By 2030, business will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 3.7 billion metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year. That’s half a tonne of CO2 for every man, woman and child on the planet, every year.

 
 

The Paris Agreement was a turning point for global action to limit climate change. In addition to national and sub-national governments taking action, civil society and businesses are on board too. In fact, some companies have already signed up to initiatives that support the Paris Agreement, going beyond and taking action sooner than their government’s commitments. In fact, it’s starting to make sense to talk about a ‘business-determined contribution.’ But how big will that business contribution be?

 
 

We want to add more.

 
 

In this first edition of our study, we look at five initiatives that companies have joined to limit climate change: Science Based Targets, EP100, RE100, Zero Deforestation and the Low Carbon Technology Partnership initiative (LCTPi).

 
 
 
 

We focus on We Mean Business coalition commitments for pragmatic and data access purposes. We want to include a broader set of initiatives in the future so get in touch to suggest one or work with us in other ways.

 
 
 
 

We’ve estimated how big the business-determined contribution could be by 2030 using these first five initiatives.

 
 

That’s meant looking at what would happen if these five initiatives achieved their most ambitious plans for signing up companies to reduce emissions. We’ve also estimated what the impact on reducing emissions would be if all relevant companies that could join the initiatives actually signed up. And finally, we assessed the overlap in impact across the analyzed initiatives.