Proposal Description

To a large degree, climate transition is an information problem. Users need to understand the carbon footprint of their products, including their own emissions during usage. Producers need to control the carbon content of their inputs, in order to manage the carbon content of their own output. Investors need to understand the risk implied by the carbon footprint of their portfolios. Government authorities need information on direct and indirect emissions of companies. Im-porters need information on what happens in the source countries. For all of these purposes, effective micro level information management needs to be combined with aggregate, industry level information on the interactions along the value “chain”
Setting up efficient micro and macro-level information systems is a formidable challenge. Re-cent months, however, have seen important progress on all aspects of this challenge:
• Company level carbon accounting is leapfrogging towards a standard that may make it an effective tool in value chain management. Carbon Measure is a union of large pro-ducers, consultancies and accounting companies working on joint rules. Carbon measures can build on initiatives from the E-Ledger Institute, CASI and others. Cumu-lative carbon accounting carries over the principles of traditional cost accounting to in-form about emissions. Progress shall be charted and evaluated.
• Carbon accounting needs underpinning by statistics. Eurostat is preparing the publica-tion of data on embodied emissions for all country-industry combinations of its flagship Input-Output model, FIGARO. The IMF is preparing the publication of MARIO, a world-wide interregional IO model of unprecedented scale, that will be extremely useful for sustainability.
• The European CBAM is evolving, and experiences can be evaluated. How can the carbon content of imports and of EU producers be evaluated reliably, to keep down in-direct emissions and to protect producers that invest in avoidance technology? Can the data induced by CBAM be used for statistics?
• The ECB is actively developing its statistics on climate risk. The data on portfolio foot-prints of financial institutes shall embrace information on Scope 2 and Scope 3 emis-sions. At the same time, new methods are being developed to estimate downstream emissions based on aggregate and micro-level data. This work and its progress shall be discussed and evaluated.
• In the EU, the CSRD has been redesigned. Large producers – not only those operating within the EU -- will have to report many details on their environmentally relevant activi-ties, specifically on their emissions. Disclosures will be largely standardised and cen-trally available, which is the precondition for good statistics. A collaboration between statisticians in European statistical offices and central banks attempts on making effi-cient statistical use of this new and valuable information. What are the perspectives of this work for the near future and the medium run?
The proposed session will make visible these developments and connect them. It can build on the experience of two large IFC sponsored workshops, Hamburg 2024 and Amsterdam 2025, as well as a very lively and informative exchange on the ISI World Statistics Congress in The Hague.