Net zero’s next phase is about engineering, not promises
https://arab.news/5ekua
The last five years of corporate sustainability produced an enormous volume of pledges, frameworks, and disclosure reports.
Measured by what ultimately matters, which is operational tonnes of carbon avoided against a verified baseline, most of the work has yet to begin. The risk now is mistaking the planning phase for the project itself.
The numbers make that distinction visible. The Net Zero Stocktake 2025 reports that 63 percent of the Forbes Global 2000 now hold a net-zero target, covering $36.6 trillion in revenue, up from around a fifth in late 2020, yet roughly one in three of the 1,245 companies with targets has no implementation plan attached. Accenture’s November 2025 analysis of the world’s 4,000 largest companies is more direct: only 16 percent are on track for net zero in their operations by 2050, and those leaders account for just 4 percent of the cohort's operational emissions. In March 2024, the Science Based Targets Initiative removed the net-zero commitments of 239 corporates for failing to validate their targets in time.
The gap is a question of discipline. Pledge-setting is a communications exercise; it needs consensus, intention, and a credible brand position. Decarbonization is an engineering exercise; it needs metering, modeling, and capital plans that hold up against the physics of a real asset.
Scope 3 shows this most clearly. CDP’s 2024 supply chain analysis found that reported supply chain emissions are, on average, 26 times larger than reported operational emissions, yet only 15 percent of corporates have set a Scope 3 target, and 85 percent of companies surveyed by the Science Based Targets Initiative cite data access as a barrier. A target without a verified baseline is a forecast, not a plan.
The disclosure environment is closing that gap. Dozens of jurisdictions are adopting or moving toward the ISSB standards, IFRS S2 was amended in December 2025 for more consistent emissions disclosure, and the European CSRD, though narrowed in 2026, continues to phase in. Voluntary narrative is giving way to audited evidence, a harder transition for portfolios narrated rather than measured.
The operating model has to change. Decarbonization at portfolio scale is a high-frequency optimization problem across millions of decision points: chiller setpoints, fuel blends, freight routes, occupancy patterns. Solving it in real time was, until recently, prohibitively expensive. That ceiling has moved.
This is where artificial intelligence becomes a serious decarbonization lever, and where it is most misunderstood. AI is not a substitute for engineering; it is an amplifier of it. Without verified baselines, instrumented assets, calibrated controls, and clear maintenance accountability, an AI layer simply automates the propagation of bad data. With them in place, it becomes a continuous optimization engine across building management, predictive maintenance, process control, grid balancing, and fleet routing.
The International Energy Agency’s 2025 Energy and AI report found that deploying existing AI applications across the energy system could deliver around 1,400 megatonnes of carbon dioxide reductions in 2035, roughly 5 percent of energy-related emissions. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory work published in Nature Communications in 2024 found AI adoption across US commercial buildings could cut sector energy use and emissions by 8 to 19 percent by 2050, and, combined with energy policy and low-carbon power, cut energy use by around 40 percent and emissions by around 90 percent.
The shift carries particular meaning for Saudi Arabia. Air conditioning accounts for roughly 70 percent of residential electricity consumption, is the largest driver of peak demand on the national grid, and is the load most responsive to real-time measurement and optimization.
The region’s structural advantage is rarely articulated: from the giga-projects to the hospitality, commercial, industrial, and mobility build-out, much of its 2030 asset base is being built now, and can embed instrumentation, controls, and audited data architectures at the design stage rather than retrofit them later.
The institutional scaffolding is moving in the same direction. The Saudi Green Initiative spans more than 85 programs with over $188 billion of committed investment. The Regional Voluntary Carbon Market Co., established by PIF and the Saudi Tadawul Group, has auctioned more than 6 million tonnes of high-quality carbon credits across auctions in Riyadh and Nairobi and at the November 2024 launch of its exchange. Mostadam, the national green building rating system, recorded a 64 percent year-on-year rise in projects entering sustainability assessment in the first quarter of 2025, with design compliance certificates up 140 percent.
The competitive question of the next five years is not who has the most ambitious target, but who can produce, on demand, an audited operational dataset showing the target is being met. Organizations that invest in measurement, optimization, and the engineering capability to act on what the data shows will hold an unusual advantage: their sustainability story will look identical, in numbers, to their operational performance.
The pledge era was necessary, and the institutions that delivered it deserve credit for the ground they cleared. What follows will be quieter, more technical, and dependent on evidence, measurement, and delivery.
Net Zero is not a brand position. It is an engineering deliverable, and the next decade will be defined by the organizations that treat it that way.
- Ahmed Yousif is regional director, Middle East and North Africa at BEE Incorporations.
