NicoElNino/iStock(NEW YORK) -- Dubbed a "code red for humanity" by the head of the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its most-recent report that the impacts of human-induced climate change are already being seen in "every region across the globe" and urgent action must be taken immediately, not decades into the future, to mitigate the devastation. As scientists sound the alarms, it has become near-impossible for business leaders to ignore the research -- or the global, youth-led protests spurred by activists like Greta Thunberg, who view climate change as an intergenerational justice issue -- as a new generation of consumers accuse major greenhouse gas-emitting corporations of robbing the young of their future. In recent years, a slew of high-profile announcements have followed from hundreds of major U.S. companies, pledging to achieve "net-zero" emissions by a date often decades in the future. Some have welcomed these public-facing commitments as positive indicators that the private sector is heeding to public pressure, but the scientific community says a lack of universal accounting standards results in most of these promises being ineffective, unjust and the latest form of "greenwashing" from corporate America. Scientists are urging that at this point, with the impacts of climate change already manifesting, the "net" part of these "net-zero" announcements are coming too late and have shifted the focus from reducing emissions to simply "offsetting" them with nature- or tech-based solutions that simply don't yet exist at the scale necessary to meet the need. Some researchers have used the analogy that if your house is flooding, you would likely focus on turning off the faucet spewing the water rather than on trying to mop the floodwaters up. "The word 'net' is really the key to the zero," Rahul Tongia, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, told ABC News of these recent pledges from major companies. "What that means is relying on offsets, where I don't actually 'zero' my emissions, I don't stop completely, but I compensate for them, I adjust for them, I offset them," Tongia added. "And this is really a very long, complex challenge of understanding what these mean." With businesses and industry contributing to an outsized share of greenhouse gas emissions, it's going to take more than individual lifestyle changes to tackle the crisis. Here is how scientists say the private sector's "net-zero" emissions pledges could end up having "net-zero" impact. Already decades off track to meet climate goals, 'offset' commitments don't cut it Data directly ties greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions -- the largest source of which in the U.S. comes from humans burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat and transportation -- to the rising average surface temperature on our planet. This research led to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, which sought to limit warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, preferably to 1.5 degrees, compared to pre-industrial levels by drastically reducing emissions. In a subsequent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the world must bring its carbon dioxide emissions to "net zero" by 2050 in order to keep global warming below the 1.5 degrees Celsius benchmark. More recent data from the U.N., however, suggests that at the current rate of emissions (if the world continued emitting the same amount of carbon dioxide as it did in the pre-COVID year of 2019), we would surpass our carbon budget necessary to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in approximately eight years. This means that on our current trajectory, the plans for "net-zero" by 2050 as outlined in the Paris accord likely won't cut it anymore as the planet could surpass the dire 1.5 degrees Celsius mark around 2030. A world warmed by just the 1.5 degrees Celsius benchmark would already look vastly different than today, the IPCC has warned, with some 70 to 90% of coral reefs projected to be gone at that temperature (and 99% disappearing at the 2 degrees Celsius mark). Moreover, a warming of just 1.5 degrees Celsius "is not considered 'safe' for most nations, communities, ecosystems and sectors and poses significant risks to natural and human systems," the IPCC has stated, saying some of the worst impacts are expected to be felt among agricultural and coastal-dependent communities. With the consequences dire, experts say the stakes are too high to rely on vague promises of "net-zero" emissions -- with the emphasis on "net" -- or offsetting in the future. Over 350 climate-focused nongovernmental organizations recently released a statement directed toward the Biden administration and lawmakers decrying "net-zero" as a "dangerous distraction." "Net-zero pledges delay the action that needs to happen," Diana Ruiz, a senior campaigner at the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace USA, one of the statement's signatories, told ABC News. "What we've seen is more of the abuse of these pledges by corporations to allow them to continue to pollute and and continue business as usual." Ultimately, net-zero emissions pledges "can mean a very wide variety of things," Joeri Rogelj, the director of research at the Grantham Institute and a reader in climate science and policy at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, told ABC News. "There are lots of net zero targets out there today," Rogelj added. "What do they mean? It's not always equally clear." In a recent commentary published in the scientific journal Nature, Rogelj and his team of researchers argue that net-zero targets are too vague, and while they are welcome signs of intent, they are fraught with difficulties that impede their effectiveness at reaching climate change goals, and the stakes of climate change are too high to take comfort with mere announcements. "First of all, a net-zero target can be applied to either carbon dioxide or all greenhouse gases. Very often, that's not really clearly specified," he told ABC News, adding the scope of the pledges can also refer to just the tail-end emissions versus the sum of all the activities along the supply chain and distribution of products or services a company delivers. Greenpeace's Ruiz, said they ultimately view net-zero pledges as a way for corporations "to greenwash their pollution by using carbon offsets and other false climate solutions." "It allows the corporations to continue to pollute while claiming to reduce their emissions somewhere else," Ruiz told ABC News. "The key here is that net zero doesn't mean companies will stop polluting." Swedish teen activist Thunberg summed up what net-zero pledges mean to her on Twitter as the COP26 conference commenced, writing: "I am pleased to announce that I've decided to go net-zero on swear words and bad language. In the event that I should say something inappropriate I pledge to compensate that by saying something nice." How a computer model 'opened Pandora's box': Where does 'net-zero' come from? Climate scientist Wolfgang Knorr, a senior researcher at Sweden's University of Lund, has said he now feels remorse over how some of his earlier climate research, built by computer models, was coopted by policymakers and the private sector to contribute to the rise of net-zero pledges. "Basically, what happened is the Paris Agreement was signed, but then nobody actually knew what it meant," he said. "And then the scientific community, the IPCC tasked to actually figure out what 1.5 meant in two ways -- what's the difference between climate impacts with 1.5 versus 2 degrees of warming? An