Lack of coordination between corporate and public actors is likely to prevent the achievement of climate mitigation targets. Yet, corporate emissions reduction targets are often assessed against global benchmarks, failing to account for regional differences in transition plans. We provide an approach for assessing corporate emissions reduction targets against their respective sectoral national transition plans. We apply this method to assess the emissions reduction targets of a sample of 9 electric utility companies in Australia, India, and the United Kingdom, including multinational corporations. 

We find that companies’ emissions targets are not ambitious enough to enable their countries to meet their national mitigation targets, at least for Australia and India. Misaligned companies fully consume their carbon budget in the next 10 years, highlighting the need for changes in the short term. Furthermore, the use of national pathways to assess companies does not guarantee strict compliance with the Paris Agreement and risks lowering the overall level of ambition to at least 2.8 degrees of warming. However, national pathways appear to be more suitable benchmarks when they are more ambitious than the global average. 

This paper is part of our work with Oxford Sustainable Finance Group in the Net Zero Transition Plans project.