Commission on Sustainability Data (CSD)
The Oxford Commission on Sustainability Data (OCSD)
The Oxford Commission on Sustainability Data (OCSD) was established in late 2023 in response to a critical challenge: while sustainability is a stated strategic priority for many organisations, progress has stalled. Existing software solutions can enable meaningful change, yet companies are not integrating sustainability into everyday decision-making. This is largely due to a lack of standardised, auditable data – without it, sustainability reporting and performance remain fragmented and unreliable.
Current approaches often target only a small subset of high-profile “carbon pressured” companies. These firms, facing external scrutiny, are offloading carbon-intensive operations to less visible “non-carbon pressured” companies – a tactic that improves optics but fails to reduce overall carbon impact.
OCSD takes a different approach. It recognises that every company operates through software-driven processes that generate detailed transactional data. If made accessible and auditable, this data can provide a precise picture of an organisation’s sustainability footprint. OCSD is pioneering methods to transform this raw data into verified business intelligence, enabling real-time sustainability insights.
Through this work, OCSD aims to build a market-driven, data-first framework for sustainability – empowering companies to prove the truthfulness of their data to third parties, reduce costs, enhance transparency across supply chains, and support regulators, investors and trading partners in making informed decisions.
Goals of the Commission
The Oxford Commission on Sustainability Data seeks to:
- Bring together influential software and vendor companies to prototype universal and auditable datasets from which sustainability data can be drawn.
- Promote the idea that auditable datasets can be constructed via the mass auto logging of transactional data.
Work with auditing firms and sustainability standards groups on how auditing can be done while ensuring appropriate corporate privacy. - Inform governments how they can improve the certainty in sustainability datasets by understanding how their requests for information trace back to transactional data.
- Bring together a large, diverse group to mutualise a singular effort to give companies the ability to secure a database to which their systems and vendors will automatically log transactional data at the click of a button. Find out more about how to participate in this initiative.
Founding Partner
The OCSD was established with the support of Avalara, Inc, a leader in modern tax compliance. Avalara helps businesses increase efficiency and accuracy by automating tax compliance, enabling streamlined customer experiences globally, and simplifying vendor management. The company currently works with 43,000+ business and government customers in over 75 countries. https://www.avalara.com/
Resources
An invitation to work with the Oxford Commission on Sustainability Data
Find out moreWorking Groups
The Commission has developed three Working Groups to take forward the project:
Software and Operations Working Group
Finance Working Group
Assurance & Audit Working Group
Investigates the practices and processes of audit and assurance for carbon measurements attributed to the data collected. The group’s aim is to build greater confidence in the carbon accounting practices and measurements of companies participating in the project.
- Professor Jonathan Michie
- Professor Nigel Mehdi
- Ms Cindy Rose
- Dr Stuart Jenkins
- Mr Aleksandro Monthanha