SINGAPORE, Nov 6 (Reuters) – Countries, cities and companies across the world have mostly maintained their net-zero commitments despite growing geopolitical and economic challenges over the last year, researchers said on Friday.
• While new target-setting stalled in the last year there was “little evidence of widespread abandonment,” Net Zero Tracker, an independent research group, said in its annual assessment of more than 4,000 countries, regions, cities and enterprises published ahead of next week’s COP31 climate talks in Turkey
• The group found 47% had set targets to cut their greenhouse gas emissions to net zero, unchanged from last year
• The proportion of large companies pledging to reach net zero was also unchanged at 64%, representing about $40 trillion in annual revenue, it said
• While “progress is uneven” globally, European firms continued to take the lead and Chinese firms were catching up, said John Lang of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a British think tank that helps run Net Zero Tracker
• Among the companies that had committed to net zero, 78% had begun publishing plans to implement the targets, up from 69% last year
• Despite Washington’s rollback of climate commitments, “it’s remarkable how many US firms have stuck with net zero,” Lang said, with 51% still making the pledge, down from 52% last year
• However, 384 of the world’s biggest companies, a fifth of those monitored, still had no mitigation targets at all, with the financial sector lagging the most, the report said
• Subnational governments also remained a major “target gap,” it found, with only 28% of cities and 29% of states and regions setting net-zero targets, despite being in charge of large numbers of high-emitting transport and energy systems
(Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
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