Weekend Reading: Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor: Food and Ag

Corporate Climate Resposibility Monitor has published its 2025 report: Food and Agriculture Sector Deep Dive, which looks at measures of protection against climate change.  It doesn’t find much.

It does find:

• Agrifood companies present measures that are unlikely to lead to structural, deep emission reductions in the sector.
• Agrifood companies’ emission reduction targets are currently undermined by the undefined role for land-based carbon removals.
• Standard setters need to anchor the need for deep and structural emission reductions in their voluntary standards and guidelines, guided by key transitions for the sector, and need to call for separate targets for emission reduction and removal.

Overall,

Not much green in this chart.

The report goes into detail for each of the companies it’s tracking.

Not much good news here.  No surprise.  Reducing and cleaning up emissions costs money.

I learned about this report from Ag Funder News: Danone and Nestlé hit back after new report accuses Big Food of ‘corporate greenwashing.’

According to the report, penned by nonprofits NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, “This focus on CDR [carbon dioxide removal] distracts from their lack of commitments to deep, structural emission reductions, especially regarding methane.

“While the draft GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Guidance recommends setting separate targets for emissions reductions and removals, the current SBTi FLAG guidance appears to allow companies to count removals toward their reduction targets. Danone, Nestlé and PepsiCo seem to be taking this approach.”

It adds: “Companies are exploiting loopholes in voluntary standards like SBTi FLAG and the GHG Protocol, which allow them to blend removals with reductions in a single figure, masking a lack of real mitigation.”