Introducing the Superpollutant Roadmap for Corporate Action
Companies have spent a decade building climate strategies around carbon dioxide (CO2). But CO2 is not the only climate pollutant—and reducing it is not the fastest lever available to slow warming.
Superpollutants, such as methane, F-gases, and black carbon, are responsible for roughly half of the warming the world is experiencing right now. These climate pollutants are highly effective at trapping heat: some are thousands of times more potent than CO2. Superpollutants also operate on different temporal scales. While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, many superpollutants decompose within years or decades. This means that cutting them can slow warming much sooner than any amount of carbon reduction or removal.
To date, superpollutant emissions have been overlooked, and efforts to mitigate them have been under-resourced. They are frequently absent from corporate climate targets.
Today at New York Climate Week, we are excited to release the Carbon Containment (CC) Lab’s Superpollutant Roadmap for Corporate Action. Created in partnership with the Beyond Alliance and guided by a renowned group of advisors, the roadmap builds on the CC Lab's years of work unlocking investment and technical solutions for superpollutants. It grounds its recommendations in current science and real-world corporate practice.
The roadmap gives companies a clear, practical path to addressing superpollutants through three levers they can pull today:
Value Chain Intervention — reducing superpollutant emissions inside a company's own operations and supply chain.
Voluntary Carbon Markets — financing high-integrity superpollutant mitigation beyond the value chain.
Policy Engagement — supporting the regulatory frameworks that make the first two levers durable and scalable.
The roadmap is built for action: each lever chapter concludes with a checklist of priority steps for the next 12–24 months and through 2030, enabling companies to find the entry point that best matches their exposure and begin immediately. These steps form a cohesive strategy that reinforces companies’ existing climate commitments while delivering a second dividend: cleaner air, healthier ecosystems, and stronger economic resilience.
Download the Roadmap Below
For an interactive version, visit www.superpollutantroadmap.org. Over time, the CC Lab plans to expand this site with additional resources for implementers, emerging best practices, and quantified impact data, so be sure to check back regularly and follow us on LinkedIn for updates.
The Roadmap is a report designed to educate stakeholders, particularly companies, about the urgent need and opportunity to mitigate superpollutant emissions and to guide them toward concrete action. It draws on the best available science to identify where corporate action on superpollutants is most urgently needed across three levers: value-chain interventions, the voluntary carbon market, and policy advocacy.
The Roadmap explains how and why superpollutants—five types of extra-potent greenhouse gases—are major contributors to climate warming. It describes how these emissions are linked to companies’ value chains and provides high-impact strategies for mitigating them. The goal is to help companies reduce these emissions as quickly as possible to slow climate change and help avoid tipping points.
The Roadmap is one of the key projects of the Superpollutant Action Initiative (SPAI), a collaborative effort among leading companies coordinated by the Beyond Alliance. The CC Lab led the creation of the Roadmap. The Roadmap was funded by Beyond Alliance as a sponsored research project and guided by an expert Advisory Council listed below under ‘Roadmap Contributors.’
The Roadmap was launched at New York Climate Week in September 2026.
After launching at New York Climate Week, the CC Lab plans to continue adding content and tools related to the Roadmap at www.superpollutantroadmap.org. Check back regularly and follow us on LinkedIn for updates.
No, the roadmap is not intended to directly guide the implementation of SPAI’s $100M. In principle, participating companies aim to align their investments with the science and will look to the Roadmap to identify the strongest opportunities. However, each company will make its own investment decisions. The overarching goal is much broader: to guide companies across sectors to take greater action on superpollutants today.
Anastasia O’Rourke led this project at the CC Lab, with contributions from many different CC Lab team members. John Nixon, a consultant to the CC Lab, helped to scope out and manage the creation of the project, drawing on his corporate strategy and sustainability expertise.
Send it our way via LinkedIn or email us at superpollutants@cclab.org
Roadmap Contributors:
Authors: Anastasia O’Rourke, John Nixon, Öznur Öztürk, Sinéad Crotty, Drew Pomerantz, Jack Lowenthal, and Dean Takahashi.
With support from: Puneet Chhabra, Justin Freiberg, Isabella Garrioch, Nicole Gotthardt, Selin Gören, Leslie Guerra, Chi Nguyen, Ethan Olim, Violet Dorsey-Reyes, and Olivia Rhodes.
Advisory Council: The roadmap benefited from the expert consultative input of an Advisory Council helping the authors think through core scientific, economic, policy, and implementation issues. We are grateful for their time and talents. Their participation in our process does not imply their or their organization’s endorsement of the resulting work. Responsibility for this roadmap’s content and recommendations rests solely with Carbon Containment Lab. • Alex Kats-Rubin, Amazon • Beth Trask, Rainier Climate • Chris Costello, Environmental Defense Fund • Claire Henly, Super Pollutant Action Alliance • Donna Lee, Calyx Global • Gabrielle Dreyfus, Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development • Ilissa Ocko, Spark Climate Solutions • Jessica Seddon, Yale University • Lauren Frisch, Independent Expert • Luke Pritchard, Beyond Alliance • Marcelo Mena, Global Methane Hub • Nathan Borgford-Parnell, Climate and Clean Air Coalition • Randy Spock, Google • Rick Duke, Gigaton Strategies • Yannish Naik, Clean Air Fund
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