New Harvard University Tracking Tool Reveals How Companies Adjust Climate Targets

NEW YORK — There are lies, damn lies and then there are green statistics. More than 80% of the companies in the Russell 3000 Index that announced one or more greenhouse-gas emissions targets between 2000 and 2024 revised them before the target year.

So says a new tool developed by Harvard University researchers that provides insights into companies’ emissions targets, how they changed, and what drives them.

As many as 42% of the companies set less ambitious targets; dozens no longer reported targets; and just 15% raised their targets, according to the Corporate Climate Targets Database. It was unveiled on Tuesday at Climate Week NYC by Harvard University’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. Tracking the climate commitments of nearly 3,000 publicly traded U.S. companies, the database will allow people to compare companies and sectors on emissions and monitor how their targets change.

The new tool is designed to monitor U.S. public companies’ climate targets over time. In the absence of any federal requirement for American companies to disclose overall emissions, companies voluntarily set targets and report progress on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. That leaves tracking to nonprofit organizations, universities, and other institutions concerned about climate change.

Harvard Business School Professor Michael Toffel, who studies how companies address climate change and hosts the Climate Rising podcast, says that most tracking until now has focused on data from large corporations. The new tool provides a more comprehensive picture by capturing data from companies that make up the Russell 3000 Index, representing approximately 98% of all US publicly listed companies by market capitalization.

“This tool enables everyone to see what is happening at nearly 3,000 companies, many of which rarely make the headlines, and to get a fuller picture of targets and trends,” Toffel explains.

A tool for business

Companies can use the tool to compare their performance against competitors or their industry. They can also look at how different industries compare.

For example, using their own methodology, Harvard University researchers examining the data found that manufacturing tops the list in terms of setting climate targets, with companies setting thousands of targets related to greenhouse gas emissions, energy, electrification and more. Industries like retail, wholesale and hospitality are at the bottom of that list, with targets that number in the hundreds.

The data also allows corporate targets to be mapped, showing how companies set goals in states with carbon pricing, renewable portfolio standards, greenhouse gas targets and other regulatory regimes.

Toffel and others who appeared on the Salata panel said they hope it can lead to greater transparency as companies adjust or drop climate targets.

“We’ve had a lot of conversations with asset managers who are interested in this as part of their portfolio assembly process,” Toffel says. “NGOs have expressed interest in figuring out who's actually doing the work … and maybe new corporate consortia might emerge to address common challenges arising from setting similar targets.”

Panelist Fiona McRaith, director of The Climate Pledge at the climate organization Global Optimism, called the tool “magnificent” and said she hopes it can spur further action among companies in the climate space. The Climate Pledge, co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism, unites more than 700 companies committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

“I'm thinking about ... potential collaborators, what are other peers, companies that are committed to this that might be well poised to jump into projects with the Climate Pledge or beyond,” McRaith says.

The new data set comes at a time when the regulatory environment is uncertain. The Trump administration earlier this year formally walked away from a Biden-era climate reporting rule at the Securities and Exchange Commission. That left California as the national leader, passing a law that places reporting requirements on companies operating in the state with global revenues of at least $1 billion.

Several other states are considering similar approaches. The European Union’s law mandates reporting on environmental, social and governance (ESG)-related issues, including greenhouse gas emissions.

“We're working with the rest of the team and noting where we see companies going quiet in this uncertain period, and dealing with — and thinking about — how that relates to what we might see as progress [on disclosure requirements] in California or the European Union,” says Abby Husselbee, a staff attorney at Harvard University’s Environmental & Energy Law Program.

Insight for companies and industries

Harvard Business School has been at the forefront of studying the U.S. voluntary system. A 2025 study by Professors Ethan Rouen and Laureen Cohen found that more than 135 million tons of emissions went underreported when companies revised their emissions — more than the annual total for many countries.

Another study by Professors George Serafeim and Shirley Lu this year found that half of U.S. publicly traded firms in climate-relevant industries said they were working on climate solutions of some type, according to their mandatory annual reports to the SEC for 2023, which represented an increase over 2022.

Toffel said his research teams are addressing several questions about corporate climate commitments. Among them is what leads companies to set targets, looking at predictors such as regulation and shareholder pressure.

“The second question is: Do these targets actually predict reductions in emissions? Are target-setters’ emissions falling faster, and for which types of targets in particular?” he says.

Another piece of Toffel’s research with Harvard Kennedy School Professor Joseph Aldy and HBS doctoral student Srimayi Tenali involves looking at broader trends in the Russell 3000 index. “What patterns of reductions are we seeing following various types of targets?” Toffel says. “Is it the more aggressive targets? The less aggressive ones? Targets in particular sectors?”

Toffel says he would like the tool to eventually cover countries outside the U.S.. He’s already spoken with executives in India and learned that some of their motivation for issuing climate commitments and decarbonizing was the EU’s new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which serves as a tax on imports into the EU of carbon-intensive products like steel, iron and aluminum.

“In order to avoid or reduce that carbon tax, companies around the world are being incentivized to make decarbonization investments, even though they are costly,” he says. “The math that they did was that it was less costly to make those investments in order to pay a smaller CBAM fee or avoid it entirely. That’s putting into practice the theory that motivated the creation of CBAM.”