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December 20, 2025

The importance of multiregional accounting for corporate carbon emissions

Yohanna Maldonado

The team behind the development of CEDA, in collaboration with Stanford University, CDP and WWF published a peer-reviewed paper on the Nature Communications journal in December, 2025.

Below an abstract of the paper and a link to download it here.

Our research was also referenced on Heatmap, “Another way companies majorly undercount emissions”.

Abstract

Corporations routinely use environmentally-extended input-output models to estimate and report greenhouse gas emissions upstream in their supply chains. However, the most widely used models assume that supply chains and emissions intensities of industries match those of a single region—usually the U.S. or the U.K. Here, we use a high-resolution multiregional input-output model to demonstrate the scale and pattern of emissions that may be missed by single-region models. We find that the upstream emissions of the companies reporting to CDP are together greater by 2.0 gigatons of CO2-equivalent emissions (~10%) when estimated by a multiregional model instead of a U.S.-based single-region model, with the largest differences in manufacturing sectors of moderate emissions intensity. Widespread adoption of multiregional models could thus improve the accuracy of corporate emissions inventories and help prioritize primary data collection and emissions reduction efforts, often by shifting focus to energy- and emissions-intensive sectors of industrializing nations.


Multiregional Carbon Accounting

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