Target 13.3: Education and awareness on climate
Improve education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning
Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
Why shareholder democracy is necessary
Public understanding of climate change is shaped as much by corporate communication as by classrooms. Supran and Oreskes' analysis of 180 ExxonMobil documents from 1972 to 2019 found the company systematically framed climate change as a matter of consumer 'energy demand' rather than its own product. In the authors' words, that rhetoric mimicked the tobacco industry to downplay the seriousness of the problem. InfluenceMap documents ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute deploying 'consumer choice' rhetoric on more than 100 occasions in 2024 to oppose vehicle standards. Travel companies sued to overturn The Hague's fossil advertising ban before it was upheld in April 2025. Listed companies own the advertising budgets, the media platforms, the sponsorships, and the employee communications through which most adults encounter climate information at all. If those companies communicated about climate the way they communicate internally, and stopped funding messaging that manufactures doubt, public awareness would shift. The change would reach the whole population without a single new curriculum. Formal education, training, and early warning systems are still built by schools, universities, and government agencies. Owners remove a necessary obstacle to awareness while public institutions must also act.
How this was scoredNecessary
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Documented and supported the 2024 vote-no campaign against ExxonMobil directors after the company sued shareholders who had filed a climate resolution rather than using the SEC process.
Investors Vote No on Exxon Board, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2024-05
Lead filer of the 2020 ExxonMobil lobbying report proposal, arguing the company's public disclosures omit state-level lobbying and trade association spending.
3 campaigns on record
Improve disclosure of climate-related lobbying, on the grounds that the company's January 2024 report fell far short of investor expectations.
Result: Over 90 percent of shareholders voted against the resolution.
Toyota AGM: shareholders reject climate lobbying resolution, Net Zero Investor, 2024-06
Vote against board members because the company sued investors who filed a climate shareholder resolution instead of challenging it through the established SEC process.
Result: not stated in source
Investors Vote No on Exxon Board, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2024-05
Publish an annual report on lobbying policies, payments and recipients, including the state-level lobbying and trade association spending that the company's public disclosures leave out.
With Boston Trust Walden
Result: not stated in source
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.