Climate action-focused platform Climateworks Foundation announced today the launch of Carbon Call, a new initiative aimed at addressing the need for a reliable and interoperable global carbon emissions accounting system. The initiative is being founded with participation from over 20 companies and organizations* including Microsoft, United Nations Environment Programme, Linux Foundation and United Nations Foundation.

According Microsoft Chief Environmental Officer Lucas Joppa, Carbon Call is being launched in order to address one of the key areas needed to facilitate the road to achieving net zero. Joppa said that “we can’t fix what we can’t measure, and reliable measurement and accounting of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is critical to climate accountability and attribution.”

In a statement announcing the launch of the initiative, Joppa added:

“With so many organizations now committing to net zero, one key piece is still missing: a transparent and interoperable system to track, report and compare GHG emissions and removals. The Carbon Call is a collaboration to enable reliability among the multiple, different GHG accounting ledgers — from the corporate to the national to the planetary. We encourage all organizations committed to net zero to join us.”

Carbon Call aims to identify and fix gaps in existing global carbon accounting systems, with a focus on carbon removal and land sector, methane, and indirect emissions. The initiative will mobilize collective investment and resources towards expanding transparent, comprehensive, and regular emissions reporting from companies, supporting underlying data and science to produce comparable, combinable, and sharable information, and enable open and efficient assessment of companies’ carbon accounting.

The organizations announced that several companies have already signed on as signatories to the initiative, with commitments to report GHG emissions and offset information, including all scopes and classes of GHG emissions. Signatories at launch include Capricorn Investment Group, EY, GSK, KPMG, Microsoft, and Wipro.

Steve Varley, Global Vice Chair, Sustainability at EY, said:

“As businesses realize their role in tackling climate change, pledges and promises must be evidenced by progress and performance. A global, reliable and interoperable system for improved GHG accounting is critical for our efforts to accelerate action and track progress at scale. EY is excited to be joining this collaboration across a broad range of stakeholders that will help create value for all.”

*participating organizations: Capricorn Investment Group, Climate Change AI, Corporate Leaders Group Europe, Global Carbon Project, Global Council for Science and the Environment, International Science Council, LF Energy, Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Mila, Skoll Foundation, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, United Nations Environment Programme (collaborating organization), and United Nations Foundation. Carbon Call is hosted by Climateworks.