On 14 April 2026, with no headline announcement and a public release that landed two weeks later, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) shifted the rules of the game. Companies setting new targets now can commit to 2030 reductions considerably less ambitious than the ones already validated under the previous regime.
What does this mean in practice? Here’s the breakdown.
What’s changed
Until April 2026, a company validating a near-term target with SBTi via the general-purpose route (the Absolute Contraction Approach) had to commit to specific linear reductions:
- Scope 1 and 2: 4.2% per year from the base year, translating to roughly 42% by 2030.
- Scope 3: 2.5% per year, slightly above 20% by 2030.
The change: SBTi has issued an appendix to its Corporate Net-Zero Standard that allows companies to distribute reductions differently between the base year and 2050. According to consultancies that have already modelled the impact, for some companies starting now with a 2025 base year and a 2030 target:
- Scope 1 and 2 drops to around 21% (half the previous figure).
- Scope 3 drops to around 15%.
Substantial change. Worth understanding why it’s happened and what it means.
Why now?
The official line: as 2030 approaches, demanding 4.2% linear annual cuts from companies just starting their journey was becoming mathematically untenable. A company entering the process in 2025 with a 2030 target had only five years to hit 42%. In many sectors, that was simply unrealistic.
The consequence: companies were dropping out of the process or never engaging in the first place. SBTi faced a familiar dilemma: keep methodological purity and lose coverage, or adjust to bring more companies in.
They went with the second option. And here’s the tension.
What SBTi argues
The organisation’s position is that the 2050 net-zero target hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how reductions get distributed along the way. A company still needs to reach zero (or close to it) by 2050; it can now make the decarbonisation curve steeper later rather than earlier.
Pierre-Victor Morales-Aubry, of the Carbon Trust, put it like this: targets are still labelled “1.5 degree-aligned”, on the assumption that everyone hits them. But that assumption, he conceded, “may no longer be true”.
What critics worry about
Three points are generating noise across the ESG community:
1. Cumulative emissions. The remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C is finite. Every year of delayed reductions consumes part of that budget. Companies cutting less in earlier years means more accumulated emissions in the atmosphere, regardless of where they land in 2050.
2. Alignment with climate science. The IPCC still says 1.5°C requires a 43% global emissions cut by 2030. If SBTi-validated targets can now sit at 21%, the gap between climate science and what gets stamped “science-based” widens.
3. Fairness across companies. Businesses that signed up to 42% under the previous rules can’t apply the new ones retroactively. Companies that came in earlier and pushed harder are locked into stricter commitments than those joining now. Claire Taylor of the Carbon Trust summed up the mood: imagine you’ve just submitted a target you fought to get internal buy-in for, and two weeks later you find out you could have submitted something significantly looser.
A second change worth flagging: scope 1 and 2 are no longer combined
A second important change in version 5.3.1 of the near-term criteria has flown under the radar: scope 1 and scope 2 targets are now separated.
Historically, companies set a combined scope 1+2 target. In practice, a fair share of progress came from switching to renewable electricity tariffs (an “easy win” on scope 2). With the separation, scope 2 is expected to reduce faster than scope 1 (because SBTi expects scope 2 net-zero by 2040). This means you can no longer offset the difficulty of decarbonising scope 1 by leaning on a scope 2 quick fix.
In sectors like manufacturing, this has real operational implications. Tools like carbon footprint measurement make the separation auditable from the start.
For companies with already-validated targets
The change doesn’t apply retroactively. Your validated target is still the one you signed off, and progress is measured against that figure. SBTi has indicated it will publish a transition guide to align current targets with the upcoming version 2.0 of the Corporate Net-Zero Standard, expected in 2028.
For companies considering starting
Three things worth doing:
Re-run your model. If you walked away from SBTi recently because the reduction figure looked unrealistic, run the numbers again. Consultancies are noting that this reopens the conversation for plenty of companies that had stepped out.
Watch the base year effect carefully. If you’ve reduced emissions significantly between your base year and the most recent reporting year, the new criteria will demand additional, steeper reductions. In other words: companies that already did their homework before validation will face tougher scope 3 targets than those starting from scratch.
Decide if SBTi validation is still the metric your business wants to communicate. Plenty of corporate clients, investors and banks require it. But there’s a growing debate about whether “SBTi-validated” still carries the same weight it did two years ago. Anchoring the decision in audited data, not opinion, makes the difference. The CSRD resource hub is a good entry point if you also need to align disclosure obligations.
The Dcycle angle
Having an ambitious target without the data to track it is the worst-case scenario: it commits you without protecting you. At Dcycle, we help companies measure scope 1, 2 and 3 with the traceability needed to defend the target in front of an auditor, an investor or a customer asking the question.
If you’re considering SBTi (or already have it) and want to see how to connect measurement with reporting, book a demo.