The importance of multiregional accounting for corporate carbon emissions
Steven J. Davis, Andrew Dumit, Mo Li, Yohanna Maldonado, Michael Steffen, Martha Stevenson, Tatiana Boldyreva, Sangwon Suh · 2025
Read The importance of multiregional accounting for corporate carbon emissions by Steven J. Davis, Andrew Dumit, Mo Li, Yohanna Maldonado, Michael Steffen, Martha Stevenson, Tatiana Boldyreva, Sangwon Suh (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12847884.txt.
Description
Eight researchers show that company carbon reports miss a large slice of emissions when they use single-country models, in a 2025 paper. Firms estimate supply-chain emissions with input-output models, but the popular ones assume every supply chain behaves like that of one country, usually the United States or Britain.
The team ran a detailed multiregional model that tracks trade and industry across many countries. For companies reporting to the CDP disclosure system, the fuller model found about two gigatons more upstream emissions, roughly ten percent higher. The biggest misses sat in mid-intensity manufacturing sectors. The authors argue that multiregional accounting would sharpen company inventories. It would also steer cleanup effort toward the energy-heavy industries of industrializing nations, where much of the hidden tonnage sits.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Steven J. Davis, Andrew Dumit, Mo Li, Yohanna Maldonado, Michael Steffen, Martha Stevenson, Tatiana Boldyreva, Sangwon Suh |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 40 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |