The Climate Risk Few are Governing

Corporate lobbying serves as a powerful yet often overlooked force that shapes and undermines climate policy. Despite the rising alarm among investors and the public about climate change, a crit

ical information gap persists regarding the effectiveness of companies’ internal governance structures in managing this risk.

This is crucial: inadequate lobbying governance leads to disconnects between companies’ climate commitments and their lobbying actions. It also creates significant problems with the trade associations they finance, which do most of the world’s climate lobbying.

We know that when companies take lobbying governance seriously, it leads to greater alignment between their climate values and lobbying along with meaningful actions, such as leaving trade associations that oppose climate action.

Yet, our research shows that three in four companies have no lobbying governance process.

Our aim at Danu Insight is to shift the focus from symptoms to causes: from ‘What did the company lobby for?’ to ‘What governance structures allowed that position to form, and how can they be improved?

We published the world’s first publicly available climate lobbying governance database, using a five-point governance scoring framework to comprehensively assess whether companies have:

• Defined accountability – A named individual or governing body (e.g. CEO, committee) explicitly responsible for climate lobbying alignment.

• Formal oversight process – A recurring mechanism (e.g. annual audit, internal review cycle) to assess both direct and indirect lobbying against climate commitments.

• Trade association accountability – Governance must apply to trade association positions, with clear steps to engage, correct, or exit where misalignment occurs. 

To analyse 8,000+ companies, we deployed data science and AI to process over 250,000 regulatory filings, lobbying disclosures, and public reports to assess every reference to lobbying and governance.

We have also extended our work to the ecosystem of trade associations, which wield disproportionate influence over climate policy. This expansion holds the potential to significantly shift the landscape of climate governance, ensuring greater transparency and accountability in the industry.

Without analysing trade association lobbying and linking them back to all their corporate funders, proper lobbying governance and accountability is impossible for companies and civil society alike.

It’s a massive failure of global governance, as no one knows which direction these entities are pushing critical government policies.

To this end, we have:

• Mapped 200 associations to 1,500 companies.

• Scored each association on every climate policy it lobbied.

• Built the capacity to scale this to 2,000+ associations, linked to our index of 8,000 firms.

We aim to develop this as a free public resource, enabling companies to manage their advocacy, both direct and indirect, and allowing civil society and investors to monitor any misalignment.

Lobbying Governance Index