Why corporate climate actions need scientific support?
Corporate Net-Zero journeys are uncharted territory. While frameworks like the GHG Protocol and guidelines from the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) provide direction, sustainability teams face constant challenges—from annual rebaselining due to changing emission factors to securing management buy-in and aligning supplier engagement strategies with decarbonisation levers and regulatory pressures. By working closely with some of the world’s largest enterprises, I have helped model their Net-Zero pathways, streamline data collection, and train teams to integrate sustainability into core business functions. In this post, we explore why scientific rigor is essential for corporate climate action—ensuring strategies are credible, measurable, and aligned with real-world impact.
Dr. Ramana Gudipudi
5/2/20252 min read
The challenge: Lack of scientific clarity on net-zero pathways
Despite growing recognition of sustainability’s importance, corporations face a fundamental challenge: a lack of clear, science-based pathway to net-zero. Many set ambitious targets but struggle to determine how much they must reduce within their value chains before resorting to offsets like energy attribute certificates or carbon credits.
This uncertainty leaves businesses vulnerable to missteps—either risking corporate climate integrity, as flagged by the UN High-Level Expert Group (2022), or leading to ‘greenhushing’, where corporations downplay their climate progress for fear of backlash and accusations of greenwashing.
Addressing corporate net-zero pathways requires a holistic approach with robust science-based guidelines that span the entire corporate journey - from emission accounting and target setting to identifying key hotspots, assessing decarbonisation levers and costs, implementing actions, tracking progress, and developing a long-term net-zero strategy.
Without a structured, science-driven approach, corporations risk making arbitrary or ineffective decisions, weakening the credibility of their climate commitments, eroding stakeholder trust, and ultimately jeopardizing long-term financial gains.
How science can close the gap: Developing industry-specific net-zero blueprints
The science of decarbonisation has traditionally taken two broad approaches:
A top-down focus on national targets and sectoral pathways—such as energy, agriculture, transportation, and heavy industry.
A bottom-up approach emphasizing individual behavior change.
Between national strategies and sectoral pathways on one end and individual behavioral change on the other, corporations play a pivotal role in decarbonisation. However, developing individual net-zero strategies for each company is impractical. Instead, science must focus at the industry level, where companies with similar value chains and materiality can adopt science-based net-zero blueprints tailored to their shared challenges.
For example, in the food and beverage industry, companies face common emission hotspots like agriculture, processing, packaging waste, and logistics. An industry-level net-zero strategy would establish standardized emissions accounting, realistic decarbonization targets, and cost-effective reduction levers and monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) strategies ensuring alignment across businesses.
Without such industry-specific blueprints, companies struggle to translate sectoral goals into actionable plans, leading to fragmented efforts and misalignment with national policies. Science must bridge this gap, making net-zero pathways both scalable and effective in accelerating climate action.
By shifting toward science-based industry-specific net-zero blueprints, corporations can move from a reactive, compliance-driven model to proactive, strategic decarbonisation pathway essential for business viability, competitiveness, and resilience in a rapidly decarbonising global economy.
Aligning corporate and government policies
Nation states can also benefit from clear scientific guidelines to craft effective, economically viable climate policies. Many governments that pledged to the Paris Agreement face a dual challenge: ensuring economic stability while driving decarbonisation.
By adopting science-backed, industry-specific net-zero blueprints, policymakers can:
Develop targeted incentive programs for corporations with credible decarbonisation roadmaps.
Safeguard jobs and foster industrial competitiveness in a low-carbon economy.
Address residual emissions through scientifically validated carbon removal strategies.
With clearer insights, policymakers can design smarter regulatory mechanisms that drive genuine emissions reductions while maintaining economic stability. Science-driven, industry-specific strategies are the missing link between corporate ambition and effective government policy.
In times of crisis let science lead the way
As policy uncertainty persists and corporate sustainability faces increasing scrutiny, one thing is clear—science must lead the way.
Businesses and governments alike cannot afford to rely on fragmented strategies, vague targets, or reactive policy shifts. Industry-specific, science-based net-zero blueprints provide the clarity, accountability, and direction needed to turn climate ambition into real action.
Those who embrace science-driven sustainability today will not only future-proof their organizations but will be at the forefront of a resilient, low-carbon economy.