Current carbon footprint of Germany's blue chip companies would result in 5°C warming – report

The current carbon footprint of Germany's blue chip companies, the 40 largest listed companies in the DAX stock market index, will cause global temperatures to rise by almost 5°C if they do not implement their own climate targets, newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine wrote, based on a report by climate tech company Right°. If the world had the same climate performance as the companies, based on their current carbon footprint, global warming would reach 4.9°C by 2100, the "What if" report concluded. The report’s authors simulated two scenarios: one in which a company leaves its emissions unchanged, and one in which it achieves all its climate targets.

Extrapolating current emissions, DAX companies are on a path to between three and eight degrees of warming, while the climate target scenario ranges between 1.2 and 6.5 degrees, the authors found. The quality of the data varies because of the complexity of Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, but there have been significant improvements on data quality over the past two years, Right° co-founder Hannah Helmke is quoted as saying. The authors could not calculate a baseline value for two companies because the data quality was still too poor, while six DAX companies are eliminating ambiguities in their data. Eight of the forty DAX companies have already set climate targets that are compatible with the 1.5 degree target, Frankfurter Allgemeine wrote. Right° plans to name the role models in next year's report if the companies agree to this.

Companies across the globe are racing to declare themselves and their products "climate neutral". Most claims still rely on questionable commitments to compensate continued emissions elsewhere on the planet, leading to accusations of greenwashing.