Firms largely ignore uncertainty when disclosing greenhouse gas emissions in their annual reporting

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides rigorous empirical evidence on the prevalence of ignoring uncertainty in emissions disclosures, highlighting a critical research gap.

🏢実務担当者:Emphasizes the need for sustainability teams to incorporate uncertainty analysis in emissions reporting to improve data credibility and decision-making.

🏛政策担当者:Supports arguments for making uncertainty analysis mandatory in GHG disclosure standards (e.g., GHG Protocol, ISSB, ESRS) to prevent misallocation of capital.

Corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions disclosures increasingly inform investment, procurement and policy decisions, but when emissions are reported without acknowledging uncertainties, it risks misleading stakeholders, misdirecting capital and undermining climate action. This study aims to examine whether and how firms report emissions uncertainty in practice. The study reviews uncertainty analysis requirements in measurement and disclosure standards, and analyses sustainability reports from 2,636 listed firms using automated text analysis and manual review to identify whether and how uncertainty was disclosed. While measurement and disclosures standards have optional requirements for uncertainty analysis, the findings show that of the 2,102 reports that disclosed emissions, 2,052 (97.6%) reported only single-value estimates without uncertainty analysis. Only 50 (2.4%) explicitly discuss the impact of relevant uncertainties on GHG measurements: 38 qualitatively, and just 12 (<1%) quantitatively. This is consequential as some firms claim small year-on-year reductions (that may sit within much larger unreported ranges of uncertainty. The study focuses on publicly available reports from major stock exchanges, mainly in North America and Europe, which may not reflect all global practices. Automated text analysis may have misclassified some reports, although manual checks helped reduce errors. Optionality should be removed in measurement standards (GHG protocol) and disclosure standards (e.g. GRI, IFRS, ESRS). The lack of uncertainty analysis in disclosures may impede decision-making and drive misallocation of capital and resources to decarbonisation projects based on uncertain data. Without acknowledging uncertainty, firms reduce the transparency and legitimacy of their emissions disclosures. This undermines stakeholders’ ability to hold firms to account for their climate impacts and weakens the policy feedback essential for effective sustainable development. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first large-scale empirical evidence that the absence of uncertainty analysis is widespread in corporate emissions disclosure.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.1108/sampj-03-2025-0375first seen 2026-05-15 18:44:52