CARBON EMISSION ACCOUNTS AND DATASETS

The Carbon Emission Accounts and Datasets (CEADs) was established in 2016 by Professor Guan Dabo's team at Tsinghua University. It is a world-leading carbon-emissions data infrastructure platform dedicated to providing free, open, and verifiable high-quality data for climate-change research and carbon-reduction practice.

CEADs pioneered an original multiscale carbon-emissions accounting methodology with cross-validation, breaking through key bottlenecks in traditional accounting, such as mismatched scales, inconsistent accounting boundaries, and insufficient tracing of carbon flows along industrial chains. The platform has built carbon-emissions inventories covering China and more than 70 developing economies, as well as over 400 cities and regions, achieving multiscale integration from the national level to the regional, city, and infrastructure levels. In the industrial sector, CEADs was the first to construct a carbon-emissions inventory covering 500,000 high-energy-consuming individual facilities worldwide, encompassing nearly one million units and tens of millions of manufacturing processes and technology combinations, marking an important breakthrough from "aggregate accounting" to "process analysis" and "precise traceability." In industrial-chain tracing, the team built a global multi-regional input-output model covering 245 economies and 146 sectors, and was also the first to compile input-output tables for more than 300 prefecture-level cities in China, enabling full accounting of embodied carbon across multiple layers from the global to the city scale.

CEADs has always upheld the open-science philosophy and the principles of "collaborative building, open sharing, and cross-validation." It brings together more than 1,000 scholars from 22 countries to participate in data construction, methodological improvement, and quality validation, and has regularly released annual emissions reports at the United Nations Climate Change Conference since 2021. To date, the platform's data have been downloaded more than 10 million times, supported more than 6,000 academic papers and nearly 1,000 industry reports, and have been widely used in earth system modeling, global carbon budget assessment, urban and industrial low-carbon transition, industrial-chain carbon-footprint accounting, and climate-policy evaluation.

As a globally important carbon-emissions dataset and open-science platform, CEADs not only fills long-standing data gaps in emissions research for developing economies and city-scale studies, but also provides a unified, transparent, comparable, and verifiable data foundation for global climate governance. It is advancing carbon-emissions accounting from macro statistics to multiscale process analysis, from a single inventory to industrial-chain tracing, and from closed data to open sharing, making it an indispensable data infrastructure for global carbon-neutrality research and decarbonization practice.

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