Perspectives · Sustainable Project Management

A Validated Target Is a Promise. Projects Are Where It Is Kept.

Last week I sat at a UN executive roundtable in London, and the new chief executive of the Science Based Targets initiative, David Kennedy, took the floor. He did not spend his time on pledges. He spent it on delivery. The phrase he kept returning to, the one now at the heart of SBTi's new strategy, was "ambition to action." He had the numbers to stand behind it. Roughly 11,000 companies now hold science-based targets, covering close to 40 percent of global market capitalization. Last year was a record, with 3,200 companies setting targets. And through all the political noise of the past two years, he was keen to stress, not one company has walked away. The pledging phase worked. The question that has replaced it is the one every project professional already knows by heart. Now that you have promised, what exactly are you going to deliver?

On 11 June 2026, the initiative released Version 2.0 of its Corporate Net-Zero Standard, and it put real architecture under Kennedy's phrase. Something most of the coverage walked straight past: the standard grew up. It stopped being a framework for making a promise and became a framework for keeping one. V2.0 now requires accountability at the highest level of governance, a board-approved transition plan with actions, timeframes, assumptions, and dependencies, continuous progress reporting, and an end-of-cycle assessment of what was actually delivered. The question it now puts to all 11,000 of those companies is harder than it used to be. It is no longer enough to have pledged. Now they have to show delivery.

Here is what the standard does, stated plainly, because plain is where authority lives. It defines what the organization must achieve. It validates that a transition plan exists and holds the required elements. And then it stops. It does not tell a single project how it contributes to that target. It names actions and timeframes at the corporate level and stays silent on the mechanism that turns those actions into results on the ground. The plan may say the company will halve operational emissions by 2030. It does not say what the fleet program, the facilities upgrade, or the procurement redesign is meant to deliver toward that number. That silence is easy to miss and expensive to keep. It is the exact place where good targets go to die.

The orphaned target

I have watched this failure enough times to name it. A validated target sits at the top of the organization, real and board-approved and audited. Below it sit the projects that are the only things capable of moving it. And between the two there is nothing. No share of the target handed down. No number any team is actually on the hook for. Ask a project manager in that situation what their contribution to the corporate target is and you will get an honest shrug, because no one ever told them. They were handed an instruction to reduce emissions. They were never handed a figure to deliver. An instruction is a hope. A figure is a commitment. The distance between the two is the distance between a company that meets its target and one that spends the following year explaining why it did not.

The missing layer has a name

That layer is decomposition. You take the organization's validated trajectory and you break it into a threshold each project carries, grounded in the emissions that project actually controls or can reduce, and reconciled back to the pathway so a team cannot quietly hit its own economic share while the company drifts off the science. Once a project holds a threshold, everything changes. It has a number written into its plan, measured through delivery, and checked when the work is done. "Reduce emissions" becomes "deliver a 10,000-tonne reduction this cycle." The team stops guessing and starts delivering, because for the first time it knows what delivering means.

Kennedy framed the same shift plainly at the roundtable. The old approach asked a company to track a high-level emissions trajectory handed down from a climate model. The new framework, he said, aligns to the levers a company actually holds, the actions it can and should take. Decomposition is how those levers reach the hands that hold them. It is the translation between a boardroom number and a project deliverable, and until someone performs that translation, the levers sit in a strategy document while the emissions carry on unmoved.

This matters most where emissions actually live. A company's largest climate footprint is rarely in its own boiler room. It sits in Scope 3, in procurement, in capital projects, in product design, in the suppliers it chooses. Every one of those is a project, or a portfolio of them. Which means the corporate target is met or missed inside decisions that project people make every ordinary week. V2.0's own implementation hierarchy tells them how to make those decisions well: direct reduction at the source first, through design, procurement, and technology; shared-system measures next, inside the grids and supply chains a project draws on; market instruments last, only where reduction closer to the source is genuinely not feasible, and only with the reason written down. That order is a discipline, and disciplines are what our profession was built to run.

An invitation to tell the truth

V2.0 does one more thing that any experienced delivery professional will quietly appreciate. It assesses progress on a best-efforts basis and expects companies to name the barriers they hit and the actions they took in response. That is an invitation to honesty. When a project misses its threshold, the mature move is to record why, the root cause, the variance, the mitigation, the escalation owner, and let that record travel up into the company's reporting. A shortfall with a documented reason is worth more than a clean figure no one can trace, because the reason is the thing that lets an organization fix the pathway. The standard is asking for evidence generated inside the work, captured as it happens, in place of numbers assembled after the cycle has already closed.

Kennedy was direct about this in London. As long as a company is doing everything it can, he said, no one could reasonably expect more; where obstacles fall genuinely beyond its control, the standard asks it to be transparent about them, because the alternative is greenwashing risk and the legislation now taking shape in the EU. He called the net-zero path a course correction and a learning journey. A barrier register is simply how a project tells that truth in a form the organization can carry upward, so a course correction at the fleet level becomes a course correction the whole company can see and act on.

Picture a fleet electrification program inside a company committed to halving operational emissions by 2030. Decomposition hands the program a threshold, a 10,000-tonne reduction for the cycle, derived from the operational emissions the fleet controls. The direct action is to replace two hundred diesel vehicles with electric ones. Then reality arrives, the way it always does. Utility interconnection delays hold up the charging infrastructure, and the program lands at 8,400 tonnes instead of 10,000. Under the old habits, that gap would evaporate into a spreadsheet and a soothing footnote. Under this one, the shortfall and its cause are recorded, escalated, and carried into the end-of-cycle assessment, where the miss and the reason for it are both visible to everyone who relies on the number. That is the system working exactly as designed.

Why this version is the hopeful one

This is why I find V2.0 genuinely encouraging, and why my team built a practice extension to carry it into project delivery. The new standard finally speaks the language project managers have spoken all along. A threshold is scope. Continuous reporting is progress tracking. The end-of-cycle assessment is benefits realization. Best-efforts barrier reporting is honest risk escalation. Net zero has quietly become a delivery discipline, and delivery is the very thing our profession exists to do. The companies that read V2.0 as a reporting update, and hand it to their disclosure writers, will keep struggling. The ones that read it for what it is, a delivery mandate that lands in their projects, will pull ahead, because they will put it in the hands of the people who actually move the numbers.

The board can validate a target. Only the projects can keep it. For years the profession has told itself that knowing how to hit these targets was the hard part. It never was. The hard part was always delivery, and delivery already has a home. It is called project management, and its moment on the climate stage has arrived.