Trucost: firm-level environmental and carbon data (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

Trucost is a licensed commercial dataset (S&P Global), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no S&P credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

Trucost is a firm-level environmental dataset maintained by S&P Global. Its most-used content is greenhouse-gas emissions: scope 1 (direct), scope 2 (purchased electricity), and scope 3 (value chain), reported in tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) by fiscal year, alongside emission intensities (per revenue), other pollutants, natural-capital costs, and fossil-fuel reserve exposure. It is a common carbon-emissions source in climate-finance papers: used in, for example Zhang for firm-level annual scope 1 and 2 emissions with their actual release dates, and Pedersen for fiscal-year 2021 scope 1 and 2 emissions in a sustainable-discount-rate calibration.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: S&P Global (Trucost; the environmental data line of S&P Global Sustainable1).
• Coverage: thousands of listed companies globally, with emissions and other environmental metrics by fiscal year; history back to roughly 2005 for the broadest panels.

Access (when licensed)

• S&P Global / Sustainable1. Through S&P’s data feeds, the S&P Capital IQ platform, or the Trucost data files, keyed on the S&P company identifier.
• Possibly via a data vendor or library feed. Some institutions reach Trucost through bundled S&P Global products; availability is not confirmed here, so check with your library before assuming a given path.
• Credentials are required either way. Keep them in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Most emissions are modeled, not disclosed. A large share of firm-year emissions are estimated by Trucost’s environmental model from sector and activity data, not taken from a company report. Disclosed and modeled values are mixed in the same field; if your design needs disclosed numbers, filter on the disclosure flag rather than treating every value as reported.
• Fiscal-year emissions are released with a long lag. Emissions for a fiscal year are published well after that year ends. Using a value as if it were known at fiscal-year close builds in look-ahead. Match on the actual data release date, not the fiscal year, for any return or pricing test.
• Scope 3 is the noisiest. Value-chain emissions depend on the most estimation and on boundary choices; treat scope 3 levels and changes with more caution than scope 1 and 2.
• History gets restated. As the model and disclosures are reworked, prior firm-years can be revised. Pin the data vintage and re-pull deliberately rather than mixing vintages.
• Intensity denominators matter. Emission intensity uses revenue (or another denominator) that itself changes with currency and restatements; state the denominator and the units so the number is reproducible.
• Entity and identifier mapping is its own step. Join on the S&P company identifier and confirm the parent/subsidiary and ticker mapping before merging with returns or fundamentals.

Citation

Cite the product and vendor, e.g.: Trucost environmental data, S&P Global; data licensed and accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the data vintage, the emission scope, the units (tCO2e), and whether values are disclosed or modeled.