The companies evaluated had a combined revenue of more than US$3.16 trillion in 2021, making up about 10 per cent of total revenue from the world’s 500 largest firms, and accounted for around 2.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019, which is roughly 4 per cent of the global total, according to the report.

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China’s place in the climate crisis fight | Jane Goodall on Talking Post with Yonden Lhatoo

China’s place in the climate crisis fight | Jane Goodall on Talking Post with Yonden Lhatoo

“At a time when corporations need to come clean about their climate impact and shrink their carbon footprint, many are exploiting vague and misleading ‘net zero’ pledges to greenwash their brand while continuing with business as usual,” Carbon Market Watch executive director Sabine Frank said in a statement.

“This dangerous procrastination must stop,” she said. “Since multinationals have both an oversized impact on the planet and the means to reduce their carbon footprint, they must take real action to clean up their act and not just their image by slashing their emissions.”

The critical evaluation shows that many companies continue to lag behind global efforts to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions at a level that would help limit changes in the weather system.

Many of the evaluated firms had 2030 climate targets that “fall well short of the required ambition and are inappropriately verified”, the report said. These targets covered a limited scope of emission sources, such as those directly generated by the company or through procured energy.

The report indicated that the assessed companies only addressed a selected category of indirect emissions – also known as scope 3 – which account for more than 90 per cent of the greenhouse gas emission footprints for most of these enterprises.

“The full scale of emissions from cradle to grave will be laid bare for all to see when Scope 3 reporting is mandated and improved, limiting the room for greenwashing,” said Christina Ng, debt markets research and stakeholder engagement leader at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in a report last Wednesday. “This can only lead to more meaningful investor decisions and robust discussions framed around transition plans, risks and opportunities.”

Still, some the companies cited in the report defended their climate strategies.

“Walmart was the first retailer to set science-based targets, and we have continued to share our progress regularly and transparently since 2005,” a representative of the American multinational retail firm said. “This report mischaracterises our goals: to achieve zero emissions – not ‘net zero’ – across our global operations (Scope 1 and 2) by 2040 and help reduce or avoid 1 billion metric tons of emissions in the global value chain (Scope 3) by 2030.”

Swiss food and drink conglomerate Nestlé, meanwhile, said it welcomed constructive feedback on their approach to reaching net zero emissions.

“We will continue to pursue a holistic strategy of reducing our emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere through measures that deliver benefits to the millions of people connected to our company’s operations,” said Benjamin Ware, head of climate and sustainable sourcing for Nestlé in an emailed response.

That sentiment was echoed by a Fast Retailing representative, who said the company welcomed dialogue and scrutiny of the company’s climate commitments and goals, adding that the Japanese firm “remained committed to continue to make progress and to share more information about our initiatives in the future”.

Carrefour and Volkswagen did not immediately respond to requests for comment over the weekend.