Elsevier is facilitating fossil fuel expansion, activity associated with climate-related human rights harms. The company has been unwilling to signal an end to this for years, while also communicating misleading claims about its industry customers.
Since at least 2011, scientists have warned that the world had discovered more fossil fuels than can safely be burned. By 2021, new fossil fuel projects were declared to be incompatible with the Paris warming target—and that most known reserves must stay in the ground to ensure a safe transition and avoid human rights harms. Yet Elsevier products still inform the fossil fuel industry's development of new resources, avoiding its UNGP human rights obligations.
Elsevier publications—some with authors and editors who are employees of Exxon, Chevron, and other oil majors misaligned with a safe future—provide data and technical resources that enable customers to analyze resource potential, inform exploration, and develop new reservoirs in the remaining frontiers for oil and gas exploration. With research institutions and policy makers compromised by Elsevier's fossil fuel industry customers, these businesses are funding extensive research to suit their business aims while blocking climate policy that would restrict it. Papers from Elsevier's vast portfolio, some authored by oil major employees, falsely claim fossil fuel expansion is needed to meet energy demand, is "environmentally sustainable," and supports carbon neutrality goals, while pointing to natural gas and blue hydrogen as "clean" energy; they promote industry actions generating fossil fuel lock-in and cite a desire to help meet global demand for oil and gas, not critical climate targets. Elsevier materials include the assertions that global warming is an opportunity to provide guidance for “large-scale exploration and drilling of Arctic resources” in thawing permafrost, that reducing costs and risks in oil and gas exploration could help accomplish the UN's sustainable development goals, and that rapid decarbonization is unnecessary to keep warming under 2°C. Elsevier even promotes its support for a net zero transition by highlighting a paper co-authored by PetroChina employees that focuses on the "great development potential" of shale gas through enhanced oil recovery—pointing to increased emissions when such a transition requires a rapid decrease.
Well into 2023, Elsevier R&D was still openly stating that it acts in service of most Fortune 500 oil and gas companies, with resources to scale up operations, respond to new opportunities, and increase exploration successes. Into 2024, Elsevier was listed as an OSDU Forum member, providing geophysical information on the Amazon OSDU platform, where data is provided to oil majors that have business plans antithetical to net zero pathways, warming targets, and a science-based and just transition.
RELX exhibitions provide valuable resources for coal companies that are still expanding development of unburnable coal, refusing to decarbonize, and severely misaligned with the Paris Agreement.
RELX's PAC (political action committee) provides financial support for political leaders in the United States, some of whom act to block effective climate action and deny climate change. Said one past recipient: "There isn't any real science to say we are altering the climate path of the earth."
—The Guardian, February 2022
ABOVE: An Offshore Magazine and an Elsevier publication from 2024. RELX has acknowledged that its biggest environmental impact is "through its journals and what [is] published" and claims it "monitor[s] all [its] environmental impacts," but it points to things like energy, water, waste, paper use, and employee travel as primary negative impacts. The company continues to promote its "support [for] the Paris Agreement’s intention to limit climate change to 1.5°C", while driving actions that help put that goal far out of reach.
As it maintains customers whose business plans are a deep threat to human well-being, RELX/Elsevier is assisting an industry committed to hydrocarbon expansion through messaging that misleads the public about the misalignment of these plans with what's required to maintain a livable planet—such as an immediate reduction in greenhouse gas emissions this decade and no new fossil fuel projects. Rather than sounding the alarm about this industry, Elsevier has generated misconceptions about it.
—Paul Behrens, Associate Professor of Energy and Environmental Change, Leiden University, and Speaker at Elsevier's 2021 SUSTAIN Festival
—Elsevier paper: White Knights, or Horsemen of the Apocalypse?, 2021
—UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, January 2023
The Union of Concerned Scientists and Scientists for Global Responsibility have concluded that "Elsevier is engaged in greenwashing" and labeled RELX's stance that it's focused on a transition as being "demonstrably false." The company has oil and gas customers with no science-based, just transition plans, but plans that are fundamentally altering the planet's capacity to sustain life. RELX has made a variety of statements and pledges that give the impression that it would not be involved in aiding such businesses. After a 2021 employee ethics complaint, Elsevier/RELX removed and altered some of its marketing materials, but has fallen short of ending support for new projects and customers still engaged in fossil fuel expansion—activity carrying deep human rights risks.
—Dr. Márcia Balisciano, Global Head of Corporate Responsibility, RELX
'Unique Contributions' podcast, 2021
—Muhammad Yunus
Keynote speaker at RELX SDG Inspiration Day, 2021
"I don't think you understand what 'transition' means."
—Dr. Caroline Vincent, speaking to RELX leaders at the 2023 Annual General Meeting
Declaring journals as having 'transitioned' has not resulted in a prohibition on content that serves new oil and gas, activity the IEA has declared needs to already have stopped to realistically ensure a just and timely transition. Some Elsevier journals remain staffed by fossil fuel industry professionals whose employers are working to develop extensive new hydrocarbon resources. Despite this, the company maintains that it “wouldn’t want to tell journal editors what they can and can’t publish.” (Márcia Balisciano, Global Head of Corporate Responsibility)