Chapter 02 The State of Corporate Superpollutant Action

Companies are naming the gases without setting goals against them

A decade of corporate climate action has produced more than 10,000 science-based targets and 1,900 net-zero commitments.⁹⁰ To date, few superpollutant-specific strategies have emerged.

A Carbon Containment Lab review of public climate disclosures from 40 large companies⁹¹ in sectors with superpollutant exposure—oil and gas, retail, food and consumer products, technology and media, and finance—found the great majority of companies name these gases at least once in their sustainability reporting, most commonly as a bundled component of their emissions footprints. Eighty-eight percent of the 40 companies name methane, 75 percent name F-gases or refrigerants, and 63 percent name nitrous oxide. But few set a goal against them. Only 13 of the 40 companies presented a quantified methane target, six an F-gas target, and one a nitrous oxide target.

The conversion rate falls as the gas becomes harder to detect and control: 37 percent for methane, 20 percent for F-gases, and 4 percent for nitrous oxide. That ordering tracks the practical difficulty of each case—concentrated and increasingly regulated point sources, diffuse equipment leakage spread across owned and leased estates, and dispersed agricultural emissions sitting several tiers up a supply chain or downstream in mixed waste facilities.

The methane targets also rest almost entirely on a single sector and appear to respond to existing or pending regulation. Eleven of the 13 methane targets belong to the oil and gas companies in the scan, where the EU Methane Regulation, the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter, and Oil & Gas Methane Partnership 2.0 (OGMP 2.0) have made methane intensity targets close to a condition for operations.⁹² Outside oil and gas, only two of 24 companies that name methane set a target against it. Setting superpollutant targets is therefore nearly absent except where policy has already compelled it.

Interviews with corporate practitioners conducted for this roadmap describe the same gap from the inside. Sustainability teams understand that superpollutants exist across their Scope 1, 2, and 3 footprints, and many can identify the major sources. But they have yet to lean into mitigating them.

They lack the elements that enable goal setting—a credible methodology for how superpollutant reductions count toward existing climate commitments, and clarity on how to fold superpollutant action into climate plans that took years to negotiate internally.⁹³

Where companies are embracing value chain intervention, voluntary carbon markets, and policy engagement on carbon dioxide at scale, they are only beginning to do so on superpollutants.

• Value Chain Intervention: Pilots rather than portfolios. In the sectors where superpollutants concentrate—food and agriculture, refrigeration and cooling, energy, and waste—value-chain interventions are typically described in publicly available reports and press releases as pilots rather than portfolio commitments. Consistent with standard reporting guidelines, most large food companies express climate goals in aggregate carbon dioxide-equivalents and treat methane and nitrous oxide interventions as discrete projects rather than managed programs. Refrigerant transition planning exists, but adoption trails ambition. Across the largest U.S. supermarket chains, only three of 16 received passing scores on Environmental Investigation Agency’s (EIA) 2024 Climate-Friendly Supermarkets Scorecard. The sector average for annual HFC leak rate sits at roughly 25 percent, exceeding the level that EPA’s voluntary GreenChill program treats as best practice by fivefold—yet just five of the 16 companies even disclose their leak rate.⁹⁴
• Voluntary Carbon Markets: Capital is not reaching superpollutants at scale. Superpollutant credits remain a small share of issuance and retirement, and the methodologies and supply pipeline needed to change that pattern are only now being built at scale. The most frequently cited pressure on corporate climate targets is financial rather than technical. Fifty-five percent of executives polled by The Conference Board identified capital allocation, cost, or return on investment as a factor likely to prompt significant adjustment or delay, ahead of evolving regulatory requirements (45 percent) and technology readiness (37 percent).⁹⁵
• Policy Engagement: Advocacy trails corporate ambition. Oftentimes, companies hold publicly supportive climate positions while powerful trade associations engage in regressive advocacy. S&P Global’s Corporate Sustainability Assessment, which evaluated disclosures from 12,813 public companies across 62 industries in 2024, finds that 82 percent of companies have not aligned their lobbying and trade association activities with the Paris Agreement and just 2 percent have a process to address misalignments between their position and the climate change policies of trade associations.⁹⁶ This impact compounds when 65 percent of U.S.-based industry associations “are engaging highly negatively on climate policy,” as found by InfluenceMap’s analysis.⁹⁷ For example, lobbying against the EU Methane Regulation came predominantly from industry associations seeking to delay implementation, dilute leak-detection standards, and weaken coverage for imported gas.⁹⁸ When the regulation was at risk, it was a coalition of 44 institutional investors representing more than €4.85 trillion in assets that wrote publicly to defend it.⁹⁹ Another constructive exception is F-gases, where manufacturers and refrigerant producers supported the Kigali Amendment and the U.S. AIM Act because a predictable global phase-down levels the playing field and protects against high-GWP imports.¹⁰⁰

Narrowing the gap between internal ambition and external voice is, on its own, one of the largest potential opportunities. It costs little, if anything, for companies and can shift entire markets rather than individual project portfolios.

