Watershed acquires VitalMetrics

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Watershed has acquired VitalMetrics, creator of CEDA (the Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive), the world’s most comprehensive multi-regional greenhouse gas emissions database. With the addition of CEDA to the Watershed platform, Watershed customers will be able to measure their emissions with new levels of global coverage and granularity, while meeting rising standards for verification and audit.

While many corporate climate programs rely on coarse emissions factors from one country that can be ten years out of date, CEDA is an annually-updated multi-regional model covering 95% of global emissions, 148 countries, and 400 product categories per country. CEDA is referenced by hundreds of organizations in CDP disclosures, including Macy's, AstraZeneca, Standard Chartered, Coca-Cola, and U.S. government agencies.

VitalMetrics has been measuring organizations’ climate impact using CEDA since 2005. VitalMetrics founder Dr. Sangwon Suh spent twenty years building the foundations of global carbon data as an author of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the U.N. IPCC Assessment Report, and lead developer of CEDA. Dr. Suh will join Watershed as Head Scientist alongside Dr. Steve Davis.

Watershed will continue to offer global access to CEDA. Watershed is also launching CEDA Academic, which makes CEDA data available for free to academic and nonprofit institutions to advance climate science research and education.

“Climate action requires high-quality carbon data. As we join forces with VitalMetrics, we’re excited to bring the world's most granular, actionable data to more organizations, accelerating economy-wide decarbonization,” said Taylor Francis, co-founder of Watershed.

"Joining Watershed vastly accelerates VitalMetrics’ vision of integrating primary data into climate measurement and mitigation,” said Dr. Sangwon Suh, founder of VitalMetrics. “Together, Watershed’s deep expertise in climate disclosure and carbon reduction, and VitalMetrics’ pioneering emissions methodology, will serve as the bedrock of strong corporate climate action.”

VitalMetrics data enables companies to better pinpoint global emissions hotspots and incorporate climate risk and impact into more of their business decisions–including measuring supplier emissions at deeper granularity and helping customers take effective action to reduce emissions. CEDA will be integrated into Watershed’s existing library of over 500,000 emissions factors to form the most comprehensive and reliable carbon database on the market.

Press Contact: Amelia Penniman (amelia@watershed.com)

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