CDP emissions and financial metrics

Summary

This dataset describes corporate greenhouse gas emissions and associated financial intensity metrics as reported to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). The data refers specifically to disclosures made during 2010.

The dataset

This dataset provides a number of metrics which describe the energy and emissions performance of over 600 companies. The dataset has been cleansed to normalize all financial metrics to a common set of reference units (kg/USD) and to remove those companies for which financial metrics are deemed unreliable (see below). The following types of data are provided for each company.

1. Reporting period start date
2. Reporting period end date
3. Disclosed emissions for scope 1 activities, tonnes
4. Disclosed emissions for scope 2 activities, tonnes
5. Total energy consumption associated with scope 1 activities, megawatt hours
6. Total energy consumption associated with scope 2 activities, megawatt hours
7. Scope 2 electricity consumption (scope 2), megawatt hours
8. Scope 2 heat consumption (scope 2), megawatt hours
9. Scope 2 steam consumption (scope 2), megawatt hours
10. Scope 2 cooling consumption (scope 2), megawatt hours
11. Type of financial metric (e.g. revenue, EBITDA)
12. Emissions intensity per unit financial metric, kg/USD
13. Absolute value of financial metric, USD

Reporting Period

These values - start and end dates - simply represent the precise calendar year for which the company disclosure is representative.

Types of financial metric

Under the CDP, companies can choose the basis on which they make a financial based estimate of emissions intensity. Most companies report on the basis of revenue (e.g. tonnes of GHGs per unit of revenue), but others use earnings before tax (EBITDA), profit or other financial metrics. In some cases, a company will provide multiple intensity estimates based alternative financial metrics.

Emissions intensity

All companies for which no estimate of emissions intensity are provided have been discarded from this dataset. Where estimates of emissions intensity are present, these have been normalized into a common set of reference units - kg per USD - to enable easy comparisons between companies. The original dataset quotes these metrics in a variety of currencies (USD, GBP, EUR, YEN, etc.), multiples of currencies (e.g. 1000's, 1,000,000's) and a variety of mass units (e.g. kilograms, metric tonnes).

Absolute financial intensity values

Since each company provides (1) a total quantity of emissions (in tonnes), and (2) a measure of emissions per unit of some financial metric (e.g. revenue, profit), this means that the implied, absolute value of this metric can be obtained by simply dividing the former by the latter. This implied value is also availble within this dataset. In some cases, these implied values do not correspond closely with other independently available financial data for the respective company, suggesting that the financial metric has been erroneously calculated. In these cases, the company's data has been discarded as unreliable.