The gap persists for reasons specific to superpollutants

SBTi’s Corporate Net-Zero Standard required companies to include methane, nitrous oxide, and F-gases inside their carbon dioxide equivalent targets, but it did not mandate separate targets for any individual gas.¹⁰¹ The GHG Protocol’s corporate standard did not require Scope 3 disclosure and did not provide standardized, mandatory treatment of facilitated emissions.¹⁰² The major net-zero frameworks, therefore, have created uncertainty about how superpollutants fit into strategy by bundling them within “aggregate GHG” rather than as a distinct category necessitating separate action. Further, they offered little specific guidance on how to set targets, measure progress, or close data gaps.

Until recently, companies could set a combined Scope 1 and Scope 2 target under the SBTi, allowing cleaner electricity procurement to carry flat operational emissions. That matters because superpollutants sit almost entirely outside Scope 2. Fugitive methane from oil and gas systems, refrigerant leakage from cooling and process equipment, fluorinated gas emissions from semiconductor and electronics manufacturing, and sulfur hexafluoride from electrical transmission and distribution equipment are all Scope 1 for many companies. Enteric and manure methane, rice methane, industrial and fertilizer-driven nitrous oxide, supplier F-gas emissions, and waste methane are usually all Scope 3. The scope where corporate reductions have been most readily available, renewable electricity Scope 2, is also the one scope in which these gases barely appear.

Measurement has also compounded the accounting problem. A carbon dioxide inventory can be built from purchase records, because combustion emissions generally follow fuel consumed. Superpollutant emissions are different because they most commonly leak from equipment, escape during maintenance, and sometimes vary with weather, herd, and soil. Estimating these emissions from activity and financial data with default emission factors produces numbers that are challenging to anchor a public target. Recent technological developments have included source-level monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV), which can resolve that uncertainty at a commercial scale while footprinting standards for superpollutants catch up.

Accounting that treated superpollutants as a subset of aggregate CO₂e is being replaced by scope-level targets with full coverage.

Changing rules are impacting superpollutant footprints

The SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard Version 2.0, effective February 1, 2027, removes the combined-scope option for larger companies. Category A companies shall set separate Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 targets, and near-term Scope 1 targets shall cover 100 percent of Scope 1 emissions, with no materiality carve-out. (Companies may continue to set targets under Version 1.3.1 until January 31, 2028.) ¹⁰³ By early 2028, therefore, every large company with material fugitive methane, refrigerant leakage, or industrial F-gas emissions validating a target under Version 2.0 will hold a stand-alone, fully covered Scope 1 target. In refrigeration-intensive retail, upstream oil and gas, semiconductor manufacturing, chemicals, and electrical equipment, superpollutants will constitute a visible share of that new target. The issue facing those companies is not whether superpollutants belong in their climate strategy. It is how quickly they can build the measurement, abatement, and procurement capabilities to deliver against a target.

A second new provision extends the same logic across the full target horizon. Where emissions remain at the net-zero target year, the revised standard requires that residuals of long-lived greenhouse gases be neutralized with long-lived removals, while residuals of shorter-lived gases may be neutralized with short-lived removals or a combination of both. It also assigns companies direct and unshareable responsibility for neutralizing Scope 1 residuals.¹⁰⁴ An implication for companies carrying sulfur hexafluoride in transmission and distribution equipment or perfluorocarbons in semiconductor manufacturing, for instance, is that eliminating emissions at source is the cheaper option when evaluating current capital decisions. The same financial trade-off analytics will need to be applied to all other capital decisions with greenhouse gas footprints.

Each of these shifts answers the dynamic that preserved the gap between awareness and action: accounting that treated superpollutants as a subset of aggregate CO₂e is being replaced by scope-level targets with full coverage and a neutralization requirement keyed to atmospheric lifetime. The source-level measurement that fugitive and diffuse emissions have always required, and rarely had, is now increasingly available through satellite and continuous-monitoring systems.

Pathfinder companies show moving from awareness to action is a matter of choice

In every sector we evaluated, a small group of companies has taken serious action. While they remain the exception, they offer the strongest case that what separates them from their peers is choice rather than capability.

Three characteristics recur. Companies act where the gas is concentrated and measurable, rather than where the aggregate footprint is largest. They treat superpollutants as a managed program with a baseline, a target date, and an accountable owner, not as a pilot. And several act on pollutants that their own operations do not generate, beyond their value chain.

Implications for corporate strategy

The implication for corporate strategy is not that superpollutants should be added to a list of climate priorities. It is that in the next phase, corporations must prioritize superpollutant mitigation to meet their goals. Climate stabilization requires it.