Thousands of organisations now publish a carbon footprint and set a climate target. However, research from the MIT Sloan School of Management points to a gap between setting a target and actually reducing emissions. Setting a target says little on its own about whether emissions actually go down afterwards. What appears to matter far more is independent, recurring third-party verification.

The problem: plans are not the same as progress

Among large companies, setting a climate target has become standard practice. Companies report footprints every year, and many sign up to voluntary schemes to make their ambitions official.

A target is a statement of intent. It says nothing about what was measured, how carefully, or what happens after the announcement. Without an ongoing process or independent checks, a particular emissions source can be missed, an outdated emission factor can be used, or momentum can simply fade after the target is set, often without any bad intent involved. From the outside, the plan still looks credible, but progress remains much harder to see.

What the evidence shows

A working paper from MIT Sloan School of Management looked at this question directly, using data from more than 30,000 listed companies worldwide between 2016 and 2021. Two findings stand out.

First, companies that have their emissions independently checked report higher emissions in the year they are first checked than similar companies that are not. The check catches emission sources that unverified reporting tends to miss.

Second, and more telling: a climate target on its own (in this study, a target validated by the Science Based Targets initiative, SBTi) showed only a weak and inconsistent link to a real reduction in emissions the following year. Once the researchers accounted for whether a company’s emissions were also independently checked, that link largely disappeared. Those independent checks, meanwhile, were consistently linked to a measurable drop in emissions: companies that had their emissions checked reduced their output by a meaningful amount the year after.

The clearest takeaway is that in this data, independent verification, rather than the target itself, is what predicts an actual reduction in emissions.

The study does have some limits. It is a working paper, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the results show a strong statistical pattern rather than definitive proof that verification causes reduction. The data covers direct emissions from company operations only (known as Scope 1) at large listed companies. Even so, the study seems to confirm the intuitive idea that independent and recurring scrutiny changes behaviour in a way a self-reported promise does not.

A working example: the CO₂ Performance Ladder

The CO₂ Performance Ladder has applied this principle for more than fifteen years. Rather than asking organisations to publish a footprint and a promise, the Ladder requires them to be independently audited on a recurring basis against a structured system for managing and reducing emissions.

Certified organisations go through a continuous cycle: measure emissions, plan how to reduce them, act on that plan, and get re-audited to prove it happened. If progress stalls, the next audit shows it. That repeated, independent check is the same principle the MIT Sloan research points to, applied in practice by more than 8,000 certified organisations, mainly in the Netherlands and Belgium.

The Ladder also functions as a procurement tool. More than 300 contracting authorities use it as a tender criterion, giving certified bidders an award advantage in the form of a notional discount on their bid price, without procurers needing in-house expertise to judge whether a supplier’s climate claims are accurate. The audit has already done that work.

Why this matters for policy and procurement

For governments, contracting authorities and financiers, the quality of a self-reported climate claim can be hard to assess and the intentions behind it even more so. Independent verification closes that gap, without asking every procurement officer or investor to become a carbon accounting expert themselves.

In the European Union, large companies face mandatory sustainability reporting with independent verification under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Recent simplification of these rules has reduced the number of companies in scope. For the much larger group of organisations that now fall outside it, independent verification is a voluntary choice, both for them and for the public buyers who work with them. The CO₂ Performance Ladder offers these organisations a practical route: recurring, independent verification that organisations of any size can adopt and that public buyers can reward in their tenders.

Conclusion

Third-party verification is what turns a climate strategy from a stated ambition into a credible, trackable process. The CO₂ Performance Ladder shows that this does not need to be complicated or expensive to apply at scale. More than fifteen years of independent audits, across thousands of organisations, point in the same direction as the research: real reduction follows real scrutiny.