Financial institutions face increased pressure to measure, disclose, and reduce their climate-related risks and financed emissions. Yet, it remains extremely challenging to access reliable data on a large scale. Climative partnered with Vancity, Canada’s largest community credit union, to test a novel way to quickly and more accurately measure financed emissions, so Vancity can set accurate emissions reduction targets, manage climate risks, and make progress toward net-zero targets by engaging homeowners.
Click here to access the full whitepaper, “Measurement to Action: Transforming Carbon Reporting with Innovative Proxy Data”.
Vancity, like most financial institutions, still relied on regional averages and low-quality data to measure its financed emissions. This typical approach meets PCAF DQS 4/5, representing high uncertainty, poor visibility into actual building performance, and low usefulness for decision-making.
The core issue is the lack of reliable, building-level data. Obtaining accurate energy use, heating fuel type, and emissions factors from a variety of stakeholders is not realistic to implement at scale. Major barriers include: inconsistent data formats, privacy constraints, and the administrative effort required across thousands of properties.
Without this granular data, financial institutions can’t translate emissions insights into actionable climate progress.
Vancity partnered with Climative, a climate data company and PCAF-accredited partner. Climative’s Automated Carbon Model (ACM) uses machine learning, historic onsite energy audits, property-level features, and region-specific emissions factors to produce accurate and scaleble building assessments. This methodology meets PCAF DQS 3 without requiring homeowner-provided data.
While onsite audits require 200+ data inputs, Climative applied the ACM to each home using fewer than 10, including:
The model produced property-level estimates of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, enabling DQS 3 assessments across the entire residential portfolio.
Click here to access the full whitepaper, “Measurement to Action: Transforming Carbon Reporting with Innovative Proxy Data”.
Improving data quality from DQS 4/5 to 3 represents an upgrade in financed emissions measurement but, more importantly, provides the foundation for an effecive decarbonization and homeowner engagement strategy. With property-level insights, a financial institution can:
Data access advocacy: Vancity and Climative are exploring a national registry of building-level carbon and energy labels to align advocacy across financial institutions, data providers, regulators, and other stakeholders. Expressions of interest can be directed to winston.morton@climative.ai.
Climative projects: Climative’s emissions reporting solution is available to financial institutions, as well as our homeowner engagement platform powered by the ACM so financial institutions can offer home upgrade advice and the financing to make it happen.
Essential reading:
Tian is a dedicated and creative statistical modeler who leads the development of Climative’s data strategy and machine learning algorithms. She believes that ethical and thoughtful use of AI will help us achieve climate goals while creating equal opportunity for all.
Climative provides a collaborative AI-assisted data platform for organizations to enable personalized advice and offers to building owners, taking the guesswork out of building upgrades and transforming the low carbon economy.
