We Scored the Whole FTSE 100 on Climate. It's Not Cutting It.

Scottish Mortgage is one of the most popular investment trusts in Britain. On climate, it scores 26 out of 100. easyJet scores 25.

That isn't a mistake, and it's one of several things we didn't expect when we scored every company in the FTSE 100. If you have a workplace pension or an index fund, there's a good chance you own a small slice of all of them.

We scored all 100 the way we score everyone: ten questions, public evidence only. Nobody filled in a questionnaire and nobody paid. Every score shows its sources, and any company can challenge its number.

Good at counting. Not at cutting.

Each company is marked out of ten on ten questions. Average them across the whole index and the pattern is clear.

The FTSE 100 is at its best on the paperwork: measuring its own emissions and reporting them, often checked by an auditor. It's at its worst on what happens in the physical world: whether emissions are actually falling, and what happens to water and land. Eighteen companies scored two out of ten or less on whether their emissions are coming down.

Part of the reason is that progress is often measured as a ratio. Emissions per passenger or per pound of sales can look steady while the total going into the air grows. easyJet's direct emissions rose 7.9% in a year, from 7.5 to 8.1 million tonnes. The atmosphere only counts the total.

Why investment trusts score like airlines

Scottish Mortgage on 26. Alliance Witan and Polar Capital Technology on 25. Pershing Square on 24. These funds have tiny offices, or no staff of their own at all. So how do they end up level with an airline?

Because a fund's real footprint isn't its office. It's everything it owns. A bank's is everything it lends to, and an insurer's is everything it invests in. These are called financed emissions, and for a financial company they are nearly always most of its climate impact, often thousands of times its office electricity.

Most of the FTSE 100's financial companies don't publish that number as a total. Some publish a ratio, such as emissions per million pounds invested, which can improve while the total grows. So our rule, since September, is simple: a bank, insurer, fund or trust that doesn't publish its financed emissions as a total can't be treated as a small footprint.

That matters for your pension, because finance is a big slice of the index. 27 of the 100 companies are banks, insurers, asset managers or investment trusts, and they average 34, against 41 for everyone else.

Aviva is a good example. It says the carbon intensity of its share and bond holdings fell 64% between 2019 and 2024, which is a real improvement in the ratio. But it doesn't publish what those holdings emit in total. When our rule came in, its published score moved from 59 to 43, and the change is logged on its page with the reason.

Barclays scores 1 out of 10 on controversies. The campaign groups behind the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report found it provided $35.4 billion of fossil fuel financing in 2024, more than any other European bank.

The top of the table sells information

Sage, the accounting software company, is first on 64. Then come Pearson (60), Auto Trader (59), and Burberry, Experian, Informa and RELX, all on 58. Apart from Burberry, these companies sell software, data and publishing, not steel or fuel. What a company physically does sets how high it can score, and a business made of information starts lighter than one that digs things up or burns them.

Burberry is the interesting one. Look only at how companies perform on our ten questions, before industry and size, and Burberry has the best performance score in the FTSE 100: 74 out of 100. It cut emissions from its own operations by 93% between 2016/17 and 2023/24. Its final score is 58 because fashion is a heavy industry: cotton, leather, dye, shipping. A company can do almost everything right and still be held back by what it makes. A bag has a footprint however well it's managed.

The bottom is no surprise. The size of it is.

Oil, gas and mining take the bottom six places: Ithaca Energy (16), Shell (17), Glencore (17), BP (20), Rio Tinto (20) and Anglo American (22).

Shell's own figures put the emissions from customers burning its oil products at 517 million tonnes in 2023, and that doesn't include its gas. For comparison, the whole of the UK emitted about 367 million tonnes in 2025, on the government's provisional figures. Shell's own operations added another 58 million tonnes in 2024.

None of this is hidden. These companies publish the numbers. Publishing a big number just doesn't make it smaller.

