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 from 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.
The analysis and scoring are focused on an organization's publicly available interactions with climate-related legislation and regulation. It does not consider a company’s internal strategy (including emissions targets), activities, and performance 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 U.S. government 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 (October 2018). The IPCC benchmarks are currently being updated to reflect latest scientific findings from the AR6 Mitigation of Climate Change Report, which will be phased into analysis from the end of 2022.
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 companies and industry associations 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' scores, which weights the most recent evidence pieces more heavily, with older evidence pieces gradually having less impact on the entity's score. InfluenceMap retains older pieces in the system, however, for the historical record. On the “Companies” and “Industry Associations” tabs, entities’ names will link to distinct profiles for that entity: these profiles may contain evidence across a broad range of climate-related policies from the last 5+ years, with the most recent evidence having the greatest impact on its score.
The “Policy Tracker” pages on this platform highlight and summarize evidence of corporate engagement on those specific policies only, which began when each policy was announced.
When scoring climate policy engagement, InfluenceMap looks for evidence of lobbying in every region in which that entity operates. For example, the evidence InfluenceMap has collected and scored for Amazon, a company that operates globally, comes from its climate policy engagement in regions including the US (including state-level), EU, Japan, etc.
The Organization Scores and Engagement Intensities calculated for each of the entities covered in this research reflects InfluenceMap's analysis of these entities' climate policy engagement both in and outside of the U.S. Similarly, a company's Relationship Score is a measure of its indirect climate policy influence through all of its industry association memberships globally.
The “Policy Tracker” pages on this platform highlight and summarize evidence of corporate engagement on those specific U.S. policies only.
The U.S. Platform hosts a wide range of companies that are headquartered in the U.S. This list will be progressively expanded to offer an increasingly complete analysis of Corporate America. U.S.-based companies are added to InfluenceMap’s total universe of over 350 companies based on a number of factors, including the Forbes 2000 and S&P 100 company rankings, the companies selected for engagement by the Climate Action 100+ initiative, and other instances of external demand for information on particular companies.
InfluenceMap selected three initial policies for the U.S. Policy Tracker. This platform is still under development, and more policies will be added over time, including state-level legislation and regulation. The three currently presented have all seen high levels of engagement from U.S. companies and industry associations. Corporate engagement with these policies will be monitored and updated continuously.
