By David Stanway
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - More than 40% of major companies, cities and regions have still not set any targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to an annual "stocktake" released on Monday to gauge global progress in the fight against catastrophic climate change.
While more governments and enterprises have issued net-zero pledges since last year, their attention has been further diverted by wars, elections and economic challenges, leaving a significant "commitment gap", said Net Zero Tracker, a coalition of research groups at the University of Oxford.
As countries prepare to submit new 2035 climate targets to the United Nations, policymakers and company boardrooms are struggling to translate long-term goals into concrete action, with transition plans still lacking robustness and detail, the researchers said.
"A common theme throughout this report is the persistent lack of integrity across the board," said John Lang, who heads Net Zero Tracker's Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
The report looked at net-zero commitments and action plans from 198 countries, 706 sub-national regions, 1,186 cities and nearly 2,000 publicly-listed companies.
They found that while 1,750 entities out of more than 4,000 had made formal net-zero pledges, nearly 1,700 hadn't set targets of any kind.
Among the listed firms, just under 60% had set net-zero targets, up 23% since last year's report, with a significant rise in pledges from Asia.
The total number of companies with no emissions targets dropped to 495, from 734 last year. They include electric vehicle makers Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) and BYD (SZ:002594), Nintendo and Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRKa), Net Zero Tracker said.
The report cited Costa Rica, Volvo (OTC:VLVLY) and Google owner Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) as examples of "good practice" when it comes to implementing net-zero pledges.
However, only 5% of regions, cities and companies met all of Net Zero Tracker's criteria for "robustness" - which include having detailed plans to phase out fossil fuels, it said.
Around half of the regions, cities and companies have failed to set targets for non-CO2 greenhouse gases like methane, and many firms also failed to account for emissions across their entire value chains or clarify how much they will rely on offsets to meet targets.
As many as 148 states covering 88% of the world's total population have net-zero commitments, with Mexico, Iran and Azerbaijan, host of the COP29 climate talks in November, among the exceptions, the report said.
Technologies exist to triple the current levels of climate ambition, and the next round of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) submitted to the U.N. need to provide more details about how targets will be implemented, it concluded.
"There's been some good progress, but we need a lot more," said Catherine McKenna, a former Canadian environment minister who chairs a U.N. expert group on net-zero commitments.