The number of U.S. companies holding corporate climate targets peaked at 1,140 in 2022 — just over a third of the Russell 3000 universe — and has fallen since, according to a database published Sept. 21 by Harvard University's Salata Institute.

The finding marks a turn in a metric that has reported almost uninterrupted growth for a decade. Coverage held roughly flat in 2023, then dropped by 79 companies in 2024, the most recent year for which the researchers have published data. The decline is the first sustained contraction in the dataset, which tracks the Russell 3000 — an index covering 98 percent of U.S. equities by market capitalization — over a quarter century.

Headline figures elsewhere still point upward. The Science Based Targets initiative announced earlier this year that it had validated its 10,000th pledge, with companies in close to 100 countries participating. The Harvard dataset differs in method: rather than counting cumulative commitments across a shifting global population of firms, 27 researchers spent roughly two years tracking a single, fixed cohort of U.S.-listed companies over 25 years. That design captures exits as well as entrants — and the exits are now material.

Three forces behind the drop

Joseph Aldy, an environmental policy expert and member of the Harvard team, pointed to multiple drivers behind the contraction. The first is political. The anti-ESG campaign waged by Republican attorneys general — which began with investigations into ESG investing and has more recently extended to SBTi and other climate nonprofits — has, in his assessment, suppressed corporate engagement.

"I think that has had a bit of a chilling effect for some of these companies," Aldy said.

The second driver is policy alignment. Voluntary corporate targets have historically mirrored the ambition of the policy arena, Aldy noted. When President Joe Biden committed the United States to halving emissions by 2030 in 2021, some companies matched that pledge with their own 50-percent-by-2030 targets. The federal commitment has since lost its anchor, and the corporate targets that tracked it are following.

The third factor is regulatory, and counterintuitive. The decline came amid a period of apparent regulatory support for decarbonization, including the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. But Aldy and his colleagues argue some companies reviewed the IRA's provisions and concluded the law did not deliver the support they needed to meet their targets. With significant additional climate legislation effectively off the table, those companies chose to drop their targets rather than carry commitments they could not credibly execute.

The IRA's incentives have since been largely reversed by the current U.S. administration, reinforcing that calculus for any company reassessing its position in 2025.

What the number does and does not show

The database counts the presence of targets, not their stringency or achievement. A 79-company net decline across roughly 3,000 firms leaves climate-target coverage at just under a third of the Russell 3000 — a level that still represents a large installed base of emissions commitments across U.S. industry, including many of the largest emitters in materials, energy and heavy manufacturing.

But the direction of travel matters for the circular economy value chain. Decarbonization targets have functioned as procurement drivers for recycled content, secondary metals and low-carbon materials. A contracting base of committed firms reduces the creditworthy demand signal that recyclers and secondary-materials suppliers have priced into capacity planning over the past five years.

The Salata Institute has published the Corporate Climate Targets Database openly, with annual updates expected. The next data release — covering 2025 — will show whether the 79-company contraction was a one-year correction under a hostile federal policy environment or the start of a structural unwinding of voluntary corporate climate commitments in the U.S. market. That figure, alongside the trajectory of state-level climate disclosure rules that survived the federal retreat, is the milestone to watch.