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Is Walmart’s rollback on its carbon goals a sign of corporate withdrawals to come?
Certainly, the world’s No. 1 retailer’s announcement that it’s poised to undershoot its targets to reduce planet-heating emissions by the end of the decade doesn’t augur well for the industry at large.
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While Walmart pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions from its own operations—that is to say, Scopes 1 and 2—by 35 percent in 2025 and 65 percent in 2030 compared with 2015 levels, it has so far only managed to curtail 19.3 percent. The big box’s “aspirational goal” of zero emissions by 2040 also appears a little further out of reach: While its emissions intensity continued to decline, dropping 2 percent year-over-year, its operational emissions rose by 3.9 percent in 2023 because of what it said was largely due to aging, high-emitting refrigeration equipment, transportation-related emissions from changing routes and a growing fleet, and a slowing of renewable energy expansion relative to its business growth.
Because of this and many factors beyond its control, including public policy, the availability and cost-effectiveness of low-carbon technologies, and “broad sectoral transitions” in energy systems, transportation, materials and agriculture, progress “will not be linear,” Walmart said. “We will continue to report progress and in 2025 will consider revising our targets based on the best available information and assumptions at that time.”
There was, however, some good news mixed in with the bad. Walmart said it fulfilled its Project Gigaton goal of reducing, avoiding or sequestering 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases from its global supply chain—meaning, Scope 3—six years ahead of its 2030 schedule. That’s the equivalent, the Arkansas-headquartered firm said, of taking 200 million passenger vehicles off U.S. roads for a year.
But Walmart admitted in its update that though many projects that “produce a positive result” under Project Gigaton can also “positively impact” its Scope 3 footprint, data gaps and underdeveloped Scope 3 footprint estimation methodologies mean that these efforts and results “cannot be fully reconciled” as yet.
Any improvements in its Scope 3 footprint also depend on a swath of determinants, including some that are, again, outside its realm of influence, such as changes in energy grids in regions from where it sources and where its customers reside, agricultural production means, transportation technologies, waste handling infrastructure, customer purchasing decisions, inflationary or deflationary pressures, government policy and supplier upgrades that can provide meaningful changes.