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Million Tons CO2 Retired
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MtCO2 Matched to Listed Firms
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Unique Public Firms
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Project Countries
Overview
Quantity Retired by Year (MtCO2)
Matched Quantity by Registry (MtCO2)
Where Listed Firms Retire Offsets
Location of offset projects, weighted by retired volume (tonnes). Log scale.
Where Retiring Firms Are Headquartered
Headquarters of listed firms, weighted by retired volume (tonnes). Log scale.
Methodology
How We Match Retirements to Firms
- Data Sources: Retirement records from Verra (VCS), Gold Standard, American Carbon Registry (ACR), and Climate Action Reserve (CAR) via the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project; plus EcoRegistry (Cercarbono standard), BioCarbon Registry (Global CarbonTrace), and Puro.earth (carbon removal CORCs) via their public registries; plus CDM/UNFCCC (CER voluntary cancellations, 2010–2026) via the Wayback Machine and CDM Registry archives.
- Beneficiary Extraction: Registry-specific parsing of retirement beneficiary fields, with fallback text extraction from notes and details fields.
- Firm Matching: Two-stage process: (1) exact and normalized name matching against a cache of 3,600+ known beneficiary-to-firm mappings; (2) LLM-assisted entity resolution for new names, resolving subsidiaries and brands to parent listed firms.
- Firm Universe: Publicly listed companies identified via FactSet entity IDs, covering ~50,000 global public firms.
- Quality Control: LLM matches are assigned confidence scores (high/medium/low). Only high and medium matches are auto-accepted; low-confidence matches are flagged for manual review.
Citation
Pedraza, Alvaro & Williams, Tomas & Zeni, Federica, 2026. “Local Visibility vs. Global Integrity: Evidence from Corporate Carbon Offsetting,” Policy Research Working Paper Series 11331, The World Bank.
If you use this dataset in your research, please cite the paper above and include a link to this page.