CLIMATE-edGE: Climate Leadership, Innovation, Machine Learning, and Analytics for Transformational Evaluation of the Green Economy

Proposal Summary:The private sector plays a crucial yet complex role in the climate transition. While responsible for a significant portion of global greenhouse gas emissions, it also holds vast investment capital and innovative potential. CLIMATE-edGE will address a critical question: Under what conditions do private sector climate commitments translate into measurable actions, and what factors determine whether firms and sectors are effectively aligning their climate promises with actual performance? By examining publicly traded firms in the EU/EEA, the UK, and the US, the research will uncover complex relationships between climate commitments (climate talk) and climate performance (climate walk), in turn reflecting on the impact of regulatoryThe private sector plays a crucial yet complex role in the climate transition. While responsible for a significant portion of global greenhouse gas emissions, it also holds vast investment capital and innovative potential. CLIMATE-edGE will address a critical question: Under what conditions do private sector climate commitments translate into measurable actions, and what factors determine whether firms and sectors are effectively aligning their climate promises with actual performance? By examining publicly traded firms in the EU/EEA, the UK, and the US, the research will uncover complex relationships between climate commitments (climate talk) and climate performance (climate walk), in turn reflecting on the impact of regulatory measures aimed at advancing climate efforts in the green economy. This project will break from traditional approaches by developing a novel database which will contain the full universe of climate commitment and performance data; it will then apply data transformation techniques to enhance interoperability of these data and, finally, it will conduct both advanced econometric and machine-learning analyses to uncover hitherto hidden and latent patterns in the private sector’s climate talk-walk efforts.