Without fanfare, U.S. companies, financiers, and entrepreneurs are continuing to make substantial investments in reducing emissions of carbon, methane, and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) and, in a growing trend, in direct removals of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In April 2025, for example, the X Prize Carbon Removal competition doled out $100 million in the largest global incentive competition award in history.

While many clean energy investments will continue to scale, a single market failure—the lack of investor-grade performance metrics—threatens to hold back investments in three of the most promising opportunity areas for GHG emissions reductions and removals: methane emissions reductions; hybrid (or engineered) CDR solutions; and forest carbon interventions.

The Stanford Law & Policy Lab report describes how poor performance accounting standards are the soft underbelly that is afflicting each of these sectors. In all three cases, there is no general agreement on protocols that should be used to measure and confirm GHG reductions and removals, nor is there a system for transparently sharing performance results that will trigger additional investment.

This lack of GHG performance accounting can and must be fixed. The Stanford report reviews how leaders in other fields have come together to identify and incentivize the use of modern data management tools to pool together shared, trusted performance information that data users of all types can rely upon. The report provides recommendations for how key stakeholders in each of the three sectors highlighted in the report can—with the assistance of expert convenors and university consortia—leverage and expand nascent standard-setting and data collection and sharing initiatives to generate accessible, trusted GHG performance data, triggering increased investment in activities that will reduce methane emissions, scale CDR solutions, and increase carbon uptake in forests (and other nature-based solutions). The report also highlights GHG performance data gains that can be made in the urban context, building on foundational work undertaken by Crosswalk Labs and the Data Foundation.