case study

Asset-Level Data

Enabling Sustainable Investment in the Cement and Steel Sectors

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What is asset-level data

Investors need accurate, comparable and comprehensive data about climate and environmental risks, opportunities and impacts to support the transition to a net-zero economy. Asset-level data ties information about a particular physical asset such as a power plant, or a palm oil plantation, to its ownership and location. This is crucial to understand an investment portfolio’s impact on the climate as well as the impacts of a changing climate on the investments themselves. It allows observations from satellites to be linked to financial products and increase transparency around the environmental risks or impacts they are exposed to.

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Investment Analysts

By overlaying asset-level data with climate risk maps or reported emissions data, analysts can compare a company’s exposure to climate risk against other companies in the sector.

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Policymakers

By knowing facility technology and age, policymakers can understand which facilities need to be retrofitted or retired to comply with Paris Agreement targets, and how this might affect local employment.

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NGOs

By identifying the companies and locations with the highest emissions, NGOs can engage with corporate investors and policymakers, and therefore impact on local population health, biodiversity and climate change. Engagements can be localised and better targeted.

This Asset-level and Spatial Finance Use Case report provides an overview of the user research from the Asset-level Data project for the cement and steel industries. It shows the wide range of use cases identified for asset-level data and analysis, summarized per theme and per user type.

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Why Cement and Steel?

Industrial facility with metal structures and smokestacks emitting steam against a cloudy sky at sunset.

Cement and Iron & steel production are two of the most emissions-intensive industries in the world, accounting for approximately 8% and 6.7% of global CO2 emissions respectively. They have significant environmental impacts beyond carbon emissions, including the substantial energy requirements and the significant amount of natural resources consumed during their production. As such, a global transition strategy to environmental sustainability, including net-zero by mid-century, requires a complete understanding of these sectors.

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Our goal is to create the most comprehensive, open asset database for the cement and steel sector globally. With details on:

Exact asset geo-location
Ownership
Production process
Capacity
Age

The project team used a combination of manual and machine learning techniques to analyse satellite, geo-spatial and web-based datasets to extract asset-level information in a way that is transparent, repeatable and allows for open publication of the derived insights.

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