InfluenceMap uses data-driven analysis to understand how the corporate sector influences climate policy. It defines “policy engagement” as efforts to inform or influence government policy. This definition follows the 2013 "Guide for Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy" from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). This report outlines various corporate activities, such as advertising, social media, public relations, research sponsorship, lobbying, campaign funding, and participation in policy advisory committees, aimed at influencing climate policy. These activities are typically managed by a company's regulatory affairs department but may also involve public relations, communications, and marketing teams. InfluenceMap tracks the results of these activities as they relate to climate policy and regulations, when publicly available. As of 2025, InfluenceMap has found evidence of all the forms of engagement listed in the 2013 UN Guide for Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy in India.
The LobbyMap analysis is focused on an organization's comments on, interactions with, and attempts to influence policy and legislation. We do not consider a company’s internal strategy, activities, or performance on climate change-related issues, such as CO2 emissions, use of various energy forms, orbusiness activities, if these have no direct relevance to policy and legislation forming. There are numerous other research streams that deal with corporate performance on climate, and we do not wish to widen our remit where adequate coverage exists.
To ensure objectivity, LobbyMap’s scoring process follows strict protocols that compare each example of corporate climate policy engagement to external standards, a method known as "benchmarking." Rather than unilaterally determine what “good” climate policy is, InfluenceMap draws it benchmarks from external and authoritative sources. These benchmarks reflect key processes that underpin the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s efforts to deliver the goals of the Paris Agreement. There are two main types of benchmark: science-based policy benchmarks (drawn from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s analysis) and government policy benchmarks (drawn from the proposals of government bodies mandated to deliver a country’s Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement). Further details can be found here.
The scoring process determines the level of support or opposition a company or industry association has shown on a particular climate policy or policy-related issue in the evidence provided. This relies on a systematized process of analysis that codes each evidence piece as: “Strongly supporting”; “Supporting”; “No position/Mixed position”; “Not supporting”; or “Opposing.” These codes correspond to a numerical five-point scale between +2 and -2. The five-point scale enables a more nuanced analysis of the gray areas within corporate positioning on climate policy. Thus, the LobbyMap analysis can capture the full range of climate policy positioning, from pushing for greater ambition and constructive critique, to highly conditioned or limited support, to outright opposition.
InfluenceMap searches for new evidence on companies and industry associations on a weekly basis. When new evidence is found, it is added to the entity's profile. InfluenceMap uses a weighting system when calculating the entities' scores, which weights the most recent evidence pieces more heavily, with older evidence pieces gradually having less impact on the entity's score. InfluenceMap retains older pieces in the system, however, for the historical record. On the “Companies” and “Industry Associations” tabs, entities’ names will link to distinct profiles for that entity: these profiles may contain evidence across a broad range of climate-related policies from the last 5+ years, with the most recent evidence having the greatest impact on its score.
When scoring climate policy engagement, InfluenceMap looks for evidence of advocacy in every region in which that entity operates. The evidence InfluenceMap has collected and scored for an Indian company that operates globally would come from its climate policy engagement both in and outside of India.
As such, the Organization Scores and Engagement Intensities calculated for each of the entities in this research reflects InfluenceMap's analysis of their climate policy engagement both in and outside of India. Similarly, a company's Relationship Score is a measure of its indirect climate policy influence through all of its industry association memberships globally.
The India Platform hosts a wide range of companies that are headquartered in India. This list will be progressively expanded to offer an increasingly complete analysis of the corporate landscape in the country. India-based companies are added to InfluenceMap’s total universe of over 500 companies based on a number of factors, including the Forbes 2000 and S&P 100 company rankings.
Different levels of capability for responding to climate change is a core principle of international climate action in the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement makes provisions for ‘Common But Differentiated Responsibilities’, in recognition of the variation in countries’ historical emissions and therefore in different levels of contribution to climate change, as well as of their current capability to implement an urgent climate response.
To create adapted benchmarks for fairly assessing climate policy engagement in countries with different economic needs and requirements, InfluenceMap referred to Chapter 5 of the IPCC's 2018 Special Report, titled ‘Sustainable Development, Poverty Eradication and Reducing Inequalities’. The IPCC acknowledges that many countries have a comparative lack of resources and higher systemic barriers for rapidly implementing climate policy. It also finds that rapid climate transition of developing economies, supported by international finance and technology transfer, has significant synergies with sustainable development.
To account for this, InfluenceMap applies adapted benchmarks for assessing engagement in countries that are not in the Top 100 GDP per capita, including India, using the World Bank database. While this is an incomplete measure of a country’s responsibility and capability when it comes to climate change, this metric was chosen based on the understanding that capability to implement climate policy would be significantly dependent on economic wealth per capita.
In 2023, India updated its Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) guidelines, making it mandatory for the country’s top 1,000 listed companies to respond to 98 essential indicators (mandatory) and 42 leadership indicators (voluntary). Under ‘Principle 7: Businesses, when engaging in influencing public and regulatory policy, should do so in a manner that is responsible and transparent’ companies are mandated to disclose the number of its trade and industry association affiliations (1.a) and list the top 10 affiliations based on total members of the bodies (1.b). Following this, companies have the option to disclose ‘Details of public policy positions advocated by the entity’, included the name of the policy, method of advocacy, whether the position is public, frequency of review of position and a link to the position.
The Global Standard on Responsible Corporate Climate Lobbying is an investor-led framework that guides companies to align their policy engagement activities with the Paris Agreement. It provides indicators for committing to, establishing governance, and acting and reporting on misalignments between policy engagement activities and climate goals. InfluenceMap has developed a dedicated methodology to assess company disclosures and governance processes related to climate policy engagement alignment. These evaluations are separate but complementary to LobbyMap’s analysis of real-world policy engagement activities and are benchmarked against the Global Standard.
Disclosures under the BRSR guidance are used by InfluenceMap to assess transparency for direct and indirect climate policy engagement. As BRSR does not meet all the requirements under the Global Standard, a full disclosure under the BRSR may result in full alignment under InfluenceMap’s assessment. Further details comparing BRSR with the Global Standard can be found in the platform briefing, meanwhile how companies can achieve an aligned score for its direct and indirect climate policy engagement activities can be found here.
