Apple Inc. has draped its new California campus with solar panels. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. cut the energy consumption of its refrigerators. Steelmaker Thyssenkrupp AG streamlined trucking routes, Dell Inc. made its servers less power-hungry and Microsoft Corp. pledged last month to slash its carbon output.
Among just over 1,000 of the world’s biggest publicly listed companies, accounting for about 12 percent of total greenhouse-gas emissions, 89 percent have plans to cut those emissions, according to a survey from the CDP, a nonprofit platform for corporate environmental disclosures. That is a 16 percentage-point increase since 2011, said the CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project. Earlier last month, a group led by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and California Gov. Jerry Brown presented a climate pledge under which 1,400 businesses have set emissions-reduction targets.
As world leaders gathered in Bonn, Germany, last month to negotiate enforcement of the 2015 United Nations Paris Agreement on capping climate change, company and bank executives said corporations will be as crucial as governments in making good on the U.N. pact, from which U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to withdraw.
“The world is going to be saved or doomed by what the private sector will be doing,” said Steven Tebbe, the CDP’s managing director in Europe.
