Danu Insight:
Updates and blog

The Climate Risk Few Are Governing
Date: August 1 2025
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 critical 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 (prototype below).
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.
Methodology overview and why investors should care?
Date: July 2025
Danu Insight analysed 8,500 firms and found fewer than 1 in 4 show any signs of climate lobbying oversight. This is not just a disclosure gap - it’s a climate risk hiding in plain sight. Here’s what the graph shows and why it matters for policy, investors, and net zero 👇
✅ Score 4 – Comprehensive
A public lobbying alignment report that thoroughly addresses both direct and indirect lobbying efforts, with named oversight (e.g., CEO/Board involvement).
🟢 Score 3 – Strong
Demonstrates effective management of both internal and external lobbying activities; however, it lacks a public report or an internal audit.
🟡 Score 2 – Moderate
Contains some climate lobbying policy or identifies a responsible manager, but the details are insufficient or limited in scope.
🟠 Score 1 – Limited
Features a generic lobbying policy that fails to address climate issues.
🔴 Score 0 – Silent
No information available regarding any policies or actions related to climate lobbying.
Why investors and companies should care about lobbying governance?
🚦 Governance gap: Lobbying has a significant impact on the rules that govern markets; however, most companies operate without any oversight regarding this influence.
🧾 Unaccountable influence: Most companies cannot map their lobbying footprint. Trade associations often take aggressive anti-climate stances, funded by companies that claim to support net zero.
🤔 You can’t defend what you can’t see: If companies do not govern or disclose their lobbying, investors may be holding climate obstruction in their ESG portfolios and not know it.
🛠️ This should be a management fix: This could be a high-systemic-impact, minimal-effort intervention. Political alignment is not a complex engineering overhaul—it’s a governance fix ESG teams can implement.
❓ Should companies be allowed to claim net-zero alignment while ignoring, or even participating directly or indirectly in actions that oppose climate action?
Join the LinkedIn conversation here.
Why lobbying governance matters to climate change?
📜 Policy is our most powerful decarbonisation tool.
🔄 Better governance can fix this disconnect by aligning public affairs teams with ESG teams and the overall values of the company.
🧾 Trade associations do most of the lobbying against climate policies.
Companies often do not know who they fund, let alone what positions those groups are taking. That has to change.
📊 Our new database on climate lobbying governance and report is available.
💡 Good climate lobbying governance does not need to be just an ESG issue. Effectively managing your policy influence should be a mainstream governance and management concern.
New Study: Silent Influence - Are companies failing to govern their climate lobbying?
Date: June 2025
Danu Insight, a climate-tech non-profit, unveils Silent Influence, the most extensive data-driven study to date on how over 8,500 publicly listed companies worldwide disclose and govern their climate lobbying activities. This is accompanied by a new publicly available database.
Key Findings:
💼 78 % of companies say nothing about either their direct climate lobbying or the lobbying done in their name or by their trade associations.
📜 75 % show zero evidence of a governance process to keep that lobbying in check.
⚖️ Less than 4% of companies appear to have strong or comprehensive governance structures to manage climate lobbying risks and ensure adequate alignment of their direct and indirect influence.
📈 Good governance matters: firms with robust oversight are 6× more likely to be transparent about their lobbying than the average company.
🖥️ Sector disparities: Traditionally scrutinised companies in the Utility, Energy and Materials sectors lead on disclosure, whilst newly resource-intensive companies in the Tech sector trail far behind.
🌍 Europe tops the regional table for both transparency and governance; Asia lags, suggesting a huge opportunity (and risk) for investors.
"Companies should be required to be transparent about their climate policy lobbying, just as they are their GHG emissions. This report's findings and the evident lack of transparency and governance should concern investors about being misled or the inadequate management of companies’ material lobbying risks. This is particularly important as most companies do not understand what they and their trade associations are lobbying for and against. We know that when they do audit their lobbying, they often take proactive and meaningful actions to align their lobbying with their publicly stated climate values." - Thomas O'Neill, Director, Danu Insight
Join the LinkedIn conversation here.
Why lobbying governance matters?
Misaligned or hidden lobbying undermines net-zero policy, misleads investors, and creates reputational and regulatory risk. Good lobbying governance is one of the most effective steps to drive progress on this issue.
The report finds less than 4% of companies scored ‘strong’ or 'comprehensive' through aligning their lobbying efforts, which includes both direct lobbying and lobbying through trade associations, by establishing a clear policy and management process to monitor and ensure the alignment of its climate lobbying activities, while also designating specific individuals or groups, such as the CEO, head of ESG, or relevant working groups, to oversee these efforts.
This is needed as lobbyists often see their role as preventing legislation, particularly in the climate space, where new policy overwhelmingly imposes costs on industry. The lobbyists employed are usually highly knowledgeable about the legislation they seek to influence, but not necessarily about alternative, climate-aligned solutions. Conversely, companies undergoing transition need lobbyists who take a different stance and are willing to support climate-friendly legislation. Public affairs teams also operate across numerous jurisdictions globally. Without clear internal policies and management, irregular lobbying is likely.
Similarly, aligning trade associations with company values is also essential for building coherent, effective climate policy globally. These well-funded and politically entrenched groups are unlikely to disappear. Auditing trade associations’ lobbying activities is vital for identifying which companies are funding which groups, and what positions those groups are taking. This allows companies to push for alignment between the trade associations they empower with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Without these audits, companies remain in the dark about how their trade associations engage with climate policy. Further, they cannot navigate the already challenging task of assessing whether their lobbying is truly aligned with the Paris Agreement—and therefore, whether they can credibly claim to be a Paris- or Net Zero-aligned company.
Our report has shown that current lobbying disclosures and governance are widely inadequate, making this, in turn, a change opportunity for companies and investors. Our proposition is that if thousands of companies effectively manage their climate governance, it will significantly support lobbying and policy outcomes that are aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
What are the Sector and Continent Trends?
Data analysis reveals distinct patterns when companies are grouped by industry sector or continent. As illustrated in the graph below, average scores for both climate lobbying transparency and governance vary considerably across different sectors.
Companies operating in sectors generally understood to be highly exposed to climate-related policy and transition risks tend to demonstrate higher levels of disclosure. Notably, the Utilities sector shows the highest average transparency score by a significant margin, followed by Energy and Materials. These sectors also lead, albeit with lower average scores overall, in climate lobbying governance. This suggests that companies facing more climate pressure (e.g. from regulators, transition challenges, or stakeholder scrutiny) are more likely to disclose their lobbying activities and implement governance structures
