In many cases, large international companies are among the world’s biggest climate sinners. At the same time, they also have enormous influence due to their size and available capital. “The potential impact on the planet is huge – depending on the company, it could be very negative, but also positive,” marine biologist Timothy Lamont of Lancaster University (UK) told science.ORF.at.
Global warming has now become an issue that even large companies cannot sit idly by – even if in some cases just to maintain a certain reputation in the eyes of the public. Companies are therefore increasingly willing to make promises and protect nature, at least in theory. Among other things, pledges to plant trees and restore certain ecosystems are popular.
“Extreme lack of information”
Every now and then, according to Lamont, promises even lead to real success. “We see more and more that companies in certain areas are actually doing something positive for the local environment and nature.” These are still isolated cases, but the growing interest of some companies in nature conservation is definitely a promising trend, says the marine biologist.
Together with an international research team, Lamont wanted to clarify how many corporate promises actually lead to positive effects on the environment. To do this, researchers analyzed publicly available information from the world’s 100 largest companies. The surprising result: “We were unable to answer our initial research question because we had to deal with an extreme lack of information,” says Lamont.
However, the team was able to demonstrate that around two-thirds of the large companies examined agreed to take nature conservation measures in recent years. Furthermore, researchers found less and less significant information, as they explain in the study in the magazine “Science”.
“We have no proof”
In a third of the company’s promises there was no information about the size of the respective project and in around eighty percent it was not even clear how much money was invested. “For more than ninety percent of the promised projects, we could not find any information about the eventual results,” said the marine biologist: “Individual companies could very well be doing excellent nature conservation – but we cannot say that with any certainty. at this time because there is a lack of evidence.”
The team deliberately avoided mentioning specific company names in the study so as not to advertise or harm individual companies. According to Lamont, to have a more accurate view of the projects of large corporations, more transparency and clearer guidelines are needed.
“This will likely require a combination of national legislation and better international guidance on how best to approach conservation projects,” Lamont said. Only in this way will it be possible to correctly evaluate companies’ efforts in the future and be able to better estimate how much large companies influence the environment and the global climate – both positively and negatively.