Watershed, the sustainability AI platform, and AdAstra Sustainability, developer of the Orbae land use change (LUC) emissions dataset, today announced a partnership to jointly develop an open-source pipeline for direct land use change data under the Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative. Orbae is already used by sustainability leaders in the food and agriculture sector, including Danone and ofi, who have voiced strong support for open access to accelerate adoption across the industry.

The announcement comes as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Land Sector and Removals Standard (LSRS), published in early 2026, starts the clock on a new reporting requirement: As of January 1, 2027, companies will need to measure land use change emissions in line with the guidance for compliant reporting in 2028. Given the complexity of the topic, Watershed and AdAstra see an open-source approach that invites collaboration from the broader community as the fastest way to advance the underlying science.

Why open source, and why now

LUC emissions are often the single largest category in a food or agriculture company's footprint. For high-risk commodities such as cocoa, they can account for over 90% of total product emissions. Despite this, companies, standard-setters and regulators have largely worked from varying, incompatible datasets, making it difficult to agree on where land conversion carries the highest carbon cost or verify progress against SBTi FLAG targets.

Orbae's jurisdictional direct LUC (jdLUC) data and methodology have been openly accessible since early 2025. What's new is that the code behind the data — the pipeline that produces it — will become open source. This extra layer of transparency will let the market verify, scrutinize and build on the methodology itself.

What's coming

In 2027, Cornerstone will release the open-source next generation of direct land use change (dLUC). Built on a global LUC emissions layer, the code will support both farm-level assessment and jurisdictional calculations covering more than 90% of global cropland.

In the meantime, two datasets will help close near-term coverage gaps. Cornerstone’s first release under this partnership will be an open-source and LSRS-compliant global statistical LUC (sLUC) dataset in 2026. AdAstra will also release "jdLUC proxy" later this year — a scalable approach following jdLUC principles — open-sourced under Cornerstone in 2027. jdLUC data, insights and visualizations will continue to be openly available in Orbae.

The addition of this dataset meaningfully broadens Cornerstone's data coverage. Cornerstone began in 2025 with a mission to build and maintain open access to the critical datasets organizations need to measure and act on scope 1–3 emissions. Other open datasets housed at Cornerstone are USEEIO, CEDA, eGRID and the GHG Emissions Factor Hub.

About Watershed

Watershed is a sustainability AI platform that helps companies like Airbnb, sweetgreen, Visa, Harris Farm Markets and Zaxby’s measure, report on and reduce their emissions. Watershed automates data management for climate and ESG data, produces audit-ready reports, and helps companies surface decarbonization options. Watershed AI is purpose-built for sustainability, based on a database of more than 2.3 million emissions factors and the experience of a team of in-house climate scientists and policy experts. The company's advisors and investors include Christiana Figueres, Al Gore, Sequoia, and Kleiner Perkins. Watershed is dual-headquartered in London, U.K., and San Francisco, CA, with offices in Berlin, Denver, Mexico City, New York, Paris, and Sydney.

About AdAstra Sustainability

AdAstra is shifting the paradigm of agricultural supply chains with data solutions that change our understanding of how agriculture impacts the environment.

Founded in 2022 by experts in quantitative sustainability, geospatial data science, and food and agriculture systems, they support stakeholders along agricultural value chains in taking decisive action for operating within planetary boundaries.

Their core product, Orbae, builds data from the ground up to reveal the impacts of land conversion at any level of traceability. Find open data, maps and insights on how your sourcing affects the Earth at orbae.eco.