Tanzanian Companies Are Failing to Disclose Climate Action, Study Finds

When the world’s governments signed the Paris Agreement and committed to holding global warming well below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, much of the attention focused on national pledges and international negotiations. Yet a substantial share of the emissions reductions needed to meet that target depends on decisions made inside individual companies: how they measure their carbon footprints, how they set reduction targets, and how transparently they report progress to investors, regulators, and the public. A new study published in PLOS Climate suggests that in at least one rapidly developing economy, that corporate machinery of climate accountability is barely functioning. Researchers led by Ntule Shimwela, Noah M. Pauline, and Catherine A. Masao examined climate-related disclosure among companies listed on Tanzania’s stock exchange and found that the overall extent of climate action disclosure was strikingly low, averaging just 18.9 percent on a structured disclosure index built from internationally recommended metrics.

The research team set out to address a gap that has long frustrated climate policy analysts. While corporate climate disclosure has been studied extensively in Europe, North America, and East Asia, comparatively little is known about how listed companies in East Africa report their greenhouse gas emissions and climate strategies. This matters because emerging economies are projected to account for a growing share of global emissions in the decades ahead, and because international capital markets increasingly demand credible climate information before allocating investment. Without reliable disclosure, investors cannot distinguish genuine decarbonization from greenwashing, regulators cannot enforce climate commitments, and governments cannot accurately track national progress toward Net Zero Emissions targets.

To build a rigorous picture, the researchers conducted a systematic document review of 78 corporate reports published between 2022 and 2024, spanning sustainability reports, annual reports, and integrated reports from Tanzanian listed companies. Document review alone, however, can miss the institutional context behind what companies choose to publish or omit. The team therefore supplemented the analysis with interviews with six experts drawn from listed private corporations and government regulatory authorities, people positioned to explain why disclosure practices look the way they do. This combination of quantitative content analysis and qualitative expert testimony allowed the researchers to measure not only how much companies disclose, but why the numbers fall short.

The analytical backbone of the study was a climate change disclosure index constructed from the metrics and targets recommended by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, or TCFD. Established by the Financial Stability Board, the TCFD framework has become the de facto international standard for corporate climate reporting, organized around four pillars: governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. By scoring each company’s reports against these recommended disclosures, the researchers produced a comparable content score across the sample. The result was a total mean content score of 18.9 percent, a figure the authors characterize as indicating a low overall extent of climate action disclosure. Crucially, the weakness was not confined to one category; the pattern of distribution was low across all TCFD areas, meaning companies were falling short on governance structures, strategic climate planning, risk assessment, and emissions accounting alike.

Why would listed companies, which face scrutiny from shareholders and regulators, publish so little climate information? The expert interviews pointed to a cluster of interlocking barriers. The first was inadequate implementation of the relevant legal and regulatory frameworks. Tanzania, like many developing countries, has climate-related policies on the books, but the study found that the frameworks governing corporate environmental reporting were not being enforced or operationalized in a way that compelled companies to produce meaningful climate disclosures. In the absence of binding requirements or credible penalties, disclosure becomes voluntary, and voluntary disclosure tends to be minimal, particularly when it competes with short-term financial priorities.

The second barrier was more technical: a lack of baseline data. Credible climate disclosure requires companies to know where they stand, how many tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent they emit directly from their operations, indirectly from purchased electricity, and across their value chains. Establishing these baselines demands energy audits, fuel records, supply chain data, and consistent measurement methodologies. The study found that many Tanzanian listed companies simply lack this foundational data, which makes it impossible to set science-based reduction targets or to demonstrate progress over time. Without a baseline, even a company genuinely committed to decarbonization has no way to quantify its starting point or its trajectory.

The third barrier involved human and institutional capacity. The experts interviewed by the researchers highlighted that both companies and the professionals they rely on lack adequate capacity to perform scenario analysis, a core TCFD recommendation that asks companies to model how their business would fare under different climate futures, including pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Scenario analysis is technically demanding, requiring climate science literacy, financial modeling skills, and access to downscaled climate projections. Relatedly, companies struggled to define clear climate change Key Performance Indicators, the measurable benchmarks that translate abstract climate ambitions into trackable corporate objectives. Without KPIs, climate strategy remains rhetorical rather than operational.

The implications of these findings extend well beyond Tanzania’s borders. The 1.5 degrees Celsius target enshrined in the Paris Agreement depends on global emissions reaching net zero around mid-century, and every national contribution to that goal ultimately aggregates the actions of individual firms. If listed companies in a growing economy cannot measure, report, and verify their emissions, then national emissions inventories carry larger uncertainties, international climate finance flows to the region face verification obstacles, and the global accounting of progress toward net zero becomes less reliable. The study’s authors argue that their results pose important implications for governments, policymakers, and companies, calling for strengthened frameworks that make climate disclosure a practical, enforceable expectation rather than an aspirational ideal.

There are also lessons here for the international architecture of climate reporting. The TCFD framework, now absorbed into the sustainability disclosure standards of the International Sustainability Standards Board, was designed largely with large, data-rich corporations in developed markets in mind. The Tanzanian findings suggest that transplanting such frameworks into contexts with limited baseline data, scarce technical expertise, and weak enforcement mechanisms produces disclosure on paper but little substance. Effective reform, the study implies, must pair disclosure requirements with capacity building: training experts in emissions accounting and scenario analysis, helping companies establish emissions baselines, and equipping regulators to verify the claims that companies make.

For investors and the broader public, the study is a reminder that the visibility of climate action can be as consequential as the action itself. An 18.9 percent disclosure score means that more than four-fifths of the climate-relevant information that international standards say companies should provide is simply absent from the public record in Tanzania’s listed sector. Closing that gap will require coordinated effort across regulators, exchanges, professional bodies, and the companies themselves, but the alternative, a corporate landscape where climate commitments cannot be checked, risks undermining both national development goals and the collective global effort to keep warming below the most dangerous thresholds. The research, published on 18 September 2026 in PLOS Climate, offers a clear baseline from which that effort can now be measured.

Subject of Research: Corporate climate action disclosure among Tanzanian listed companies and its implications for Net Zero and the 1.5 °C target

Article Title: Climate action disclosure among companies: Implications for achieving global efforts to limit average global temperature rise to below 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels

Article References: Shimwela, N., Pauline, N. M., & Masao, C. A. (2026). Climate action disclosure among companies: Implications for achieving global efforts to limit average global temperature rise to below 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. PLOS Climate, 5(9), e0000951. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000951

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000951

Keywords: climate disclosure, TCFD, greenhouse gas emissions, Net Zero, Tanzania, listed companies, PLOS Climate, scenario analysis, key performance indicators, 1.5 degrees Celsius, sustainability reporting, climate policy