The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.
Under the second Trump adminisration, the U.S. government has effective abandoned its traditional federal role of safeguarding the environment and pushing businesses to respond to the growing threats of climate change. As a result, a major share of corporate climate action rulemaking has been relegated to standards bodies and industry initiatives led by environmental NGOs.
That work is important. Without it, companies would have even less clarity about how to measure emissions, set targets or make credible claims. But the corporate climate community is now facing a tough question: What happens when those systems become bottlenecks rather than enablers?
A bottleneck of standards
Some key aspects of the existing climate governance architecture simply aren’t equipped for the scale and speed required by the climate crisis. They move too slowly through often opaque processes with governance that doesn’t match their real-world influence. When these processes become the effective arbiter of whether a company’s approach to accounting, target-setting or claims-making is legitimate, their design flaws and delays become market barriers.
That matters for reasons Trellis readers understand well. These rules now affect capital allocation, procurement decisions, target-setting confidence, internal auditability, the overall credibility of corporate reporting and, increasingly, legal exposure. If the rulebook is incomplete, inconsistent or unworkable, companies slow down. Some defer investment or direct it to less contested areas. Others narrow their ambition to whatever can most easily be defended. In the worst cases valuable climate action initiatives can get stranded because the governance system surrounding them cannot process complexity at the speed the market now demands.
This problem is made worse by a paradox: In some parts of the rulemaking system, companies face a thicket of overlapping frameworks and proliferating definitions. In others, one body still dominates a critical lane of legitimacy. For sustainability teams, the result is often the worst of both worlds: too many standards overall, but too few practical options when one key process stalls.
Ripple effects
The land sector offers a useful example. The recent failure to settle on a universal forest carbon accounting method exposes a form of process risk that concerns not only forestry specialists. When technical processes drag on, when late-stage concepts are introduced without sufficient buy-in and against majority consensus, and when the final result creates confusion rather than clarity, the consequences ripple far beyond a process failure, affecting finance and implementation.
For land-use and forestry investment, the stakes are significant. If removals and land-sector performance cannot be reflected credibly in portfolio carbon metrics, large allocators lose one of the clearest ways to justify investment at scale. Take weighted average carbon intensity, a common portfolio metric, for example. In plain language, it’s meant to help investors understand the emissions profile of what they own by demonstrating the net GHG emissions associated with each dollar of value. But if accounting rules make it difficul
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