We recently published a meta-assessment of 100 U.S. voluntary sustainability and impact reports from public and private companies, published over two years. None was filed under CSRD. We coded every report against the same set of fields using the same standardized process. [Read the full assessment here.]
Previously, we looked at what our research said about Scope 3 and assurance. This article looks at the goals themselves: how they’re specified, and what companies report when one comes due.
Most goals that come due are reported as met
Our sample includes 78 goals with a 2025 target date in reports published in 2026. All of them had come due by the time the report was published.
Fifty are reported as achieved, seven as behind, one as retired, and one as revised. Nineteen have no update.
Roughly a quarter of goals that have come due don’t tell the reader whether they were met. And among goals reported as achieved or behind, 50 of 57, or about 88%, were met.
A bit more context: A company that drops a goal often doesn’t carry it into the next report, so the goal never enters a dataset like ours. That means 88% likely overstates how these companies perform against their targets. It does show that readers mostly see reported successes, few reported misses, and a quarter of due goals with no update at all.
Against that backdrop, the reports that state plainly that a goal was missed stand out.
Most goals can’t be checked
Across all 781 goals, most lack what a reader would need to verify them.
Only 264 goals (34%) state a baseline year. Without one, a goal to reduce emissions 50% has no fixed starting point, and a reader can’t tell whether progress is measured against 2019 or last year. Only 76 goals (10%) include an interim milestone. A 2040 or 2050 target with nothing in between can’t be checked for decades.
Another 175 goals (22%) have no target date at all, and 89 are described as “ongoing,” meaning there's no actual timeline to achieve the goal.
Seventy percent of the goals are quantified. But with only 34% stating a baseline year, many of those numbers show a direction without a way to measure progress against it.
Goals listed first are better specified
Goals that appear early in a report are generally better specified than those that come later. Among the first four goals in a report, 49% include a baseline year and 74% include a target date. After the fourth goal, those figures drop to about 21% and 60% and stay there.
A reader looking for the goal that matters to them has no way of knowing the twelfth goal was held to a lower standard than the first.
What reporters can do, in five steps
- Report the misses. Only seven goals in this sample are reported as behind. A missed target with an explanation shows a company tracking its progress, and earns credibility and trust among its readers. A goal that disappears from one report to the next raises questions about what happened to it.
- Close out every goal that comes due. If a goal had a 2025 date and the report is published in 2026, it needs a sentence on the outcome: achieved, missed, retired, or rolled forward. Nineteen goals in our sample came due with no update.
- Give every quantified goal a baseline year. Two-thirds of the goals we logged don’t have one. Without it, progress can’t be measured.
- Set a milestone before 2040. One goal in 10 has an interim milestone. It gives readers a way to hold a company to a long-term goal before the deadline.
- Hold the last goal to the same standard as the first. If the twelfth goal isn’t well enough specified to publish, consider whether it belongs in the list.
These findings come from a larger meta-assessment of all 100 reports, covering assurance, emissions, materiality, frameworks, and report design. [Read the full assessment.]
Methodology: We reviewed 100 U.S. voluntary sustainability and impact reports published between September 2024 and September 2026, each coded against the same set of fields. None is a CSRD filing. Goal figures cover the 96 operating companies in the sample and capture up to 12 goals per report. Thirty-five reports reached that limit, so the totals here are a floor rather than a complete count. Because goals that appear later in a report are consistently less well specified, the rates reported here are, if anything, slightly optimistic.
John Davies is the Director of Content at thinkPARALLAX. With more than 15 years of experience in journalism, editorial leadership, and sustainability communications, he specializes in sustainability reporting, thought leadership, and executive messaging.
