It’s time to hold agrifood corporates accountable for their climate commitments. This list may help

If there was one key takeaway my colleague Louisa Burwood-Taylor and other attendees took from the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK, last October, it was the need for corporate accountability.

The world’s climate crisis has finally taken center stage with more attention, headlines, and public commitments than ever before across industries.

Major food and ag corporations have made numerous public climate commitments in recent years, mostly focused on slashing greenhouse gas emissions and reaching carbon neutrality in the coming years or decades. Agrifood corporate climate commitments went full-on mainstream in 2020 and 2021, with mammoth corporations like General Mills and multi-billion restaurant chains like McDonald’s making pledges to pursue regenerative farming practices or reach net zero in 2050. COP26 accelerated the number of corporate commitments.

And while overall it’s positive news, “corporate accountability” was declared missing from the COP26 agenda, and many now ask how meaningful the litany of climate commitments actually is or, frankly, whether they’re just good marketing.

Just this week, German think tank NewClimate Institute took 25 of the world’s major corporations to task and found that most are committing to less than they declare in the news. “Net-zero” is only about 40% emissions reductions in many cases and “targets for 2030 fall well short of the ambition required to align with the internationally agreed goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid the most damaging effects of climate change,” reads the “Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor 2022″ the think tank published this week.

As AFN’s own Wolf of Wheat Street recently said, “you shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep in front of journalists…”

Holding companies to account for their commitments is impossible if you can’t keep track of them, however. So as we organized ourselves over here at AFN to better enable us to check in with companies at reasonable junctures, we thought we would publish a list of agrifood corporate climate commitments to help our readers also keep track — and perhaps encourage them to also hold these companies accountable.

We’ll update it frequently as more companies join the list and as climate commitments evolve. 

This list is unlikely exhaustive. We welcome suggestions of agrifood corporate climate commitments we may have missed or not yet heard about. Send me a note here.