Bridging the Climate Data and Decisionmaking Divide (809Z)
Many companies, investors, advocates, researchers, and policymakers are frustrated by the lack of authoritative and accessible information that can confirm greenhouse gas emissions reductions and removals. Decisionmakers cannot effectively combat climate change without shared, high-quality information on baseline and changing greenhouse gas conditions where emissions and/or removals are taking place. Authoritative agreements, protocols and standards are needed to address these deficiencies and build an integrated system of “bottom up” and “top down” GHG data for the benefit of all climate data users. Progress on these matters will enable verification of carbon reports and claims — a critical element for clarifying and improving corporate GHG reporting, establishing high integrity carbon markets, encouraging innovation, increasing competition, and helping investors identify new opportunities. It is a particularly propitious time to take on this work, given the large investments that many companies, non-profits, and governmental entities are making in obtaining new and better data on GHG emission reductions and removals for carbon dioxide removals, methane sources, and other GHG use cases. Students in this policy lab will work with the non-profit Data Foundation to highlight areas encumbered by serious climate data deficiencies and to develop an action plan to address them. By looking across other policy areas in which similar data challenges have arisen, students will explore the frontiers of how key climate mitigation data can be more effectively developed, shared, and analyzed in open source formats while respecting privacy, proprietary, and other data source concerns. Various institutional and governance arrangements also will be explored and evaluated through the course of the policy lab. Student work will contribute to a major conference that the Data Foundation and Stanford are planning to host on this subject next March.
Elements used in grading: Grades will be based on students’ contributions to the practicum through group discussions, report-outs on individual topics, and written submissions. Written submissions will include short papers prepared during the quarter and contributions to a report that will be submitted to the Data Foundation for publication.
CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete a Consent Application Form available at SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/.
Reports & Deliverables:
Increasing Accessibility to Trusted Climate Performance Data
Abstract:
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.