Size counts against you

Our scores have a size rule. A company with a huge footprint can't score highly just by being well run, because a well-managed 50 million tonnes is still 50 million tonnes in the air. 58 FTSE 100 companies take one of our two heaviest size reductions.

Supermarkets show why. Tesco has cut emissions from its own stores, lorries and warehouses by about two-thirds since 2015/16, and runs on renewable electricity. But more than 98% of its footprint, about 73 million tonnes, comes from what it sells: the farming, the factories, the packaging. A supermarket can switch every light to LED and still sell the same weekly shop. Tesco scores 38, Sainsbury's 43 and Marks & Spencer 46.

On performance alone, Sainsbury's would be on 62. Spirax, the engineering group, would be on 60. Size takes them to 43 and 42. That's deliberate.

Yes, there's a water company in the top ten

United Utilities is eighth, on 56. In September it was ordered to pay £964,225, including a record £900,000 fine, for pumping raw sewage into the Irish Sea for more than 35 hours in June 2023. Severn Trent, on 40, had more than 60,000 sewage spills from its storm overflows in 2023, according to Environment Agency monitoring data, as reported by ENDS.

The pollution does count. United Utilities scores 3 out of 10 on water and 3 on controversies, its two worst marks. But our score is built mainly around climate, and a water company's carbon footprint is small next to an oil major's or an airline's. So a company can do badly on sewage and still finish above companies with far bigger carbon footprints. We'd rather say that plainly. If water matters most to you, the question-by-question marks on each company page tell you more than the headline number.

Promises are going backwards

One thing kept coming up as we went through the reports: targets being dropped or watered down.

• Shell dropped its 2035 carbon intensity target in March 2024.
• HSBC pushed its net zero date for its own operations back 20 years, from 2030 to 2050, in February 2025.
• BP scrapped its target to cut emissions from its oil and gas production in February 2025.
• Diageo cut its 2030 supply chain target from 50% to 26% in August 2025.
• NatWest said in February 2026 it had withdrawn its independently validated climate targets.

A target isn't a result. But a company dropping one tells you something a glossy report won't.

What this means for you

If you have a pension or an index fund, you probably own all of this: the good counters and the slow cutters. A low score isn't a reason to panic or sell. It is a reason to ask your pension provider two simple questions. Do you publish the total emissions of everything you own? And is that number going down?

Then look up your bank, your supermarket and your employer in the table below. It takes ten seconds.

All 100 companies

Today's scores → sinkproject.com/ftse-100 (this table is a snapshot from 11 October 2026; that page updates as scores change)
Download the dataset → CSV · JSON (free to reuse with credit to SINK)
How we score → methodology and changelog

Questions people ask

Which is the most sustainable FTSE 100 company?
On our scores, Sage, on 64 out of 100, followed by Pearson (60) and Auto Trader (59). Only those two reach Leading practice, and no FTSE 100 company scores 75 or more.

Does a low score mean a company is bad?
No. It means its footprint is large, or it isn't falling, or there isn't enough independent evidence to show it is. Shell can't stop being an oil company by next year. The score tells you where things stand, not who to blame.

Why does a software company beat a supermarket?
Because what a company physically does matters: selling software produces far less carbon than growing, making and moving food.

How are the scores worked out?
Every company gets the same ten questions, marked from public evidence: annual reports, filings, regulators, courts and independent researchers. No more than 70% of the sources behind a score can come from the company itself. 30% of the score is what the industry physically does, 70% is how the company performs, and then the size rule applies. Every score is published under SINK's v2.5 methodology, and each company page shows the exact version its score was produced under. The FTSE 100 list is LSEG's September 2026 review.

Can a company challenge its score, or pay for a better one?
Any company can challenge its score for free, the same way as everyone else. If we've missed evidence or got something wrong, we fix it and log the change. Nobody can pay for a score: members, data licences and paid evidence reviews fund the work, and paying for a review buys scrutiny of your evidence, never the number.