58 TIME April 25/May 2, 2022
spurred this shift, says Paul Washing-
ton of the E SG Center at the Confer-
ence Board, a nonpartisan research
group in New York City. In 2017, an in-
ternational climate task force released
guidance to standardize climate-risk
disclosures across industries and coun-
tries. Public U.S. companies started an-
ticipating that the SEC would issue its
own proposal to require formalized
climate-risk assessments—which in-
deed it did release in March 2022 for
public comment. Additionally, climate
analysis rapidly improved, thanks to a
growing trove of climate data and a ris-
ing workforce of corporate climate ad-
visers. Then came COVID-19, which
forced companies to think about vul-
nerabilities to Mother Nature. In light
of this confl uence of events, Washing-
ton notes, companies felt increasing
heat from their boards, shareholders,
and investors to deal with what has be-
come a mainstream fi nancial concern.
TIME’s analysis hints at where com-
panies’ climate eff orts could shift next.
The “climate measurement” word
group lags behind the others, but it’s
been gaining steam, jumping from
10% of fi lings in 2018 to 39% of fi lings
in 2021. These words include terms
like life-cycle assessment and Scope 3,
which refers to emissions generated
upstream or downstream from a com-
pany’s direct business.
Callery observes that many compa-
nies have been “dragging their heels”
on investing in these assessments and
other initiatives that will be necessary
for companies to actually reach their
emissions-reduction targets. “I don’t
put a lot of stock in [net-zero goals] as
any kind of commitment, because the
time frame for these targets is so far in
the future that companies don’t actu-
ally have to do anything about it right
now,” he says. But Mindy Lubber, CEO
of the sustainability nonprofi t organi-
zation Ceres, is more optimistic. She
says that companies are attempting to
meet that challenge in reaction to in-
vestor demands and the Biden Admin-
istration’s push for climate- conscious
policies. “Over the last three years
there’s been mini revolutions,” she says,
“going from companies that planted a
tree or something insignifi cant to really
fundamentally getting it.” □
SUSTAINABLE
PRINCIPLES
SOCIAL
RESPONSIBILITY
OFFSETS
CLIMATE
CAUSES
CLIMATE
EFFECTS
CLIMATE
MEASUREMENT
CLIMATE GOALS
BROAD
CLIMATE
TERMS
ENERGY
TRANSITION
(^20122013)
(^20142015)
66 %
52 %^53 %
48 %^50 %
39 % 43 %
35 % 35 %
27 % 30 %
17 % 17 %
8 %
8 %
9 %
7 %
70 %
Changing theconversation