Aside from national and sub-national governments taking action against climate change, large potential for emission reductions exists in the corporate sector. More and more companies are making commitments to contribute to the long-term targets of the Paris Agreement. These include, for instance, pledges to source electricity from renewables, stop sourcing commodities causing deforestation, and increasing energy efficiency across various sectors.

The report "The Business End of Climate Change" estimates how large the contribution towards bending the emissions curve to “well below 2°C” from five representative initiatives – RE100, Science-Based Targets, EP100, Zero-Deforestation, and the LCTPi –could be, under the current and expected commitments of an ever-increasing group of companies. It also shows how much bigger it could be with supportive policy environments.

For this We Mean Business report in partnership with CDP, NewClimate Institute experts were responsible for the quantitative assessments of the individual initiatives‘ contribution to emission reduction, and the calculation of aggregated emission reductions under various scenarios of business initiative growth.