The 2025 Open CEDA update is now available.

Today’s release incorporates and harmonizes updates from over a dozen national and international emissions and economic datasets, as well as targeted but important methodology improvements (e.g. an update to AR6 GWP100 warming factors, an improved emissions allocation model for China, and a better rest-of-world model for small countries). The main model structure is stable, so the topline changes you see in this year’s numbers are driven by real decarbonization in the world. We’re providing detailed release notes, a change log, and a FAQ as part of today’s release if you want to dig in further.

This year, Open CEDA is being released under the Cornerstone umbrella, alongside the 2025 USEEIO update. Cornerstone is an open data initiative launched earlier this year by Watershed, the Sustainable Solutions Lab at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and ERG, to maintain and improve key datasets used for sustainability programs, starting with Open CEDA and USEEIO. Together, USEEIO and CEDA are used to calculate roughly 65% of scope 3 corporate carbon measurements globally. This is the first major release since Cornerstone’s formation.

This year’s CEDA and USEEIO data updates both show continued decoupling of emissions from business growth: a median ~2% decrease in scope 3 emissions per dollar spent across a test set of companies. CEDA shows a 2.0% median decrease; USEEIO shows a 1.8% median decrease. Changes are inflation-adjusted, reflecting real improvements in emissions intensity.

Highlights:

• The largest drivers of changes were related to the electricity (driving 31% of the change), oil and gas production (driving 7% of change), and transportation sectors, which impact the supply chains of many industries.
• The change reflects the continued decoupling of business growth and greenhouse gas emissions that we’ve seen in recent years.
• Progress is positive, but still short of Paris-aligned intensity goals (which typically require ~6% annual reductions).

In the coming months, Cornerstone will begin to merge CEDA and USEEIO into a single, comprehensive dataset of spend-based scope 3 emissions factors, which will be released in fall of 2026.