Corporate Footprints: Measuring Corporate Environmental Impacts at Scale

Recent advances in spatial environmental monitoring and modeling allow tracking environmental issues at global scale and high local resolution. We build on those advances to measure firms' environmental footprints. We combine spatial environmental data with information on the locations and financials of hundreds of millions of firms around the world to create independent, comprehensive, and localized measures of firms' contributions to environmental issues. Such information is pivotal for the design of effective mitigation policies.  Our measures complement information on firms' environmental footprint produced through corporate reporting. Firms' self-reported information often lacks credibility, is limited in scope (e.g., limited to a few listed firms and a few, select pollutants), and is aggregate in nature (e.g., at the holding company level). Our independent, comprehensive, and localized measures provide a check on corporate reports and help spot damaging impacts, irrespective of whether firms report on their impacts or not.