The online tool keeping corporations honest on climate action

Earlier this year, European oil company TotalEnergies found itself in court over allegations it had made false climate claims.

The company had promoted a ‘carbon-neutral’ future and an environmental strategy aligned with the Paris Agreement. But environmental organisations argued the claims weren’t backed by a credible, deliverable plan.

In a landmark finding – the first against a major fossil fuel company – a French court agreed that parts of TotalEnergies' net-zero messaging were misleading.

The company was ordered to remove the relevant material and pay a financial penalty.

That case is a sharp reminder of a much bigger issue: corporations now sit at the centre of climate accountability. Some of the world’s largest companies produce emissions that rival — or exceed — those of entire countries.

If we are serious about achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, we can’t only track national commitments. We need to know whether the companies driving real-world investment and production are actually on target.

This matters even more in the wake of the 30^th United Nations Climate Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, where nearly 200 countries gathered to negotiate the next phase of global climate action including stronger national targets, the pace of the fossil-fuel transition and finance for adaptation.

As critical players in the global economy, how do we hold corporations to account? We need simple, standardised measurement tools — but also enough flexibility to reflect different sectors and business models.

The danger is letting companies pick whatever strategy flatters them most. That’s where greenwashing creeps in - glossy claims of “Paris-alignment” or “net-zero” without the underlying numbers, assumptions or historical context to make those claims meaningful.

Academics can play a vital role here, because they are positioned to develop methods that are transparent, replicable and grounded in peer-reviewed science.

One example is the Carbon Budget Tracker developed by researchers from UQ, Oxford University, Princeton University and other institutions. It’s currently being tested with potential users including litigators and investors. This science-based, open-source platform translates complex climate research into a usable corporate benchmarking tool.

What makes the Carbon Budget Tracker distinctive is that it doesn’t just look at carbon intensity or emissions targets. Instead, it converts global climate scenarios into company-level carbon budgets and checks whether a firm’s past performance and forward plans fit within those limits. In plain terms, it asks: how much carbon does this company have left in a 1.5°C or 2°C world, and is it staying inside that budget?

Because the approach is budget-based and cumulative, companies can’t erase inconvenient history by choosing a friendly starting year and they can’t rely on intensity metrics that fall even while total emissions keep rising.

The tool also makes the assumptions visible — for example, whether a company’s pathway depends heavily on technologies like carbon capture that may or may not scale in time. That transparency is exactly what turns “Paris-aligned” from a slogan into something testable.

Pressure on companies to contribute to climate solutions will only increase. But pressure without measurement is just noise.

If we want ambition that survives scrutiny — from investors, regulators and the public — we need credible yardsticks. Tools like the Carbon Budget Tracker help ensure corporate climate promises are not only easy to make, but hard to fake.
 

About the authors 

Dr Saphira Rekker, pictured, is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Finance and an ARC DECRA Fellow in The University of Queensland’s Business School.

Sue Lyn Stubbs is a PhD student in Climate Finance at the UQ Business School.

Their recent commentary on corporate emissions benchmarking has been published in Nature Climate Change.