Corporate Climate Pledges of High-Revenue Design Firms and Contractors
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 150, Issue 2
Abstract
To combat the industry’s contributions to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, a rapidly increasing number of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms are making corporate climate pledges. The broader literature has shown that corporate carbon disclosures may correspond to measurable and statistically significant corporate emissions reductions. However, the literature has not yet targeted climate pledges in the AEC industry, making this a practically important topic for research. This paper documents the publicly available climate pledges made by the 100 largest civil design firms and the 100 largest contractors, in terms of 2020 revenue, to gauge their sustainability efforts. The authors describe corporate climate pledge attributes such as company climate targets, use of carbon credits, and reported Scope coverage (greenhouse gas emissions). As of February 2023, 42 design firms and 22 contractors had a formal climate commitment, including 7 duplicates (i.e., companies on both contractor and design firm lists). Although several companies have developed specific targets and reporting mechanisms, overall climate commitments vary due to differing company disclosures (e.g., different levels of Scope reporting) and the novelty of some companies’ climate pledges. Similarly, there is a lack of standardization for defining and using climate pledge targets (e.g., net zero and carbon neutral classifications). This paper provides a framework for improving climate commitment accounting for the AEC industry, with an explicit focus on AEC industry relevant GHG emissions accounting. This research makes a significant practical contribution to enabling AEC firms to leverage sector experience as they adopt and strengthen corporate climate pledges.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, including the complete data set of the Top 100 design and top 100 contractor firms ranked by revenue, and the key components of their climate pledges.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the researchers and contributors to the Net Zero Tracker for sharing information about the Net Zero Tracker as well as the codebook they used to quantify categories. The authors also acknowledge and thank Kara Gravert for her contributions to the intercoder reliability test.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 150 • Issue 2 • February 2024
Copyright
© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 2, 2023
Accepted: Sep 13, 2023
Published online: Dec 12, 2023
Published in print: Feb 1, 2024
Discussion open until: May 12, 2024
ASCE Technical Topics:
- [Inorganic compounds]
- Air pollution
- Architectural engineering
- Business management
- Carbon compounds
- Carbon dioxide
- Chemicals
- Chemistry
- Climates
- Construction engineering
- Contracts and subcontracts
- Emissions
- Environmental engineering
- Industries
- Organic compounds
- Organizations
- Pollution
- Practice and Profession
- Thermal pollution
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