With Earth Day generating the anticipated headlines around the world and on-going protests in the UK pushing climate change up the political agenda, some of the UK's top businesses have today unveiled a series of fresh climate and clean tech goals.

The Climate Group NGO today announced that banking giant RBS and property powerhouse Landsec have become the first two companies in the world to sign up to all three of its clean tech deployment campaigns to promote the use of renewable power, electric vehicles (EVs), and energy efficiency measures: RE100, EV100, and EP100.

The initiatives encourage firms to set goals to source 100 per cent renewable power, switch to electric fleets, and set targets to sharply improve their energy productivity. They have seen hundreds of corporates publicly sign up to the campaigns, but to date no firm had committed to meet all three goals.

However, today RBS, an existing member of RE100, announced it is to join EV100, pledging to switch 300 vehicles in its fleet to electric models and encourage staff to embrace EVs by building on the 12 charge points it already offers and providing a further 450 by 2025 and 600 by 2030. The bank also announced it has joined EP100 and will reduce its energy consumption by 40 per cent by 2025 against its 2015 baseline.

Meanwhile, commercial property giant Landsec announced it would increase the number of EV charge points across its portfolio to over 300 by the end of 2019 as part of its newly confirmed membership of EV100.

The company is already a member of EP100 and RE100 having pledged to double its energy productivity within 20 years against 2014 levels and successfully sourced 95 per cent of its power from renewables with a view to reaching its 100 per cent goal.

Mike Peirce, corporate partnerships director at The Climate Group, congratulated the two companies for "showing it is already possible for the private sector to go further and faster in driving the clean energy transition".

"To keep to a world of no more than 1.5C of warming we need major companies everywhere to seize the opportunities presented by cleaner, smarter energy," he said. "As climate change increasingly poses a threat to our economy and more importantly human lives, this is what now defines corporate leadership."

The news came in the same week as global newswire giant Thomson Reuters became the latest leading business to announce it plans to set a science based emissions target that will be externally audited by the independent Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) to ensure it is in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

The company also used Earth Day to announce plans to become fully 'carbon neutral' this year and source 100 per cent renewable power globally from next year.

"Earth Day is the largest and most celebrated environmental event worldwide," said Stephane Bello, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Thomson Reuters. "We are proud to be announcing today that we will be joining the list of the many companies who have made the switch to go carbon neutral. Not only is it the right thing to do from an environmental perspective, but it's what employees and customers are asking us to do. As a global organization, we have a shared responsibility to do business in ways that respect, protect, and benefit our customers, employees, communities, and environment."