Green Data or Greenwashing? Do Corporate Carbon Emissions Data Enable Investors to Mitigate Climate Change?

• DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3722973
• Publication Date: 2021-01-10T14:55:19Z
• Authors: Vitali Kalesnik; Marco Wilkens; Jonas Zink
• Keywords: Greenwashing

Investors play an important role in combating climate change. The authors examine several types of currently available carbon emissions data their capacity to enable investors incentivize companies reduce emissions. evaluate the information content estimated current and forward-looking from four popular providers. Absent mandatory reporting although many report emissions, much are by Despite providers' claims accuracy, find on (often comprising >50% observations) mostly capture only basic company (e.g., size industry). that scores different providers do not have any power predicting future changes authors' analyses suggest at least 2.4 times less effective than self-reported Their results debunk belief third-party a satisfactory substitute for company-reported call audited disclosure.