The Decarbonization Execution Gap  

Why corporate climate commitments keep missing their own targets, and what the data says about where they break down. 

Corporate climate commitments have become close to universal. Getting them to hold up is a different question. 

Net Zero Tracker's 2025 Stocktake found that 63% of the world's largest listed companies now carry a net-zero target, together covering $36.6 trillion in revenue. Only 7% of those targets meet the full set of integrity criteria the researchers use to judge whether a commitment is real, up from just 5% the year before. Nearly a third publish no implementation plan at all. A target, on its own, says very little about whether a company will hit it. 

The gap, in numbers 

PwC's third annual State of Decarbonization report, published in April 2026, put a number on how many companies are actually on pace. 46%  are on track for their own operational (scope 1) emissions. 56% are on track for scope 3 - the emissions that come from suppliers, customers, and the rest of the value chain. Eighteen percent of companies pulled back on their targets during the year, up from 16% the year before. 

Accenture's Destination Net Zero research portrays a starker picture: Across the world's 2,000 largest companies; only 16% are on track to reach net zero in their own operations by 2050. This on-track group accounts for just 4% of the total emissions these companies produce. Only 41% have set a full value-chain target covering scope 1, 2, and 3 in the first place. 

The most striking figure originates from outside the sustainability-reporting industry itself. A March 2025 study in Nature Climate Change, led by researchers at Berkeley Haas, tracked more than 1,000 companies that set emissions-reduction targets for 2020. Nearly 40% missed or abandoned those targets. Another 31% simply stopped reporting before the deadline arrived, and the researchers found that 63% of those companies were likely on a path to fail had they kept reporting. Of the 88 companies that failed outright and stayed visible, only a third acknowledged it. Three got any media coverage at all. 

The study found no measurable consequence attached to any of this: no stock-price effect, no ESG-score penalty, no shareholder backlash. 

“This does seem like an opportunity for a free lunch. Companies can enjoy some immediate benefits by announcing emissions targets, but it doesn't seem like they're paying any consequences when they miss or drop these targets.”  — Shawn Kim, co-author, Nature Climate Change study (2025) 

Why targets stall: the part nobody sees 

The gap between setting a target and hitting it, is not in itself a gap in ambition. It is a gap in visibility, mostly scope 3 visibility, and a gap in the tools teams have to close it. 

Scope 3 - the emissions a company doesn't produce directly but constitutes its suppliers, its logistics, and the use of its products; makes up an average of 75% of a company's total footprint, according to CDP's sector-by-sector analysis. For some sectors it runs past 90%. Corporate supply-chain emissions run roughly 26 times higher than a company's own operational emissions, CDP found in its 2024 supply chain report. Yet only 15% of disclosing companies actually target their value chain for reduction, and only one in four factor supply-chain climate risk into their risk management at all. 

Supplier engagement, the mechanism that is supposed to close this gap, is thin. Only 41% of companies reporting to CDP say they engage suppliers on climate at all. In Europe, where reporting requirements are the furthest along, CDP found that only 37% of scope 3 emissions are addressed by any decarbonization measure, and 23% of companies have no emissions-reduction target of any kind. 

“The majority need to take more decisive action to address their Scope 3 emissions quite promptly.”  — Maxfield Weiss, Executive Director, CDP Eur

Where teams do try to close the gap, the tools often aren't built for the job. KPMG's 2024 survey found that almost half of organizations still manage sustainability data in spreadsheets, a share that barely moves even among companies that consider themselves ahead of their peers. Deloitte's 2024 Sustainability Action Report found 57% of companies name data quality their top reporting challenge, and 64% say they lack confidence in the scope 3 data their own vendors hand them. Only 13% of public companies have even completed an evaluation of what it would take to get their sustainability data audit-ready, though 99% say they intend to pursue it eventually. 

Workiva's 2024 practitioner survey turned up something close to a confidence paradox: 98% of sustainability professionals say they're confident in their data's accuracy, and 83% of that same group say collecting accurate data for upcoming regulations will be a real challenge. Sphera's 2025 Scope 3 report found supplier data availability the single most cited obstacle, named by 79% of respondents, ahead of internal data quality at 62%. Companies that still rely on spend-based estimates - a method that infers emissions from what a company spent rather than what a supplier actually reports, can overstate their true footprint by as much as 91%, according to Sphera's modeling. 

“When it comes to sustainability data, spreadsheets no longer cut it.”  — Trellis / GreenBiz, State of the Sustainability Profession (2024) 

Teams squeezed from both sides 

The people responsible for closing this gap are working with less room than they had two years ago. GreenBiz's State of the Sustainability Profession 2024 found that budget growth for sustainability teams has slowed sharply: The number of organizations reporting budget increases for sustainability teams declined from 74% in 2022 to 57% in 2024, while outright budget cuts more than doubled from 4% to 9% over the same period. That's happening even as 74% of large organizations added sustainability headcount over the same two years. The result, the report found, is that teams are spending more of their time operationalizing compliance and data-gathering work, and less time on the proactive work that was supposed to be the point. 

What happens when the gap doesn't close 

The consequences mostly show up quietly, as commitments that fade rather than fail outright. In 2023, the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) began enforcing a 24-month window for companies to move from a public commitment to a validated target. Companies that miss the window lose their listed commitment. Trade press has reported that 239 companies, including Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Walmart had commitments removed this way. 

