Corporate Greenhouse Gas Emissions’ Data and the Urgent Need for a Science-Led Just Transition: Introduction to a Thematic Symposium

Abstract

“[T]he consequences for climate policy and for sharing the responsibility of reducing global CO2emissions can only be drawn in combination with judgments about equity, fairness, the value of future generations and our attitude towards risk.”Knutti & Rogelj (2015: 361)Climate change mitigation and adaptation are not exclusively an issue of natural science and policymaking; they are also very much anethical issuewith their significant implications for aspects such as human livelihoods, equal development opportunities of emerging nations, and intergenerational fairness (Knutti & Rogelj,2015; McKinnon,2015; Stern & Taylor,2007). Corporate GHG emissions’ data are at the core for two important reasons—first, to identify the main sources of climatic changes and investigate causal mechanisms, and second, to monitor progress toward achieving agreed targets. However, we need more research that advances a discussion regarding the availability, accuracy, accountability, honesty, integrity, deceptiveness, prudence, relevance, and ‘investability’ of self-reported and/or third-party curated corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data—and any ethical dilemmas, underlying conflicts and unintended consequences that are inherent in the process of estimating and reporting GHG emissions. In doing so, we follow Greenwood and Freeman (2018) in encouraging researchers to display epistemic awareness and reflect on the paradigm from which they study corporate GHG emissions instead of assuming paradigm singularity.The urgency for this research is grounded in the important role financial markets can play in the climate change context in general (Busch,2019; Busch et al.,2016) as well as in the reports issued by the European Union’s Technical Expert Group for Sustainable Finance on June, 18th, 2019, which require any index provider inside or outside the EU who intends to sell an index in any listed asset class to European asset owners to report the weighted average GHG intensity of all their constituents (Hoepner et al.,2019). While European asset owners much like CalPERS or Ontario Teachers in North America have a long tradition of integrating environmental aspects in their investment decision making (Hoepner & Schopohl,2018,2020), there is a substantial risk that they end up being commodified and shaped by the practices of business and finance (King & Gish,2015; Michelon et al.,2020), or captured by corporate actors (O’ Dwyer,2003), contributing little to the social and environmental betterment of the planet.