From Data to Alpha: The Market Models That Turn Decarbonization Into Value
At the Global Decarbonization Forum 2026 - New York held during Climate Week NYC, Livio Scalvini, Executive Director of the Leonardo Centre at Imperial College Business School, challenged a familiar assumption: that decarbonization necessarily comes at the expense of financial performance.
His keynote, “From Data to Alpha: The Market Models That Turn Decarbonization Into Value,” explored a different perspective. When companies move beyond commitments and reporting to fundamentally change how they operate, environmental action can become a source of competitive advantage and financial performance.
From What Companies Say to What They Do
Traditional ESG approaches often focus on what companies disclose: policies, targets, reports, and ratings. Livio's research takes a different approach by examining what companies actually do. The Leonardo Centre's GOLDEN dataset brings together 18,000 companies, 88,000 sustainability reports, and 2.7 million initiatives across 115 countries between 2000 and 2025.
To analyze the 2.7 million sustainability initiatives contained within the GOLDEN database, the Leonardo Centre developed Business Impact Maturity (BIM), a novel framework for assessing corporate sustainability actions. BIM categorizes initiatives according to the depth of organizational change they represent, from advocacy and measurement to operational improvements and innovation.
Advocacy includes activities such as communications, stakeholder engagement and philanthropy, which can demonstrate commitment but rarely change the products, processes or business models that drive real-world impact. By contrast, innovation and transformative actions embed sustainability into the core of the business, creating the potential for far greater environmental, social and commercial value. This approach reveals where companies are focusing their efforts and how deeply sustainability is being integrated into the way they operate.
The results reveal an imbalance in where companies focus their efforts. Nearly half (46%) of corporate sustainability initiatives are advocacy, and only 4% are innovation. The key finding is not that sustainability automatically creates financial returns. Rather, companies that make deeper operational changes can outperform those that focus primarily on advocacy, measurement, or preparation.
When Sustainability Changes the Economics
This distinction matters for business leaders. Markets are not necessarily rewarding companies simply for having ambitious sustainability strategies. They respond when environmental action changes the underlying economics of the company, through innovation, operational transformation, new products, improved resilience, or more efficient use of resources.
This shifts the question from “How do we report our environmental performance?” to “How does environmental performance affect the way we operate and compete?” For CFOs, procurement leaders, and operations teams, environmental data therefore needs to become part of the same decision-making infrastructure used for costs, suppliers, products, and investments.
Measuring Transformation, Not Just Disclosure
The Leonardo Centre’s research also points to the limitations of traditional ESG metrics. Policies and disclosures tell us what a company says. Behavioral indicators reveal what it is actually changing. Using AI and natural-language processing, corporate initiatives can be analyzed at scale to identify patterns in how companies transform their organizations. This creates a more dynamic view of corporate performance, one based on observable action rather than static reporting. The implication is significant: environmental data can become a source of business intelligence rather than simply a reporting requirement.
From Measurement to Impact Markets
The next step is to connect measurable impact with financial and market mechanisms. Livio introduced the concept of Markets for Impact, which looks at how financial instruments, corporate demand, policy, and digital platforms can work together to monetize measurable environmental outcomes. The objective is to move from isolated projects toward markets capable of scaling transformation across entire value chains.
One example is the use of book-and-claim and environmental attribute certificates to connect demand for lower-carbon products with emissions reductions upstream. Instead of requiring physical materials to be tracked separately, market mechanisms can connect willingness to pay with verified environmental improvements.
From Environmental Data to Business Intelligence
For companies, this emerging model depends on one fundamental capability: understanding environmental data at the level where business decisions are made. That means connecting emissions data with products, suppliers, sites, procurement, and financial information. With the right data foundation, companies can identify hotspots, compare scenarios, understand carbon costs, and make more informed decisions across the value chain.
The shift Livio describes is ultimately about moving from measuring impact to understanding its economic consequences. When environmental data becomes part of everyday business decisions, decarbonization can move from a reporting exercise to a driver of transformation, resilience, and competitive performance.