Net Zero Tracker's 2025 Stocktake documented the pattern across whole sectors. 10% near-term food and agriculture targets set for 2020 through 2029 were dropped in 2025 with no replacements. Targets previously tracked for Starbucks and Olam International could no longer be identified in the group's mid-2025 review. BP, Shell and Equinor all weakened near-term emissions or clean-energy targets. Twelve North American banks exited the Net Zero Banking Alliance, followed soon after by HSBC and Barclays. 

Some companies chose a quieter option. South Pole's survey of 1,400 companies across 12 countries found that 70% deliberately downplay or conceal their climate targets and progress to avoid scrutiny, a practice researchers call greenhushing. The same survey found that 75% of those companies had actually increased their investment in emissions reduction over the period, meaning many are doing more and saying less about it, not less and saying more. 

“If you're hiding what you're doing, or not talking about it in a prominent way, it can hold back others.”  — George Favaloro, South Pole 

The pattern underneath the numbers 

Put these findings together, and a consistent shape appears. Companies aren't short on climate ambition. 63% have a target. What's missing is the infrastructure to see where emissions actually sit, mostly with suppliers, to engage the people who hold that data, and to turn a spreadsheet-and-email process into something that survives contact with an actual audit. 

That's a different problem than the one most climate communication addresses. It isn't solved by a bolder target or a better announcement. It's solved by making the invisible 75% of a company's footprint visible, and by giving the teams responsible for it a way to work that doesn't collapse under its own manual weight. 

That's the specific gap ZERO by GO2 is built to close. 

Sources 

1. Net Zero Stocktake 2025. Net Zero Tracker (September 2025). https://ca1-nzt.edcdn.com/PDFs-and-Excels/Net_Zero_Stocktake_2025.pdf 

2. State of Decarbonization (3rd annual). PwC (April 2026). https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/esg/library/decarbonization-strategic-plan.html 

3. Destination Net Zero 2025. Accenture, as summarized by ESG Today. https://www.esgtoday.com/the-worlds-largest-companies-have-resumed-setting-full-value-chain-net-zero-goals-after-pausing-last-year-accenture-survey/  Cited via secondary summary; primary Accenture PDF was too large to verify directly. 

4. Limited Accountability and Awareness of Corporate Emissions Target Outcomes. Jiang, Kim & Lu, Nature Climate Change (March 2025), via UC Berkeley Haas. https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/study-nearly-40-of-companies-missed-or-abandoned-2020-climate-targets-with-no-consequences/ 

5. Technical Note: Relevance of Scope 3 Categories by Sector. CDP. https://cdn.cdp.net/cdp-production/cms/guidance_docs/pdfs/000/003/504/original/CDP-technical-note-scope-3-relevance-by-sector.pdf 

6. Strengthening the Chain. CDP (2024). https://www.cdp.net/en/insights/strengthening-the-chain 

7. 2024 Supplier Engagement Assessment. CDP. https://cdn.cdp.net/cdp-production/cms/guidance_docs/pdfs/000/005/569/original/2024_Supplier_Engagement_Assessment_Scoring_Introduction.pdf 

8. From Stroll to Sprint: A Race Against Time for Corporate Decarbonization. CDP Europe (July 2023). https://www.cdp.net/en/press-releases/only-37-of-scope-3-emissions-from-european-businesses-are-addressed-by-corporate-decarbonization-measures 

9. Addressing the Strategy Execution Gap in Sustainability Reporting. KPMG (2024). https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2024/sustainability-organization-survey.html 

10. 2024 Sustainability Action Report. Deloitte. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/about/press-room/new-deloitte-survey-us-companies-increase-focus-on-sustainability-talent-amid-ongoing-challenges-with-data-quality.html 

11. 2024 Sustainability Practitioner Survey. Workiva. https://www.workiva.com/resources/2024-sustainability-practitioner-survey 

12. 2025 Scope 3 Report: Forge a Path to Climate Leadership. Sphera. https://info.trellis.net/rs/211-NJY-165/images/Sphera%202025%20Scope%203%20Report%20-%20Forge%20a%20Path%20to%20Climate%20Leadership.pdf 

13. State of the Sustainability Profession 2024. Trellis / GreenBiz. https://info.greenbiz.com/rs/211-NJY-165/images/State%20of%20the%20Sustainability%20Profession%202024.pdf 

14. Statement on the End of the Commitment Compliance Policy Grace Period. Science Based Targets initiative (July 2023). https://sciencebasedtargets.org/news/statement-on-the-end-of-the-commitment-compliance-policy-grace-period  Confirms the 24-month mechanism; the 239-company count is reported by Trellis (see below), not stated in this release. 

15. Microsoft, P&G, Unilever, and Walmart among 239 companies to miss net-zero deadline. Trellis. https://trellis.net/article/microsoft-pg-unilever-and-walmart-among-239-companies-miss-net-zero-deadline/ 

16. Destination Zero: The State of Corporate Climate Action 2023/2024. South Pole. https://www.southpole.com/news/survey-finds-most-companies-going-quiet-on-green-goals