The UN backed campaign that turned net zero into a mainstream corporate promise is closing. A successor group takes over this month, with a mandate to turn six years of pledges into measurable delivery.
Race to Zero, the United Nations backed campaign that pushed thousands of large companies into net zero pledges, is winding down. Its leaders are turning instead to delivery. The initiative will be folded into the UN’s Global Climate Action Agenda, an effort to speed up implementation of climate strategies through the second half of this decade.
A successor effort arrives later this month. As Trellis reported on 11 August, the newly formed Net Zero Activation Group will lead the next stage, with a focus on putting existing commitments into practice. So the campaign that collected the promises is handing over to one built around keeping them.
How the campaign built scale
Six years is a long stretch in corporate sustainability. When Race to Zero began in 2020, the Science Based Targets initiative was still more than a year from publishing its first corporate net zero standard. Even so, close to 1,000 businesses signed up at launch, among them Nestlé, Adobe and Diageo. Each promised to reach net zero by 2050, publish a plan for getting there and set interim targets. Membership then more than doubled in the year that followed.
“When we launched Race to Zero in 2020, the challenge was to mobilise campaign members around a shared, credible definition of net zero at scale, and they did, in the tens of thousands,” said Nigel Topping, the climate leader who helped launch the campaign.
Criteria tightened as numbers grew. In 2022, for instance, the campaign told signatories to publish a transition plan within a year of joining, extend net zero across all emission scopes and bring lobbying into line with their targets. Some 7,000 companies had joined by that point.
The coal rule that split the campaign
That same 2022 update told members to stop developing or financing new coal projects. Within months, however, Race to Zero softened the language, asking members only to “phase out” coal with no end date attached. Major banks had warned that the original wording might breach antitrust law. Climate campaigners read the change differently, as a concession to financial sector lobbying.
The row also drew attention to how the campaign made decisions, through a relatively small group of experts. British academics reviewing net zero guidelines this year said the structure “creates scope for ambition but also opportunity for disruption by actors with competing missions”. Critics went further, accusing Race to Zero of deference to corporate interests and too little engagement with civil society.
Standards have taken over the detail
Race to Zero was designed to generate commitments. Writing a detailed framework for the transition fell to others, and since 2020 that work has largely gone to the SBTi and its Corporate Net-Zero Standard, updated in June. ISO, the international standards body, is developing a companion standard. Both draw on far wider stakeholder input than the campaign did.
What the next phase has to prove
Kaya Axelsson, an adviser to the campaign and a researcher at the University of Oxford who co-authored the guidelines review, argues it did its job by turning voluntary criteria into formal standards. “Now the next phase of the race is holding the line, keeping the standards and going beyond to do the systemic work that enables those things to happen,” she said.
Holding the line is harder than signing members up. Pledges cost little, while delivery shows up in capital budgets, supplier contracts and lobbying positions. Companies that joined at launch are now within a few years of the 2030 interim targets they set, and progress across that group is uneven. The Net Zero Activation Group therefore inherits a test the original campaign never had to sit, because counting signatories is easier than counting tonnes.
Organisations interested in taking part can register through the group’s page on the Climate Champions site ahead of the formal launch.
