How to dodge the imminent net-zero mass failure

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.

There’s a moment approaching in corporate climate action that very few people are willing to name aloud: a reckoning of net zero.

For the past few decades, companies have announced climate targets with impressive ambition. Net zero by 2050. Halving absolute emissions by 2030. Entire value chains transformed within a business cycle. According to Net Zero Tracker, almost two-thirds of the Forbes Global 2000 have such targets, covering $36.6 trillion in revenue.

These commitments have shifted expectations in boardrooms, unlocked capital, accelerated technological innovation and helped move climate change from the fringes of corporate responsibility into the centre of corporate strategy.

But the calendar has an inconvenient habit of speeding towards target dates. And as 2030 draws nearer, I’m hearing whispered panic. A quiet catastrophe emerging inside sustainability departments around the world: Many companies won’t meet their stated 2030 targets. 

Not because they’ve abandoned the effort or that the targets were cynical exercises in greenwashing. Instead, the societal systems within which companies operate haven’t transformed at the pace those targets assumed.

Handled badly, this moment could become a public scandal. A narrative collapse that feeds every critic who has spent the past decade insisting corporate climate commitments were always little more than reputational theatre. Handled well, however, 2030 could represent something more constructive: the moment corporate climate action reckons with societal emissions.

It’s too quiet out there

Over coffee at conferences, chats include hushed admissions that companies are five, 15 or significantly more percentage points off the trajectory required to meet their 2030 emissions reductions.

The reasons vary. Supply chains have proved slower to decarbonise than anticipated (Scope 3 is painfully difficult). Energy infrastructure hasn’t transformed uniformly across regions (governments didn’t decarbonise grids). New forms of digital demand, particularly the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, have placed huge pressure on electricity systems. Meanwhile, geopolitical turbulence has made long-term policy certainty elusive.

The sustainability community isn’t blind to any of this, just too anxious to speak up. A recent global survey of more than 800 sustainability experts found that over 90 percent believe the current sustainability agenda requires revision, with more than half calling for a radical overhaul. 

Publicly, this reality remains restrained. Companies continue issuing progress reports framed in optimistic language. NGOs continue pressing for accelerated ambition. Consultants continue constructing increasingly sophisticated decarbonisation roadmaps. Or even worse, charging for off-ramp strategies from net zero, promising they can “manage stakeholder response.” 

Everyone, in short, is behaving as though we’re not teetering on the edge of a mass failure. 

A fragile framework 

We reached this precarious position because of how corporate climate commitments evolved. Many early net-zero pledges were made before today’s definitions had fully crystallised. I stood in boardrooms in 2021 trying to explain why a net-zero goal set in 2019 meant something much harder than initially thought.  

But while those goalposts moved, many of us assured ourselves about the trajectory of the global economy. Some anticipated rapid decarbonisation in key manufacturing regions, combined with the continued globalisation of supply chains. Others assumed political momentum behind climate policy would strengthen steadily through the 2020s. Reality has proved more complicated. 

More fundamentally, the philosophy of corporate climate commitments was built on a subtle but consequential premise: that companies could reduce emissions in their value chains largely through their own efforts. That it was possible to become a net-zero organisation in isolation, even if those around you didn’t reach the same standard. 

In practice, this assumption underestimates how profoundly corporate emissions are embedded in wider societal systems. Electricity grids, agricultural systems, heavy industry, transport infrastructure, public mandates and national regulatory frameworks have all determined the pace at which companies can decarbonise.

We all now recognise this systemic constraint. National governments, in particular, are now widely perceived by sustainability professionals as among the least effective contributors to sustainable development progress. The corporate climate agenda has been attempting to move faster than the systems surrounding it, which proved impossible. 

Saving 2030 

This poses an awkward dilemma for the corporate sustainability movement.

If companies quietly begin abandoning, reframing or watering down their targets, critics will claim vindication. If businesses insist their targets remain entirely intact while the underlying numbers drift further away, the eventual credibility shock in 2030 will be worse.

For me, the most damaging outcome would be a slow, fragmented or messy retreat. A “quiet quitting” of companies individually reducing or sunsetting their ambitions would feed a growing cycle of sceptical headlines and political backlash. It could take decades to rebuild credibility from that unorganised erosion of ambition.

But there’s another possibility.

Instead of treating the coming shortfall as an embarrassment to be concealed, the corporate climate community could address it with a degree of candour that’s been largely absent from sustainability debates. If we are to avoid a credibility collapse around corporate climate action, three things need to happen:

• Companies must resist the temptation to act in isolation. Don’t water down, reframe or sunset your targets as if you’re the only business facing this challenge. The credibility of the sustainability movement depends less on the precise numerical outcome of individual targets than on the coherence of the collective story.   
• The business community must acknowledge a truth that’s become increasingly evident: Corporate decarbonisation cannot succeed unless the societies in which companies operate decarbonise alongside them. 
• Companies must demonstrate that any adjustment to net-zero ambitions, calculations or timelines is accompanied by deeper engagement in transforming those wider systems.

One way to meet that is captured in a concept Futerra and Oxford Net Zero have proposed: Companies should begin managing both their emissions scopes and their spheres of influence. Companies shape far more than their own emissions inventories. They influence each other, capital markets, technological innovation, infrastructure investment, consumer behaviour and public policy. If we’re going to resurge on net zero, it will be by recognising and scaling these wider spheres of influence.

A turning point

The temptation in public discourse is always to frame missed targets as evidence of failure. But the purpose of the corporate climate movement was never simply to win a race to a particular spreadsheet milestone.

In that sense, the approaching 2030 moment could mark when corporate climate action evolves from managing emissions inventories to reshaping the systems that generate them. Let’s dodge a mass failure by having business help transform the world quickly enough to make their own net zero numbers ultimately achievable.