An assessment by two independent institutions of 25 of the world's largest companies has shown that false announcements of greenhouse gas emission reductions are being made, indicates a report released today, cited by Lusa.

The "Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitoring Report" was made by the "NewClimate Institute" and "Carbon Market Watch", two European non-profit organizations working in the field of climate advocacy.

In the document they accuse big companies of "greenwashing" (using techniques to trumpet false environmentalist virtues) with false claims. Based on the report they wrote a letter to EU decision-makers with recommendations to distinguish true climate leadership from greenwashing.

The report, released today, assesses the climate commitments of companies through a set of "transparent qualitative and quantitative" indicators and concludes that climate neutrality claims claimed by companies actually refer to future emission reductions, "often decades away, and which, on average, correspond to only 40% reductions," Zero explains in a statement about the document.

Companies, he adds, publicize the false claims through a variety of greenwashing tricks, such as exploiting loopholes, omitting data, choosing accounting start dates when their emissions were at their peak, "and creating their own fallacious climate action measures."

Due to global warming companies all over the world are under pressure to take responsibility for the impact their activities have on the climate and most of them have already presented public strategies and targets, either to reduce emissions or even to become carbon dioxide emission neutral.

In the released report, focused on 25 large companies (Apple, Carrefour, Google, Ikea, Nestle or Vodafone, among others) the authors found that the companies' commitments actually correspond to an average gas reduction of only 40%, and not 100%, as the companies suggest when claiming they will reach "net zero emissions".

"All 25 companies assessed in this report commit in some way to a goal of zero emissions, zero net emissions or climate neutrality. But only three of the 25 companies - Maersk, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom - clearly commit to deep decarbonization of more than 90% of total emissions in their value chain," Zero says in the statement regarding the report.

In the letter sent to the European Union, based on the report's findings, the organizations recommend, among other issues, that governments prohibit companies from claiming "climate neutrality."

Companies, environmental organizations also say, should set targets that cover the total emissions of their value chain, indicate the emissions reductions both in absolute terms and as a percentage of total emissions, and indicate and detail the base year used as a reference for the emissions reduction.

Source: Lusa