What is it about?
Companies report their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to show progress on climate goals, but these numbers are estimates, not exact. Data gaps, supplier issues and different calculation methods introduce uncertainty, which may be significant. Yet most companies don’t mention this, making climate claims look more certain than they are. That can mislead investors and policymakers, and distort where money and effort go. In our review of thousands of reports, uncertainty was rarely explained and even less often quantified. We call for clear rules that require companies to disclose uncertainty (for example, a range and how it was calculated). This would make emissions data more transparent and trustworthy, and support better climate decisions.
Featured Image
Photo by Simone Secci on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Investors and policymakers are using corporate emissions numbers to make decisions worth billions, and which directly contribute to how quickly and effectively we can decarbonise the global economy. Annoyingly, those numbers are reported as if they're precise when they're actually very rough estimates. Our study of over 2,600 company reports shows that almost no one acknowledges this. That means emissions comparisons between companies, and year-on-year reduction claims, could be meaningless noise. If we want to compare carbon data to actually drive decarbonisation, we need to know how reliable it is.
Perspectives
We expected uncertainty analysis to be uncommon, but we didn't expect it to be virtually non-existent. In fact, there appears to be an omerta in the carbon accounting world around acknowledging how uncertain estimates really are, and people don't like operating under uncertainty. The GHG Protocol, which is the main standard companies use to measure their carbon footprint, makes uncertainty analysis optional. Our data shows that when you make something optional in sustainability reporting, it doesn't happen. The good news is the GHG Protocol is currently revising its standards, and there's an opportunity to fix this. Even a simple requirement to describe where the big uncertainties are would be a huge improvement over the status quo. I think that the carbon numbers we see from companies are completely meaningless without describing or measuring uncertainty.
Cormac Dineen
University of Bath
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Firms largely ignore uncertainty when disclosing greenhouse gas emissions in their annual reporting, Sustainability Accounting Management and Policy Journal, March 2026, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/sampj-03-2025-0375.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
