5 Key Changes to SBTi’s Net Zero Standard

Companies have a new rulebook for what constitutes credible climate action. The Science Based Targets Initiative, an organization that seeks to align corporate sustainability plans with the goals of the Paris Agreement, published a major update to its signature Net Zero Standard on Thursday designed to help companies assess their progress on climate goals, not just set them.

The update marks a significant expansion of the standard, which previously defined what a good corporate emissions target looked like, but did not say much about how to achieve it. The new version sets requirements for what companies must do to prove they are advancing toward their benchmarks.

“The standard is moving from being focused on ambition only to really focused on implementation,” Alberto Carrillo Pineda, the SBTi’s co-founder and chief technical officer, told me.

This accompanies a broader rhetorical shift in the standard, which asks companies to demonstrate progress on a “best-efforts basis” rather than judging them solely on absolute emissions reductions. In the foreword to the standard, Chair Francesco Starace says that the SBTi made “an explicit choice to recognize that companies do not control everything, and that pretending otherwise does not serve anyone.”

That ethos permeates the revisions and additions to the standard. Here’s a breakdown of some of the biggest changes.

The implementation hierarchy

Version 2 of the standard introduces a new “implementation hierarchy.” Companies must first do everything in their power to reduce emissions directly. Once they have exhausted those options, they can then pursue indirect actions such as buying renewable energy certificates or certificates for low-carbon cement.

This isn’t just a guideline. It’s a reporting requirement. Companies are asked to “document and demonstrate” all of the actions they have assessed and implemented to reduce their emissions directly, as well as to define the constraints to pursuing additional reductions. They also have to describe their indirect actions and explain how they “complement, and do not substitute for” direct reductions.

New company categories

The updated standard differentiates between larger and smaller companies, and those based in higher-income and lower-income countries, recognizing that the former in both cases will have an easier time decarbonizing than the latter.

Larger companies in higher-income countries, referred to as “category A companies” are required to set near-term, five-year targets for all emissions related to their businesses, whether they fall under scope 1, 2 or 3. All others are required to set targets only for scope 1 and 2. Category A companies are also required to verify much of their reporting to the SBTi with a third party, while this is optional for other companies.

Purchased power rules

The updated standard clarifies that in order for renewable energy certificates to count toward a company’s scope 2 target, they must be “deliverable,” or purchased from a clean energy source within the same grid region as the company. That means a company with offices or factories in Idaho can’t buy certificates from a solar farm in Florida. (The standard does seem to offer some wiggle room on that rule to companies with many locations.)

An earlier draft of the new standard released last year would have required that companies set targets for purchasing hourly-matched, deliverable clean electricity. That would mean looking at their energy consumption for every hour they operate and setting a goal to match it with an equivalent amount of locally produced clean power for a certain percentage of hours.

Much to the disappointment of proponents of this strategy, however, that’s not in the final standard. Companies can set scope 2 targets on an annual matching basis, meaning they can effectively claim they consumed solar power at night and will not have to do the hard work of trying to clean up the harder-to-decarbonize hours of the day.

The standard does, however, require those larger companies in category A to at least report the percentage of their energy use that they have matched with clean power on an hourly basis. This reporting rule aligns with a proposal by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a separate corporate standard-setter focused on emissions accounting. The SBTi also aims to encourage companies to make progress on hourly-matched clean power by creating a new dashboard showing which companies have exceeded certain benchmarks — 50% until 2030, 75% until 2035, and 90% from that year onward.

A place for carbon credits and a lifeline for carbon removal

Previously, regular old carbon credits like the kind that pay a Brazilian landowner not to cut down trees or fund a methane capture system at a landfill had no place in the SBTi’s net-zero standard. Also, while the “net-zero” in the name implied that companies should eventually begin investing in carbon removal credits to make up for any residual emissions, the earlier version did not say when they should start doing that.

Now, the SBTi says it will require category A companies to begin covering some of their ongoing emissions with carbon removal beginning in 2035. Because companies are only required to set targets in five year increments, they won’t have to report on those efforts for several years. But the carbon removal industry will require investment now to be able to meet demand in 2035, so companies will likely need to begin buying credits today in order to meet that deadline.

Prior to 2035, companies will be able to earn kudos for purchasing carbon avoidance and removal credits by participating in something the SBTi is calling the “ongoing emissions responsibility program.” The program has three tiers that will recognize companies that are contributing to a lower, medium, and high degrees of carbon mitigation, ranked either by tallying dollars spent or tons of carbon abated. Companies will still not be allowed to count these credits when measuring progress toward their targets, however.

An editorial shift on 1.5 degrees?

One question hanging over the news is whether the SBTi’s definition of a “science based target” is still appropriate. The organization requires companies to calibrate their targets to be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. But many scientists believe the world has already warmed more than 1.5 degrees. In theory, cooling the planet back down to this level by 2100 is still possible with a huge amount of carbon removal, but it appears exceedingly unlikely.

“Of course, there is healthy scientific debate about what is the most likely temperature outcome, so that's something that we are aware of,” Pineda said when I asked about this. “But we maintain the focus to catalyze transformation consistent with achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century.”

Pineda may have been downplaying how much the SBTi has considered this. After our call, I did a search for “1.5°” in the new version of the standard and the old one. The temperature target appeared 59 times in the old document, but just once in the new one, and only in the executive summary, where it was used to describe the SBTi’s larger mission as an organization. Nevertheless, the standard continues to emphasize a long-term goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, and there is no indication that the underlying modeled decarbonization pathways that the SBTi uses to validate targets are going to change.