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The Oxford Commission on Sustainability Data

Powering sustainable growth through trusted data.

The Oxford Commission on Sustainability Data was established in late 2023 in response to the pressing need for reliable data to guide sustainable practices.

This is a critical and complex challenge: How can consumers and investors integrate sustainability into their decisions without access to accurate, reliable, consistent and comparable data on a company’s environmental performance?

Current approaches to gathering sustainability data 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.

The Oxford Commission on Sustainability Data 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. The Commission is pioneering methods to transform this raw data into verified business intelligence, enabling real-time sustainability insights.

Through this work, the Commission 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.

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.

Why trusted sustainability data matters

Find out more about our approach to sustainability data and reporting

Work with us

Discover an opportunity to be a leader in developing solutions to sustainability reporting

Who we are

Meet our interdisciplinary and cross-sector team of experts working with the Commission

Events and webinars

Watch our webinars to find out more about how we can support scalable solutions to global challenges.

Centre on Mutual and Co-owned Business

Find out more about our research initiatives designed to improve governance, accountability and performance through an approach of mutuality.

Background papers and documents

Find out more

If you would like to find out more, or become a part of this project, please contact Professor Jonathan Michie directly.