Editor’s choice
Editor’s choice
SEI and partners created a guide that gives businesses a practical way to measure both the air pollution and climate-changing emissions they generate. The guide makes it possible for businesses to assess their environmental impacts – and uncover efficiencies to help reduce their emissions.
Air pollution poses the largest environmental risk to public health worldwide. It is the second-leading cause of death, including for children under the age of five. The health costs of air pollution amount to an estimated 6.1% of global GDP.
For air quality to improve, businesses must reduce the air pollution they generate. Yet they have seldom measured such emissions – both because the private sector lacked a practical way to measure them, and because corporate sustainability reporting standards largely emphasized greenhouse gases, not air pollution.
Work by SEI and partners in business, industry and global organizations is changing this picture.
SEI and partners in corporations and global organizations representing business and industry helped generate momentum to make air quality a core component of private-sector sustainability reporting.
They have created a measurement guide that is coming into wider use to measure such emissions, and they have provided momentum to bring the long- overlooked issue of air pollution into private-sector environmental reporting.
The Integrated Guide for Business Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollutant Emission Assessment gives businesses a way to create a comprehensive picture of their airborne emissions: both greenhouse gases and air pollutants. Published by SEI and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition in 2025, the guide can be used by any business, regardless of its sector, size or the products or services offered.
The approach that underpins the guide makes it possible for businesses to calculate emissions and pinpoint the types and sources of emissions throughout their value chain – that is, from the raw materials used; the manufacturing, transportation, sale, and use of products; and to the disposal of wastes generated.
This approach aligns with processes that many companies use to calculate greenhouse gas emissions for sustainability reporting. This allows businesses to take on additional reporting in a familiar, streamlined way. The 2025 work builds on a breakthrough method devised by SEI and partners to quantify private-sector air pollutants – the focus of a first guide (published in 2022).
SEI and partners also worked to establish air quality as a core issue for companies when examining the environmental impacts of their operations. SEI served as a technical lead of the World Economic Forum’s Alliance for Clean Air, the first coalition of private companies committed to quantifying and reducing air pollution. SEI worked with many large companies – among them, the GEA Group, Haleon, Inter IKEA Group, Maersk and Oracle – to include air pollutants in their sustainability reports for the first time. The Clean Air Fund, Smart Freight Centre, UN Environment Programme, UN Global Compact also supported the agenda.
New corporate sustainability reporting standards adopted by the EU in 2023 are now beginning to require large companies to disclose their air pollutant emissions. Meanwhile, widely used corporate and industrial standards for environmental reporting are beginning to add air pollution to their frameworks. These actions raise awareness of air pollution reporting in the private sector and provide clear steps businesses can take to quantify such emissions – whether they do so voluntarily or to comply with mandatory reporting standards.
This agenda is gaining increasing traction. For example, a voluntary sustainability reporting standard issued by the EU in December 2024 now points thousands of businesses throughout Europe to the integrated guide to quantify their emissions. And the 2025 framework of the Global Logistics Emissions Council now incorporates air pollutants: SEI and the Smart Freight Centre worked together to add air pollution to the framework, which is used by more than 180 multinationals and their suppliers across the world.
Finally, the Global Reporting Initiative Standards – used by more than 14 000 organizations in more than 100 countries – plans to adopt an air pollution standard; a decision that followed recommendations from an expert working group that included SEI.
These changes set the stage for businesses to find and leverage synergies to help clean the air and limit climate change.
SEI provided crucial technical expertise, translating air pollutant emissions measurement into a specificity suitable for the logistics sector. SEI were collaborative and focused technical partners, ensuring their work was adapted to the logistics sector whilst retaining its technical rigour. By integrating SEI's guidance into the globally recognised GLEC Framework, SEI's expertise has reached over 2000 logistics experts since it launched in October 2025 – thus, giving shippers, carriers and logistics service providers a familiar methodology to calculate air pollutants and accelerate cleaner transport.
Rebecca Powell, Global Logistics Emissions Council (GLEC) Program Manager, Smart Freight Centre
Project / The project incorporates SLCPs and other air pollutants into the GLEC Framework on emissions tracking for businesses.
Project / The project will increase the capacity of NEMA and the Uganda Ministry of Water and Environment to understand the major sources of SLCPs in the country.
Project / We provide in-depth technical support to the Alliance secretariat and corporate members on value chain air pollution emissions reductions and target setting.
SEI annual report / Across a changing global landscape, SEI delivers knowledge and solutions to drive sustainable development forward.
Other publication / The 2026 global economic assessment for climate and clean air action highlights the costs of inaction. Each year of delay could cost over $1.5 trillion.
Press release / One of the world’s oldest construction materials, clay, could help deliver lower-carbon cement, according to a new report from LeadIT.
