JUST Capital: Corporate Philanthropy Institute Resources
- How Salesforce Responds to Climate Disasters
- Salesforce Unveils Climate Finance Playbook; Grants $8.3M to Climate Justice and Nature Nonprofits
- JUST Capital’s 2022 Americans’ Views on Business Survey: Americans Want Less Talk, More Action
- More than two in three Americans (68%) say that “our current form of capitalism is not working for the average American,” a 10-point increase in negative sentiment from just one year ago, according to a JUST Capital polling report from 2022.
The public remains skeptical on whether America’s largest companies are actually following through on their commitments to a stakeholder model, with 86% agreeing that companies “often hide behind public declarations of support for stakeholders but don’t walk the walk.”
Four categories, listed in order of increasing rigor, guide JUST Capital’s annual rankings analysis of the Russell 1000:
- Emissions reduction commitments,
- Net Zero by 2050,
- Science-Based Target Initiative for 2 Degree Scenario (verified 2-degree SBTi), and
- SBTi for 1.5 Degree Scenario (verified 1.5-degree SBTi).
Within all four categories of climate commitments, we saw an increase in the number of companies setting targets since data collected for our 2022 Rankings. And while overall companies are setting more climate commitments, the majority of these commitments are concentrated within certain industries and do not meet the highest criteria for the most ambitious commitments.
An additional 86 companies set goals to reduce their emissions and 136 new companies committed to reaching Net Zero by 2050. The number of companies with verified targets by the SBTi to meet a 2-degree scenario nearly doubled, with 45 companies now verified compared to 25 companies last year. Finally, 83 companies have now set the most ambitious commitment, a verified SBTi 1.5-degree scenario, marking a 21% increase from last year.
- JUST Capital data from 2022 show:
- A strong majority (92%) of Americans say that it is important for companies to promote racial equity in the workplace.
- Across all demographics, Americans universally agree that wages are key in doing so: 77% say that racial equity cannot be achieved without all workers being paid a living wage.
- 68% of respondents say companies have more work to do to achieve racial equity in the workplace, a slight increase from 64% in 2021.
- JUST Capital research from January 2018 to September 2023 shows that the Russell 1000 leaders in corporate stakeholder performance across all five stakeholders–workers, customers, communities, shareholders and governance, and communities–have outperformed the laggards by 56.5%, as measured by JUST Overall Score.
- Building upon the collection of index concepts that JUST Capital launched earlier this year, we’ve constructed a new concept: the Workers & Environment Leaders, which tracks the top 20% of companies that perform best across all the environment- and worker-related issues in our 2023 Rankings. What we found is that the Workers & Environment Leaders outperformed the Russell 1000 by a significant 21.73% from January 2018 to July 2023.
In a JUST Capital survey, we find that Americans again agree that the focus of a just company should be its workforce, with majorities agreeing with the following statements:
