Verified at Scale: The Future of Trusted Product Carbon Footprints
At the Global Decarbonization Forum 2026 - New York held during Climate Week NYC, Dr. Max Rehberger, Head of Sustainability Services Germany at TÜV SÜD, explored how companies can scale product carbon footprint (PCF) calculations without compromising data quality and trust.
His keynote, Verified at Scale: The Future of Trusted Product Carbon Footprints, addressed a growing challenge for industrial companies: digitalization and AI are accelerating environmental data processing, but verification is struggling to keep pace. As carbon data increasingly informs procurement, product design, production, and customer decisions, companies require reliable evidence to substantiate the information they utilize.
Digitalization Needs Trusted Data
Calculating PCFs across complex supply chains requires significant manual effort, specialized expertise, and data from multiple suppliers. Digitalization and AI can help to automate data collection, processing, and calculations, making it possible to manage environmental information across larger product portfolios. However, faster calculations do not automatically produce more credible results. Max highlighted the growing gap between the deployment of industrial AI and the ability to substantiate its environmental impact. Without robust evidence, increased digital output does not necessarily equate to more reliable information for decision-making purposes.
PCF quality depends on more than just the calculation engine. Methodologies, primary data, allocation rules, system boundaries, version control, and independent verification all influence the reliability of a footprint. Companies therefore need to build data quality and verification into their processes rather than treating assurance as a final step.
Established standards such as ISO 14067 provide an important foundation for consistent PCF calculations and reporting, while independent verification helps provide confidence in the resulting information.
From Individual Verification to System Assurance
Traditional verification assesses individual product carbon footprints in detail, by examining the data, calculations, and evidence behind each result. While this approach can provide a high level of confidence, it becomes resource-intensive when companies need to assess thousands of products.
Max presented a progression towards system-level assurance, in which verification increasingly focuses on the calculation methodology, data models, procedures, and controls used to generate multiple footprints. In the longer term, continuous monitoring could help maintain trust as underlying data and business processes change. This approach can complement product-level verification by providing scalable assurance for the systems and processes used to generate multiple PCFs.
These approaches will coexist. While system assurance can improve efficiency across large product portfolios, it also introduces risks: errors in underlying data or systematic weaknesses in controls can affect multiple results. Companies must therefore balance scalability with the level of assurance required for their specific applications.
Regulation is another consideration. As Max explained, current and emerging European requirements do not always provide a clear path towards system-level assurance. Differences in regulatory expectations and standards can make it difficult for companies to implement more efficient verification processes, even when their digital systems are ready.
Building a Connected Ecosystem
Scaling trusted PCFs requires more than just better technology. Companies, technology providers, standards organizations, regulators, and independent verifiers need to collaborate to develop consistent and scalable solutions. Key priorities include improving access to primary supplier data, ensuring that standards and frameworks are interoperable, and enabling transparency for verifiers while protecting confidential business information. Standardized data exchange is important, but it must be supported by reliable inputs and clear processes for assessing the information.
Max also emphasized the importance of involving verifiers early in the process. Rather than only requesting an audit after calculations and systems have been completed, companies can benefit from discussing assurance requirements during system design. This helps to identify necessary controls, clarify expectations, and avoid costly adjustments later.
In the longer term, trusted digital credentials could also facilitate the transfer of verification results between systems, reducing dependence on static reports and manual data extraction.
Trust as the Foundation for Environmental AI
The central message of Max’s keynote was clear: digitalization and AI can accelerate carbon footprint calculations, but their value depends on the credibility of the underlying data and processes. As environmental information becomes more influential in business decisions, verification must evolve to match the scale of digital systems. This requires appropriate assurance methods, stronger standards, reliable supplier data, and collaboration across the wider ecosystem.
The goal is not simply to calculate more product carbon footprints, but to make trusted environmental information available at the scale and speed businesses need to act on it. As Max concluded, trust is not a brake on digitalization. It is the infrastructure that enables it to reach its full potential.
