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Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt – Commitments by companies, banks and cities to achieve net-zero emissions are often little more than greenery as they propose new enhanced net Emission Standards. – Zero claims.
that reportreleased at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, aimed at drawing a “red line” around false claims of progress in the fight against global warming that could confuse consumers, investors and policymakers.
At last year’s climate talks in Glasgow, UN Secretary-General António Guterres appointed 17 experts to review the integrity of non-state net-zero commitments amid concerns over the “excessive confusion and lack of credibility surrounding corporate climate claims”. Spend”.
“Too many of these net-zero promises are nothing more than empty slogans and hype,” panel chair and former Canadian environment minister Kathryn McKenna said at a news conference launching the report.
“False net-zero claims drive up costs that ultimately everyone will pay,” she said.
Regulators around the world are beginning to set stricter rules on what activities can be considered environmentally friendly, but progress has been uneven, with activists and activists increasingly turning to the courts to challenge unreasonable claims.
On Tuesday, an official with Australia’s corporate regulator said it was investigating “greenwashing” by several companies, in which a company or group exaggerated the environmental impact of its products or practices.
Meanwhile, last month, Britain’s financial regulator proposed new rules for funds and their managers from 2024 to prevent consumers from being misled about their climate credentials.
Commitments to net-zero emissions now cover about 80 percent of global emissions.
The report sets out a list of recommendations that companies and other non-state actors should follow to ensure their claims are credible. For example, a company cannot claim net-zero emissions if it continues to build or invest in new fossil fuel infrastructure or deforestation.
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The report also dismisses the use of cheap carbon credits to offset ongoing emissions as a viable net-zero strategy, and recommends that companies, financial institutions, cities and regions focus on direct emissions, rather than carbon intensity – a measure of how much carbon each person emits . output unit.
Eric Christian Pedersen, head of responsible investing at Nordea Asset Management, said the report “could be very important, depending on its appeal”.
“If this report becomes a legal standard against which one can gauge whether net-zero commitments are real, it … could provide ammunition for the litigation and regulatory action that are sorely needed to make climate action absent in the It’s more expensive at the individual company level.”
Thomas Hale, a global public policy researcher at Oxford University and co-head of Net Zero, said the report “allows companies, investors, cities, regions – and implicitly countries – to make it clear that ‘good’ ‘What it looks like’ tracker project that measures the effectiveness of such commitments.
“We need to be clear that most net-zero targets are not on track,” he told Reuters, noting that the tracker found that only half of the companies that had committed had robust plans in place.
Teresa Anderson, global head of climate justice at ActionAid International, a nonprofit that fights poverty, said that businesses “have been hiding behind net-zero announcements and carbon-offset programs for a long time, doing little to really transform and reduce emissions. the intention of hard work.”
“These recommendations are designed to align them and fill any gaps.”
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