February 2026
Standardizing carbon accounting worldwide with a single, robust, cost-effective system Written by Vincent Aussilloux, Yann Coatanlem, and Karthik Ramanna The Atlantic Council Global Energy Center develops and promotes pragmatic and nonpartisan policy solutions designed to advance global energy security, drive economic opportunity, and foster a sustainable energy future.
Bottom lines up front •
Developed economies aren’t just underinvesting in the climate transition— they are missing the mark by an order of magnitude. Because green financing is often characterized as underperforming, the capital they do deploy rarely reaches the projects or regions where it’s needed most.
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But decarbonization doesn't have to be a synonym for "high risk." The key to unlocking high-impact, high-return investment lies in better risk management. Measuring a project’s carbon footprint with greater accuracy will mitigate the guesswork that keeps capital on the sidelines.
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The authors advocate for the Climate Club, an intergovernmental decarbonization forum, to select a single, robust, and cost-effective method for computing products’ carbon footprint. The framework would provide the rigor required to significantly scale climate and drive energy security.
Introduction Carbon accounting has gained traction in recent years as the mechanism through which companies and countries can unlock competitive forces to drive innovation in decarbonization and energy availability. However, most emissions tracking today still occurs through a patchwork of carbon disclosure systems rather than through a true accounting framework. For instance, many companies currently estimate enti-
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ATLANTIC COUNCIL
ty-level emissions under disclosure standards such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which they then sometimes supplement with product-level measurement tools such as life-cycle assessments (LCAs) and environmental product declarations (EPDs). These approaches rely heavily on high-level estimates, such as regional and sectoral emissions factors, and thereby provide only static inventories that cannot be used to compare emissions performance across competing alternatives and time.1 The ap-
P. Spiller, “Making Supply-chain Decarbonization Happen,” McKinsey & Company, June 14, 2021, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/making-supply-chain-decarbonization-happen; and R. Kaplan and K. Ramanna, “Accounting for Climate Change,” Harvard Business Review (2021), https://hbr.org/2021/11/accounting-for-climate-change.
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