To define policy engagement, InfluenceMap relies on the 2013 Guide for Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy issued by the secretariat of the UNFCCC and the UNEP under the UN's Caring for Climate collaboration of the UN Global Compact. This document defines a list of corporate activities that constitute corporate climate engagement, covering direct and indirect tactics. These range across social media; public relations; sponsoring research; direct contact with regulators and elected officials; funding of campaigns and political parties; and participation in policy advisory committees.
This analysis and scoring are focused on an organization's publicly available comments, interactions, and influence on policy and legislation. It does not consider internal strategy (including emissions targets), activities, and performance of a company on climate change related issues.
InfluenceMap's scoring process is policy neutral. It does not assess the quality of governmental policy but rather the positions of companies and industry groups relative to this policy. This is achieved by using the statements and ambitions of government-mandated bodies tasked to propose or implement climate policy as the benchmarks against which corporate and industry association policy positions are scored.
For this analysis, InfluenceMap used the initial policy ambition as set out by the EU Commission to benchmark corporate engagement on climate and energy-related policies. Non-policy specific statements, such as top-line statements about net zero emissions by 2050 or comments on the energy mix, are scored using benchmarks devised from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Special Report on 1.5C, released October 2018. These benchmarks only apply to statements made after 2018.
Scored evidence is coded by InfluenceMap as: ‘strongly supporting’, ‘supporting’, ‘no position/mixed position’, ‘not supporting/supporting with exceptions’, or ‘opposing’ with reference to the benchmarks explained above. These categories correspond to a numerical five-point scale between +2 and -2, where +2 indicates strong support and -2 indicates opposition.
InfluenceMap searches for new evidence on each entity on a weekly basis. When new evidence is found, it is added to the entity's profile. InfluenceMap uses a weighting system when calculating the entities' Organization and Total Scores, which weights the most recent evidence pieces more heavily, with older evidence pieces gradually weighted out of the entity's score. InfluenceMap retains older pieces in the system, however, for the historical record. The evidence assessed as part of the Policy Tracker pages dates back to when the proposals were announced by EU institutions, for example evidence for the ‘Fit for 55’ policy pages dates back to the announcement of the Green Deal in December 2019.
When scoring the lobbying of a company, InfluenceMap looks for evidence of lobbying in every region in which said company operates. For example, the evidence InfluenceMap has collected and scored for BP, a company that operates globally comes from lobbying in regions including the US, the EU, Australia, Canada, the UK etc. As such, the organization scores and engagement intensities calculated for each of the entities covered in this research include lobbying in regions outside Europe. The policy tracker tool highlights European climate lobbying specifically, and only uses data gathered on lobbying related to those files. However, evidence from regions outside of Europe is included in individual company profiles and scores.
The initial aim of this research is to cover the lobbying of the entities most relevant to climate change in Europe. This list will be progressively expanded to offer an increasingly complete analysis of Corporate Europe. The universe of companies in this research was initially selected by taking the EU-headquartered companies identified by the Climate Action 100+ investor initiative as significant emitters of greenhouse gases and/or a company that can play a strategically important role in the transition to net-zero emissions by 2050 or before. The total 167 Climate Action 100+ focus companies account for over 80% of corporate greenhouse gas emissions. This list was then combined with the EU-headquartered companies identified as leaders in progressive climate policy engagement by InfluenceMap’s 2021 A List report. This initial universe of companies will be expanded as InfluenceMap assesses other priority entities.
For this assessment, InfluenceMap selected 13 EU-level policies to analyze under the European Green Deal. The 13 policies selected include the 2 top-level GHG emission reduction targets proposed by the EU and 11 policies proposed by as part of the Fit for 55 package in July 2021. This is not intended to provide a conclusive list of policies and more will be added in future. Lobbying on the policies currently included here will be monitored and kept up to date.
InfluenceMap uses the various policy options proposed in the European Commission’s Impact Assessment Report as a benchmark to assess the level of ambition of the positions taken by EU policymaking institutions.
InfluenceMap evaluated how ambitious each policy option was and compares this with the policymakers’ proposals in the Impact Assessment Report to understand whether:
