InfluenceMap

InfluenceMap is a London-based, independent think tank that produces data-driven analysis of how business and finance affect the climate crisis. Founded in 2015, it tracks corporate and industry lobbying on climate policy through its LobbyMap platform, assesses financial institutions through FinanceMap, and maintains the Carbon Majors database of emissions attributable to major fossil fuel producers. Its work is used by investors, corporations, policymakers, the media and campaigners who want evidence about whether companies' public climate commitments match their political activity.

The organisation's premise is that lobbying is a decisive but poorly lit arena of climate politics. Companies announce net-zero targets in public while they — and the trade associations they fund — may press governments to weaken the very policies needed to meet those targets. InfluenceMap's service is to document that activity systematically, score it against what climate science requires, and publish the results where investors and journalists can use them.

Founding in 2015

InfluenceMap was founded in London in 2015 to encourage action to tackle the climate crisis, launching with research into the lobbying of the world's largest industrial companies. Its first major study, produced with a methodology developed alongside the Union of Concerned Scientists in the United States, examined the 100 largest global industrial companies and found that a large share were obstructing climate legislation, while almost all belonged to trade associations doing the same. Unilever was identified as a leader supporting climate policy; other consumer giants were criticised for relying on trade groups to resist it.

That debut established the organisation's method and its controversy. Scoring named companies on their advocacy — not only their emissions — was a new kind of accountability, and it attracted immediate media attention. It also defined the audience: asset managers who could press companies in which they invested, journalists who could test corporate claims, and the companies themselves, which began engaging with their scores.

LobbyMap: Scoring Corporate Climate Advocacy

LobbyMap is the organisation's core platform. It maintains profiles of major companies and industry associations, assessing their lobbying on climate policy against benchmarks derived from the Paris Agreement and the guidance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Analysts gather evidence of direct lobbying, public statements, consultation responses, advertising and public relations activity, and membership of advocacy groups, then grade organisations and track how their positions evolve.

The platform's value is comparability. A steelmaker, an airline and a technology company can each be placed on the same scale of support for, or obstruction of, science-based policy. Investors use those grades in stewardship — voting, engaging and, occasionally, divesting — while journalists use them to challenge green claims. Industry associations, often more obstructive than their own members, receive particular scrutiny, exposing a gap between what companies say individually and what their associations say collectively.

FinanceMap and Carbon Majors

FinanceMap extends the same logic to the financial sector, assessing banks, asset managers and other institutions on the alignment of their financing, investment stewardship and policy advocacy with climate goals. As climate scrutiny moved from energy companies to those who fund them, FinanceMap gave campaigners and shareholders a structured way to compare institutions — examining, for example, whether an asset manager's voting record matched its public statements on climate risk.

CarbonMajors.org presents the Carbon Majors database, which attributes a large share of historical industrial greenhouse gas emissions to a relatively small number of fossil fuel and cement producers. That attribution research underpins litigation, journalism and academic work on responsibility for climate damage. Together, the three platforms give InfluenceMap a connected view: who emits, who lobbies and who finances — the triangle through which climate politics operates.

Research Findings and Media Impact

InfluenceMap's reports are built for news impact, and wire coverage routinely carries them worldwide. A study reported by Reuters in November 2023 assessed 293 companies from the Forbes Global 2000 with net-zero or similar targets and found nearly 60 per cent at risk of 'net zero greenwash' because their lobbying conflicted with their pledges, applying the United Nations High-Level Expert Group's Integrity Matters guidance. Companies named included Glencore, ExxonMobil and Stellantis, each cited for specific advocacy against climate policies in Europe, Australia or the United States; the UN group's chair called the findings a wake-up call for business.

An earlier report found that the world's five largest publicly traded oil and gas companies had spent over $1 billion on misleading climate lobbying and branding since the Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, projecting themselves as transition leaders while lobbying to delay or weaken policy. Such findings recur because the underlying platforms are updated continuously: each new consultation, vote or campaign can be logged, scored and turned into evidence, giving journalists a standing source rather than a one-off study.

Method and Standards

InfluenceMap's methodology was developed with the Union of Concerned Scientists and has been refined against external standards, including the UN High-Level Expert Group's recommendations that net-zero commitments require aligned lobbying. Analysts distinguish a company's own advocacy from that of its associations, weigh the intensity and direction of engagement across many policy streams, and publish organisational profiles so that the evidence behind a grade can be inspected. Companies are able to engage with the process and correct the record, which strengthens the data over time.

The scoring approach has limits that the organisation acknowledges implicitly through its transparency: lobbying is partly private, disclosure rules vary by country, and influence flows through informal channels no database can fully capture. InfluenceMap therefore measures the visible record — statements, submissions, campaigns, memberships — comprehensively and consistently. For users, a consistent measure of the visible record is more useful than an impressionistic judgement, even if the full picture of influence remains partly out of sight.

Audience and Users

The organisation works with investors, corporations, policymakers, the media and campaigners — a deliberately broad coalition of the actors who can act on its data. Investors form the strategic core: armed with lobbying scores, shareholders can ask why a company's trade association opposes a policy the company claims to support, and can treat misalignment as a governance and risk issue. Several investor initiatives on climate lobbying draw on this kind of analysis.

Policymakers use the platforms to understand the forces arrayed around a proposal; corporations use them to benchmark themselves and audit their own association memberships — some companies have publicly reviewed or left associations after such scrutiny across the sector. Campaigners and journalists, finally, convert the data into public pressure. InfluenceMap supplies the evidence layer for all of them, positioning itself as an infrastructure provider for accountability rather than a campaigning group in its own right.

Global Staff and Scope

Although headquartered in London, InfluenceMap has grown into a global staff of more than 75 professionals, with offices or team members in London, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, São Paulo, Australia and Toronto, according to its own descriptions. That spread mirrors the geography of climate lobbying itself: policy is made in Brussels, Washington, Canberra, Tokyo and Seoul as much as in London, and corporate advocacy must be tracked where it happens, in local languages and registers.

Its coverage of Japanese and Korean corporate advocacy — regions where climate lobbying data were historically scarce — illustrates the expansion logic. As Asian financial centres develop sustainable finance rules, demand for lobbying and finance alignment data has followed. London remains the headquarters and the largest hub, reflecting the city's concentration of investors, climate finance initiatives and international media.

Digital Presence and Open Platforms

InfluenceMap's platforms are its publication. LobbyMap.org, FinanceMap.org and CarbonMajors.org are public-facing websites where profiles, scores, reports and data can be explored, with deeper services for partners and subscribers in the investment community. Reports are released with press materials designed for syndication, and findings are presented in accessible visual formats that newsrooms can reproduce with credit.

That digital-first model gives a non-profit of modest size the reach of a much larger institution. A score change for a major company can be reported the same day on several continents; a database update can feed academic papers, court filings and shareholder resolutions simultaneously. The organisation's professional following — tens of thousands on LinkedIn alone — distributes its releases through the finance and sustainability community efficiently.

Non-Profit Status and Funding Logic

InfluenceMap is a non-profit think tank. Its independence from the companies it scores is essential to its authority: a commercial consultancy dependent on corporate clients would face obvious conflicts in grading those clients' lobbying. Non-profit status, with support from foundations and partner organisations in the climate and finance ecosystem, allows it to publish findings that embarrass powerful companies and associations without commercial retaliation through lost contracts.

The model does create a permanent fundraising requirement, met by demonstrating impact — media coverage, investor uptake, policy citations — to supporters. In that sense its reports serve two audiences at once: the public that reads them and the funders who need evidence that data-driven accountability works. The organisation's growth from a 2015 start-up to a multi-platform institution suggests that model has found durable support.

Significance

InfluenceMap's significance is to have made corporate climate lobbying measurable. Before systematic scoring, a company's climate reputation rested largely on its own reporting and targets; afterwards, its advocacy record — and that of its associations — became a comparable data point that investors could price and journalists could quote. The concept of lobbying alignment is now embedded in UN guidance, investor expectations and corporate reporting debates, and InfluenceMap's platforms are among the main instruments through which it is assessed.

Within London's cluster of climate intelligence organisations, InfluenceMap supplies the political-behaviour layer: Carbon Tracker examines financial risk, Ember the electricity data, E3G the diplomacy — and InfluenceMap the lobbying that connects companies to policy. For a directory of UK agencies, it is a clear example of the modern data agency: small, digital, non-profit, headquartered in London and consequential wherever climate policy and corporate power meet.