Climate solutions provider Watershed announced the launch of an open and free version of its global emissions database, in a move aimed at enabling organizations and companies to make more accurate decarbonization decisions.

Founded in 2019, San Francisco-based Watershed provides an enterprise sustainability platform enabling companies to measure, report, and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, to meet their climate goals and address regulatory sustainability reporting requirements. Watershed’s Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive (CEDA), which will be open to the public, covers emissions data from 148 countries, 400 industries, and 95% of global GDP. CEDA was created by environmental database provider VitalMetrics, which Watershed acquired in 2023.

Christian Anderson, Watershed’s Co-founder, said:

“Simply put, better data leads to better decisions. By opening up CEDA to the public, we hope to give organizations of all sizes a more accurate foundation from which to make critical choices about their sustainability action. We believe harmonizing measurement methodologies across more parts of the global economy will help accelerate the transition to a new climate-informed economy.”

According to Watershed, the announcement comes to address a key challenge for many companies and organizations, with a lack of access to sustainability data leading many to rely on outdated or skewed data. Of the companies reporting to the global independent environmental disclosure system CDP in 2023, 75% appeared to be using datasets that were disproportionately skewed to one country, misrepresenting the true geographic distribution of their operations, according to the company.

Watershed said several other organizations will incorporate the free CEDA database as partners. Among these is Amazon’s Sustainability Exchange, which provides tools and other information to help companies accelerate environmental innovation, and includes the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative to help make emissions data more accessible.

Michelle Jolly, director of Sustainability Solutions at Amazon, said:

“Access to high-quality environmental data is important for companies to take meaningful climate action across all sectors. The Exchange is working to democratize access to tools and learnings to address our shared climate challenges. By incorporating Open CEDA into the Exchange and ASDI, we’re helping to reduce barriers to accessing emissions data that organizations of all sizes need to make informed sustainability decisions.”