REP Wrap: SBTi says carbon offsetting comments were misinterpreted
Your weekly summary of corporate sustainability news.
The Science-Based Targets initiative’s board has hit back at what it describes as “misinterpretation” of its recent statement on carbon offsets. Earlier this month, its trustees said they recognised that using environmental attribute certificates (EACs) “for abatement purposes on Scope 3 emissions could function as an additional tool to tackle climate change”. The statement sparked public backlash and prompted SBTi’s own staff to write a letter challenging the board over its right to make such a decision without wider internal agreement. Yesterday, the board wrote on its website that its announcement was simply “a strategic steer to further explore the role that EACs may be able to play in climate mitigation, as part of the process of revising SBTi’s Net Zero Standard”. It said its trustees had “acted according to their remit to set the strategic direction for SBTi” and would “continue to secure that any potential use of market instruments will include guardrails, rules and thresholds that will ensure the global emissions decline, in the near and long term”.
Meanwhile, the International Emissions Trading Association has launched guidelines on how to use carbon credits in “high integrity” ways. The document outlines how companies should approach the issue, including recommendations around being transparent and only using high-quality carbon credits.
The former Prime Minister of Italy has urged EU leaders to set up a European Green Guarantee (EGG) mechanism to support lending to green companies in the region. In a paper commissioned by EU lawmakers, Enrico Letta explained that “European banks would pay the key role of allocating resources to the green companies, and thanks to the EGG, they would be able to neutralize the so-called ‘green transition risk’, which prices the inherent risk of lending to green companies”. He presented the paper this week.
CDP has revealed the names of more than 30,000 companies whose boards have received a letter this year asking them to complete its questionnaire on climate and environmental performance. The not-for-profit disclosure platform writes to companies each year to request information on behalf of some 700 capital markets institutions running ore than $142trn.
No food producers are currently aligned with a 1.5°C trajectory, according to the latest research from the Transition Pathway Initiative. The project, run by investors and academics, assessed the 26 largest listed food products and concluded that Nestle was the only one to align with TPI’s pathways over the medium and long term. Japan’s Ajinomoto was the only other firm to align (over the long term), but none were on-track over the short term. Only seven of the 26 had reported sufficient data to enable the assessment of their historical emissions intensities and emissions reduction targets on a comparable basis, according to the research.
