SBTi Commitments and Validation Status: How to Check a Company

Most searches that land here are not about what the Science Based Targets initiative is. They are about one named company, a supplier or an acquisition target that claims to have science-based targets, and whether that claim survives a check. This page answers that first and explains the standard second.

What the SBTi is and what its statuses mean

The Science Based Targets initiative validates whether a company's climate targets match what science says is required to limit warming to 1.5°C. Founded in 2015, it runs as a UK-registered charity with a commercial subsidiary that carries out validation. Its methodologies translate the IPCC carbon budget into company-level pathways, which is what makes a board statement about 1.5°C alignment verifiable at all.

For a lookup, the point is that "SBTi" is not one state but several. A company can have signed a commitment letter and never submitted a target. It can hold a validated near-term target but no net zero target. Its commitment can have been removed after the submission deadline lapsed. All three appear on the public dashboard under different labels and get described in marketing copy the same way.

How to check a company's SBTi commitment and validation status

The check takes about ten minutes and produces something you can file. Five steps:

1. Search the legal entity, not the brand. The public target dashboard lists whoever submitted, so a group brand often sits under a holding company and the subsidiary you contract with may not appear at all.
2. Read the status label, not the presence of a row. A row only means the company is in the system. The table below decodes what the label claims.
3. Record four fields. Entity name, status label, target year, retrieval date. Statuses change continuously, so an undated screenshot carries little weight in a due-diligence file.
4. Check the target scope. A validated Scope 1 and 2 target at a company whose footprint is overwhelmingly upstream says almost nothing.
5. Cross-check the company's own reporting. If it files under CSRD, the ESRS E1-4 target datapoints should show the same target, base year and reduction rate. A gap between dashboard and report is the finding, not a data error.

The wording matters in a supplier questionnaire. "Do you have science-based targets" invites a yes from a company that signed a letter years ago. Ask instead for the dashboard status, the exact entity name it is listed under, and whether the target includes Scope 3. A validated target is answered in one line; a lapsed commitment has to be explained, which is the information the question was for. Those three fields belong in the supplier screening record.

What a validated target actually commits a company to

Every validated pathway has two horizons: a near-term target covering 5 to 10 years and a net zero target reaching 2050 at the latest. Scope 1 and Scope 2 must fall on a 1.5°C pathway, a 4.2 percent absolute reduction per year. The long-term target requires at least a 90 percent reduction across Scope 1 to 3, with the remainder neutralised through permanent removals. Land-intensive sectors additionally set a separate Forest, Land and Agriculture (FLAG) target and commit to no deforestation for primary commodities.

A Scope 3 target becomes mandatory once Scope 3 reaches 40 percent or more of total Scope 1 to 3 emissions, and must then cover at least 67 percent of them. That is the rule of version 1.3.1, which SBTi accepts until 31 January 2028; the Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0, final since 11 June 2026 and in effect from 31 January 2027, replaces the fixed shares with a significance test covering every Scope 3 category above 5 percent of the total. This is where commitments fail. Across 1,401 public European sustainability reports from 2024 and 2025, 13 percent published no extractable Scope data at all, and 8 percent of those reporting a Scope 3 figure showed Scope 3 smaller than Scope 1 or 2, which is a methodological red flag rather than a small footprint. No company validates a Scope 3 target it cannot measure, and the Scope 3 inventory is almost always the bottleneck.

Carbon credits cannot be applied to near-term or long-term reduction targets under the current standard; they address residual emissions only. My position goes further. Insetting, meaning reductions financed inside the company's own value chain, beats buying offsets in the large majority of cases: the same money buys a supplier's measured emission cut, and that cut shows up in the inventory. An offset buys a certificate that does not. Ranking the options by cost per tonne is what a marginal abatement cost curve is for.

Validation: process, cost, timeline and the SME route

The route to a validated target runs from an optional commitment through a complete greenhouse gas inventory, target setting, submission and formal review to publication, which is mandatory within six months of approval. Formal review typically takes 40 working days for corporates and 60 for financial institutions; from a standing start, plan 12 to 18 months. Rejections cluster around an incomplete Scope 3 inventory, Scope 1 and 2 coverage below 95 percent, or a base year before 2015.

Those are validation fees, not project cost; the inventory work behind a first-time corporate submission runs an order of magnitude higher. The SME route is the exception. A company meeting at least three of the thresholds of fewer than 250 employees, under €50 million revenue, under €25 million balance sheet and no FLAG exposure skips the commitment step and needs only a Scope 1 and 2 near-term target. It exists mainly because large buyers push validation down the chain through supplier engagement targets, and it is the fastest honest answer to a procurement request.

SBTi status versus ESRS E1 target disclosure

A validated target does not discharge a disclosure obligation. The SBTi rates whether a target is ambitious enough; CSRD asks whether it is disclosed in a comparable, auditable form. A dashboard label is not an ESRS datapoint, and in report review the two regularly diverge, most often where a signed commitment is presented as though it were a target.

For companies pushed outside CSRD scope by the Omnibus thresholds, the comparison shifts. My position on Omnibus is that it is not bureaucratic relief but data deletion in instalments: climate data nobody collects appears in nobody's risk model, and the gap gets paid later by lenders and investors. Where regulatory disclosure stops doing the signalling job, a validated target and the lighter VSME reporting standard are what remain, and both count for more in procurement than while everyone was in scope.

FAQ

If a dashboard entry and a published report disagree, or you are preparing a submission and want the Scope 3 architecture stress-tested first, get in touch.