Companies should be judged on their climate influence

Climate standards are evolving; so too should our definition of corporate climate leadership

Corporate climate action has a blind spot. For decades we have measured businesses by the emissions they produce. Reducing a company’s own emissions is priority one, bar none.

But in an era of norm-wrecking political backlash, it should not obscure the other half of the story. Headlines cry retreat from net zero. Look under the hood and the broader trend points in the opposite direction, even in the US.

It is not a question of whether net zero survives. Companies are staying the course — however jagged the journey — towards their net zero goals. The real question is whether we are rewarding the right kind of leadership on the way.

A company’s climate impact extends beyond its own footprint and into the economic and political systems that determine everyone else’s emissions. Like the long-running debate over individual versus collective climate action, corporate footprints and influence are two sides of the same coin.

Sphere of Influence 

Every business has two climate responsibilities: its carbon footprint and its sphere of influence. We have spent decades asking sustainability teams to shrink one. It is time to help them grow the other.

In broad terms, spheres span products, financial portfolios and policy engagement. Emissions scopes are about how much companies emit; spheres are about how businesses help society emit less. One without the other does not get us to societal net zero, the goal that ultimately matters.

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe says the most important thing you can do about climate change is talk about it. Why? Because conversations ripple outward and take on a life of their own. They affect public opinion, change what feels normal and make new policies politically possible. Influence compounds, in other words.

The same logic applies to companies.

Solitaire Townsend, one of the pioneers of the spheres approach, recently argued that businesses cannot decarbonise faster than the societies in which they operate. The logical implication is that if companies depend on societal decarbonisation, they should also be judged on whether they are helping bring it about.

A company’s influence shows up in what it lobbies for, what it finances, the products and services it develops, and the standards it normalises across its sector.

Some influence is already being measured. InfluenceMap, for example, has brought accountability to corporate policy advocacy, surfacing where businesses’ lobbying aligns with (or undermines) their stated climate ambitions.

Influence is becoming more important because the levers of decarbonisation have flipped. Politics and economics are pulling in opposing directions. Just as clean energy has become commercially compelling and fossil fuel volatility has been laid bare, supporting policy has become more contested as political attention gets absorbed elsewhere.

There is another reason why it matters. Many of the world’s largest emitters sit beyond the reach of today’s voluntary corporate climate frameworks. Net Zero Tracker, for example, tracks less than half of the mostly state-owned enterprises responsible for more than half of historical carbon dioxide emissions.
 

Share of CO2 emissions

Half of annual C02 links back to 32 firms

Many are opaque, politically insulated or outside the reach of investor pressure. Most will not be reached directly. Over time, however, they will be influenced indirectly by changing the demand, markets and investment conditions that make clean technologies the obvious, irresistible choice.

What might that look like in practice? It means advocating for stronger clean energy policy rather than sitting idle. Opposing fossil fuel subsidies instead of accepting or ignoring them. Investing in emerging clean technologies and advanced market commitments before they are commercially inevitable.

Procuring exclusively from suppliers with credible, near-term and net zero targets, or using purchasing power to help entire supply chains decarbonise. SteelZero is a global initiative through which companies collectively commit to buying near-zero-emissions steel, helping create the long-term demand signals that give producers confidence to invest in cleaner production.

A quiet but profound shift is under way: accountability frameworks are beginning to recognise influence-based climate leadership. The open-for-consultation ISO net zero standarddistinguishes between organisational and global net zero action, and explicitly calls on businesses to contribute to global net zero through their spheres of influence, including products, finance portfolios and public policy engagement.

Likewise, the revised Science Based Targets initiative’s corporate net zero standard places greater emphasis on influence beyond the organisational footprint. 

This evolution will inevitably raise thorny questions. Influence does not fit neatly into an emissions inventory, and measuring it will never be as straightforward as measuring tonnes of CO₂. The opportunity is to create sufficient accountability to reward genuine leadership without burying companies under yet more compliance.

Spheres of influence is an idea whose time has come. It is how organisational net zero becomes societal net zero. The first few decades of corporate climate action asked: how can we emit less?

The next decade of corporate climate leadership will belong to those who ask: how can we help make net zero easier for everyone, ourselves included?

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A version of this article was originally published here on Sustainable Views on the 17th August 2026.

John Lang is the founder of Net Zero Tracker and Climate Trunk