A Network Approach to Scope 3 Emissions

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

🔬研究者:The network approach provides a methodological advance for estimating Scope 3 emissions, validated with SBTi targets, useful for further research on supply chain carbon accounting.

🏢実務担当者:Companies can use this method to approximate Scope 3 emissions even without detailed monetary data, aiding in meeting disclosure requirements and SBTi targets.

🏛政策担当者:The finding that data quality drives estimation error suggests regulators should prioritize improving emissions data infrastructure.

<div> We develop a network-based methodology to estimate firms’ indirect greenhouse gas emissions across upstream and downstream value chain tiers. The model initially requires monetary transaction data and suppliers’ and clients’ Scope 1 and 2 emissions,  </div> <div> but we show that comparable results are obtained using only the existence of transactional links, without requiring monetary values. </div> <div> Applying the method to global supply chain data from FactSet combined with Trucost emissions data, we find that our approach yields higher upstream emissions estimates for roughly 60% of firms between 2010 and 2021. Additionally, we find that downstream emissions account for the majority of indirect emissions, averaging about 61% of total value chain emissions.  </div> <div> We validate the model by exploiting a subsample of firms with SBTi-verified Scope~3 targets as a proxy for higher-quality reporting. Across multiple matched samples, SBTi-certified firms exhibit significantly lower absolute discrepancies between reported and estimated emissions, suggesting that data quality is a primary driver of estimation error rather than systematic bias in our methodology. </div>

• openaire https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6385039first seen 2026-06-11 04:42:55