To define policy engagement, InfluenceMap relies on the 2013 Guide for Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy issued by the secretariat of the UNFCCC and the UNEP under the UN's Caring for Climate collaboration of the UN Global Compact. This document defines a list of corporate activities that constitute corporate climate engagement, covering direct and indirect tactics. These range from social media; public relations; sponsoring research; direct contact with regulators and elected officials; funding of campaigns and political parties; and participation in policy advisory committees.
In South Korea, ‘third-party lobbying activity’, referring to lobbying conducted by a paid lobbyist on behalf of a third party, is banned by law. However, companies engage in the policymaking process using a variety of methods, both directly and indirectly through industry associations. As of 2022, InfluenceMap has found evidence of all the forms of engagement listed in the 2013 UN Guide for Responsible Corporate Engagement in Climate Policy, except for the corporate funding of campaigns, which is forbidden by law in South Korea.
The analysis and scoring are focused on an organization's publicly available comments, interactions, and influence on policy and legislation. It does not consider internal strategy (including emissions targets), activities, and performance of a company on climate change related issues.
InfluenceMap's scoring process is policy neutral. It does not assess the quality of governmental policy but rather the positions of companies and industry groups relative to this policy. This is achieved by using the statements and ambitions of government-mandated bodies tasked to propose or implement climate policy as the benchmarks against which corporate and industry association policy positions are scored.
For this analysis, InfluenceMap used the initial policy ambition as set out by the Korean government to benchmark corporate engagement on climate and energy-related policies. Non-policy specific statements, such as top-line statements about net zero emissions by 2050 or comments on the energy mix, are scored using benchmarks devised from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Special Report on 1.5C (October 2018). The IPCC benchmarks are currently being updated to reflect latest scientific findings from the AR6 Mitigation of Climate Change Report, which will be phased into analysis from the end of 2022.
Scored evidence is coded by InfluenceMap as: ‘strongly supporting’, ‘supporting’, ‘no position/mixed position’, ‘not supporting/supporting with exceptions’, or ‘opposing’ with reference to the benchmarks explained above. These categories correspond to a numerical five-point scale between +2 and -2, where +2 indicates strong support and -2 indicates 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' Organization and Total 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. The evidence assessed as part of the Policy Tracker pages begins from 2020, when the South Korean government announced a Korean Green New Deal and its 2050 Carbon Neutrality target.
When scoring the climate policy engagement of a company, InfluenceMap looks for evidence of lobbying in every region in which said company operates. For example, the evidence InfluenceMap has collected and scored for Hyundai Motor, a company that operates globally, comes from climate policy engagement in regions including South Korea, the US, the EU, etc.
The Organization Scores and Engagement Intensities calculated for each of the entities covered in this research reflects InfluenceMap's analysis of these entities' climate policy engagement both in and outside of South Korea. A company's Relationship Score is a measure of their indirect policy influence on Paris-aligned climate policy through all their industry association memberships globally.
The policy tracker tool highlights engagement with Korean climate policy specifically, and only uses data gathered on engagement with these specific files.
The Korea Platform hosts the 15 companies that are the largest and most relevant to climate change in South Korea. This list will be progressively expanded to offer an increasingly complete analysis of Corporate Korea. The universe of companies on the Korea Platform were selected according to the largest companies listed the 2022 Forbes Global 2000 Ranking, and compared against the top GHG-emitting companies in Korea in 2020 (Ministry of Environment, NGMS National Greenhouse Gas Management System) to create a final list. This initial universe of companies will be expanded as InfluenceMap assesses other priority entities.
InfluenceMap selected 7 policy areas for the Policy Tracker, including the 2 top-level GHG emission reduction targets proposed by the South Korean government, and the 5 policy areas that have had the highest level of engagement from corporations in Korea. This is not intended to provide a conclusive list of policies and more will be added in future. Engagement with the policies currently included here will be monitored and kept up to date.
