The hard truth: climate targets are running ahead of the systems needed to deliver them
María Mendiluce, CEO, We Mean Business Coalition
After a decade in which climate targets helped define the direction of travel, corporate climate action is entering a more consequential delivery phase.
Targets mobilized investment, created accountability and helped bring climate into mainstream business strategy. In many organizations, climate is now part of capital allocation, operations, procurement, supply chain management and risk planning. That is real progress: the foundations have been laid and the direction set.
But the next phase is different. Companies are increasingly confronting the difficulty of delivering targets in an economy that is still largely built around fossil-fuel systems, while the electrified, low-carbon systems needed to replace them are not yet scaling fast enough.
From ambition to implementation
Companies, sectors and geographies are starting from different points. Some sectors can move quickly because solutions are already available; others face deeper challenges linked to infrastructure, technology readiness, regulation, and value-chain complexity.
Regardless of the different contexts within which companies are operating, they have often set targets with an implicit assumption that infrastructure would scale, markets would price carbon and policy would evolve – providing the enabling conditions for investment and accelerated action.
The reality is slower and more uneven. In many markets, fossil fuel-based systems continue to benefit from subsidies and wider regulatory and infrastructure advantages. At the same time, clean solutions can still face a perception gap with some decision-makers assuming newer solutions are more costly or less reliable, even when their economics, performance and reliability are improving rapidly – and in some cases at parity or better.
The priority now is to strengthen the systems that allow ambition to become delivery. Companies need clear plans, consistent execution and fast learning, supported by the infrastructure, market and policy conditions needed to scale solutions in practice.
2030 is a checkpoint, not a verdict
Targets remain essential. They translate long-term ambition into operational decisions, capital allocation and measurable milestones. But targets are not the destination. They are tools for navigation.
2030 should be understood as a checkpoint, not a final verdict — but it must still be a meaningful accountability moment. Where companies fall short of near-term targets, the key question is what it reveals about delivery: whether climate has been sufficiently integrated into business decisions, whether investment needs to change, or where external barriers are slowing progress.
Used properly, targets should help answer those questions. That’s why having a credible transition plan matters: the real test is not whether a company has a headline target, but whether it has a robust, adaptive plan for delivering on it.
The next phase is about building the system
Many of the hardest emissions reductions now depend on changes that no single company can deliver alone. Deep decarbonization increasingly depends on wider ecosystem change: scaled grids and transport infrastructure, commercially viable low-carbon materials, suppliers adopting cleaner processes, finance flowing to solutions, better data, stronger skills and clearer policy incentives.
This is particularly visible in Scope 3 emissions, where progress requires decisions to be made across supply chains. In hard-to-abate sectors, the challenge is even more structural: companies are trying to decarbonize within energy, transport and industrial systems built over more than a century around fossil fuels – systems that cannot be transformed without collective action.
The next phase of climate leadership is about building what the transition needs, not just navigating what exists. Companies cannot wait passively for the right conditions to emerge; the leaders of today are shaping markets and accelerating the conditions needed for wider progress.
That starts with focusing on the areas most material to the business, which might include investing in clean technologies, creating demand for low-carbon materials, engaging suppliers, redesigning products and services, shifting capital allocation, and building more resilient value chains.
Policy engagement is also critical. Companies can move faster when policy creates certainty, provides clear incentives for low-carbon products and services, supports infrastructure investment and sets consistent rules across markets. The business case for decarbonization often depends on policy signals that reduce risk, reward early movers and scale emerging solutions.
Companies therefore have an important role to play in helping governments understand what is needed to unlock investment and reduce emissions. This includes advocating for stable regulatory frameworks, and ensuring that lobbying activity, trade association memberships and public policy positions are aligned with climate targets and plans.
The direction of travel is unchanged
The difficulty of implementation does not change the fundamentals. Climate risk rises with every fraction of a degree of warming. Rapid emissions reductions are essential to protect communities, ecosystems, and the long-term value and resilience of businesses.
As climate impacts intensify, businesses face growing material risks: disrupted supply chains, damaged assets, lower labor productivity, higher operating costs and shifting markets. Companies that fail to cut emissions and adapt risk reduced competitiveness and weaker long-term resilience. The lower the peak warming, and the shorter the duration of any temperature overshoot, the lower the risks to business and to the economies and societies on which they depend.
A new era of corporate climate delivery
The next stage of corporate climate action will be less tidy than the first. The past decade was about awareness, ambition and alignment, with leaders waking up to the scale of the challenge, governments beginning to move and companies setting targets – often before they knew how to deliver them.
What comes now is more consequential. It will involve missed milestones, revised plans, uneven progress and difficult trade-offs. But this is what implementation looks like: more exposed to real-world barriers, and more dependent on consistent execution to overcome them.
It will also be more pragmatic. Companies will accelerate where they can, while other areas remain constrained by the absence of enabling policy frameworks. Some will continue to lead, some will try to slow the process, and many in the middle will be moved by competitor pressure, regulation or shifting market expectations.
The companies that define credible climate leadership from here will be those that use targets to guide decisions, learn from delivery challenges, adapt their plans, and lean in to help build the systems they depend upon.
The hard truth is that climate targets are running ahead of the systems needed to deliver them. But closing that gap is one of the defining economic opportunities of this era — moving from ambition to action, from individual effort to collaboration, and from old fossil-fuel systems to the modern, electrified and resilient foundations on which thriving economies will be built. Companies have a role in shaping this shift – and leadership now means using their influence responsibly to accelerate it.