and adopting more transparent approaches to taking responsibility for their emissions.  

The CCRM’s 2025 edition highlighted several examples of companies setting transition targets to decarbonise their sectors: Apple committing to using 100% renewable electricity across its value chain by 2030; H&M Group aiming for 100% renewable electricity by 2030 across its suppliers; and Danone targeting methane reductions in fresh milk production while expanding its plant-based product range. Although these actions are not yet sufficient to fully align with pathways to limit global warming to 1.5°C, they offer valuable blueprints others can follow.  

Still, the overall picture remains mixed. Across four editions, no company assessed has received an overarching “high integrity” rating. For most companies, climate pledges remain thin on detail, with little evidence of concrete plans to fundamentally transform their emissions-intensive business models. 

“This partly shows the limitations in current accountability standards, which do not always incentivise the systemic changes needed for decarbonisation,” Mooldijk said. “If companies are to deliver real emissions reductions, the rules and standards guiding their climate strategies must better reward genuine transition efforts and close potential loopholes that allow misleading practices,” she added. 

For next decade of corporate climate action: improving the rules of the game   

If the past four years have helped clarify what credible corporate climate action looks like, the hardest part of the journey still lies ahead. Translating insights from independent analyses like the CCRM into stronger accountability standards and into binding regulation remains a key challenge. So does ensuring that recently adopted policy frameworks, such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, remain in place despite political headwinds. 

This year offers a critical opportunity to improve the rules of the game. Several major standard-setting processes are currently underway. These include revisions of the Science Based Targets initiative’s Corporate Net Zero Standard and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, alongside the development of a Net Zero Standard by the International Organisation for Standardization. These processes are expected to conclude in 2026 or shortly thereafter, with significant implications for how corporate climate action will be assessed and guided in the years ahead. 

“With these revisions underway, it is particularly important to reflect on the lessons from analyses such as the CCRM,” said Hans. "They can help improve existing standards and better incentivise credible, near-term climate action.” 

As the corporate climate accountability landscape continues to evolve, researchers point to a number of unresolved “nuts and bolts” issues that require deeper analysis if accountability standards and regulation are to effectively support ambitious action.  

“Standard-setters and regulators are moving fast with discussions on the potential use of commodity certificates like green steel certificates or sustainable aviation fuel certificates in companies’ climate strategies,” said Day. “Yet there is still a widespread lack of understanding of what these really mean and under what conditions they could result in real-world emission cuts.”  

In this evolving context, the team has increasingly centred on better understanding the role of market-based instruments and the nuances around their use in corporate climate strategies. This also includes scrutinising emerging initiatives – such as Carbon Measures proposed by high-emitting sectors – that could affect how scope 3 emissions are reported and accounted for. 

“There are open questions about the extent to which businesses can take a lead in redefining value and making sufficiency a more central part of their business models,” Mooldijk added. “There is also a need to better understand when and how regulatory frameworks can support companies willing to take these steps by helping level the playing field.” 

Looking ahead, how climate action by companies is scrutinised – and how insights from independent analyses, including the CCRM, are translated into robust standards and regulation – will remain central to debates on corporate climate accountability and shape the decade ahead. Building on the insights from the CCRM, NewClimate’s work will continue to focus on strengthening the rules and standards to better incentivise the real-world transitions required for decarbonisation. 

Written by Hyunju (Laeticia) Ock, writer and editor at NewClimate Institute.