Investigating corporate avoided emissions: methodological diversity, limits to comparability and opportunities for standardisation

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

🔬研究者:Provides a taxonomy and empirical evidence of methodological fragmentation in avoided emissions accounting, informing future work on standardization.

🏢実務担当者:Highlights comparability risks and standardization priorities for corporate avoided emissions disclosures, useful for disclosure teams developing reporting methods.

🏛政策担当者:Informs standard-setting and regulation for avoided emissions accounting and climate finance allocation, supporting credible transition financing.

Avoided emissions are commonly defined as the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions attributable to the provision of a product or service relative to a counterfactual scenario in which it does not exist. Despite the growing prevalence of corporate disclosures on avoided emissions and the rapid expansion of climate-focused investment strategies, the methodologies underpinning such claims remain insufficiently scrutinised. Existing carbon accounting frameworks are primarily oriented towards measuring induced emissions reductions and are ill-equipped to capture the systemic contribution of climate solutions to decarbonisation. This methodological gap presents challenges for corporate reporting credibility, investor decision-making and the effective allocation of capital towards activities aligned with the low-carbon transition. In the absence of transparent and harmonised quantification approaches, there is a risk of inconsistent claims, misinterpretation and potential misallocation of climate finance. In the context of a lack of technically focused scholarship investigating avoided emissions disclosures, this thesis seeks to map, categorise and empirically evaluate the methodological landscape for corporate avoided emissions assessments. The purpose is to establish the current state of the art, providing a categorisation framework to support further analysis and, ultimately, to support future efforts to create a global standard for avoided emissions accounting at the corporate level. It finds a complex and crowded landscape of avoided emissions methodologies, which on further examination are shown to be characterised by fragmentation and limited definitional clarity. Quantifying the implications of this fragmentation through a case study, demonstrates a high sensitivity of results to alternative methodological choices and a lack of comparability both within and across methodologies. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that while avoided emissions accounting has gained prominence in corporate sustainability reporting and sustainable finance, its methodological foundations remain insufficiently harmonised to ensure robust comparability. By identifying key sources of variation and their quantitative effects, the thesis clarifies priorities for standardisation and contributes to debates surrounding “dual-ledger” climate accounting. In doing so, it advances the case for greater methodological transparency, improved reporting credibility and more informed capital allocation in support of the low-carbon transition.

• openalex https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/44891first seen 2026-07-31 05:15:29