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Global firms are increasingly adopting greenhouse gas mitigation targets in response to climate change. These targets serve as a spur for carbon mitigation initiatives, provide guidelines to select appropriate mitigation actions, and set the standards to measure the progress of the mitigation efforts. Despite their important functionalities, firm-level mitigation targets have rarely been studied. In this paper we aim to provide a comparative view on mitigation targets set by global firms across different countries and industrial sectors. The analysis focuses on four dimensions, i.e., adoption, metric, scope, and stringency. We find Japan far leads the other major countries in terms of target adoption, but the targets of Japanese firms are generally less stringent. Canadian firms are laggards in both target adoption and target stringency. The mitigation targets are also considerably uncommon among Australian firms. Firms in developing countries fall behind in target stringency and display a significantly greater divergence than developed countries in sectoral adoption rate. The European Union firms are most likely to cover the emissions in their supply chains in targets. Target stringency has substantially tightened from 2005 to 2012. For all the countries in this study, around 95% of the firm-level targets are more stringent than the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions submitted to the Paris Agreement. Setting mitigation target has a significant positive impact on both the likelihood of investing in renewable energy and the amount of investment in renewable energy. However, there is no evidence that more stringent targets lead to higher investment. These findings point to the most pressing issues with regard to corporate mitigation target-setting that policymakers and corporate management should address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a set of prospective LCA studies of electricity production technologies of the Spanish mix from 2014 to 2050. The projection of the power system has been done by using the TIMES-Spain energy model, in which two prospective scenarios have been implemented, a Business as Usual (BaU) and other with a target of 80% reduction in CO 2 emissions by 2050 with respect to 2005 levels. Accordingly, projections of ten LCA impact categories have been obtained. Concerning the evolution of the electricity mix, the coal power plants retirement by 2020 has been observed in both scenarios. The main differences befall on the natural gas contribution, higher in the BaU scenario than in 80% scenario and connected to the Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants usage. In addition, LCA categories selected show overall reductions in the long term reaching from 21% in Ozone Depletion to 85% in Acidification in the BaU scenario, and from 56% in Ecosystems to 87% in Acidification in the 80% scenario. However, Abiotic Depletion potential grows up to 5-times by 2050 due to the metal requirements of the solar photovoltaic technologies, significantly present in the mix. Likewise, the analysis of the endpoint categories (Human Health and Ecosystems) concludes that their evolution is much affected by the presence of the natural gas CHPs and, furthermore, existing fossil options are the main cause of damage by far. Hence a fossil-renewable transition is needed in terms of sustainability. In summary, it is recommended to use energy systems modelling frameworks to develop comprehensive prospective LCA studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]