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The climate crisis is no longer a distant threat; it is now our lived reality. In 2025, global temperatures reached 1.44°C above pre-industrial levels, with the 2023–2025 average being the warmest 3 year span recorded across eight different global datasets, approaching 1.5 °C (C3S, WMO). Climate-driven disasters have also been on the rise, with natural perils resulting in an estimated $417B in global economic losses in 2024 alone (Gallagher Re). Solutions to this crisis are not lacking: solar and wind power, regenerative agriculture, electric vehicles, carbon markets, and countless other breakthroughs exist, pioneered by scientists, engineers, economists, policy advocates, and members of civil society across the globe. Yet despite this very real progress, the collective impact of these interventions is insufficient to match the scale and urgency of the challenge.
A key gap identified repeatedly by stakeholders across different modalities is the absence of accessible, high-quality and trustworthy data that can drive real-world decision-making and facilitate informed coordination. Climate action is systemic by nature, requiring producers, financiers, regulators, and consumers to coordinate across geographies and value chains. However, today’s fragmented, low-quality, and costly data systems make this extremely challenging, resulting in mispriced capital, misaligned supply chains and slower progress.
There is thus a strong need to move beyond siloed localised fixes to this systemic problem. Building open, interoperable digital infrastructure that facilitates coordination, supports diverse contextual solutions and restores agency for action across society will enable previously fragmented efforts to compound into impact at scale.
The Climate and Sustainability Data Exchange (CSDX) is intended to bridge this missing infrastructure: serving as an open, global rail for decision-grade climate and sustainability information. CSDX is an interoperable digital network that allows any actor to publish, modify, and access records using a shared infrastructure at near-zero marginal cost. By systematically aligning the underlying data requirements across a diverse set of sustainability frameworks, lowering barriers to access data, and embedding trust and credibility into each transaction, CSDX transforms data from a source of friction into a foundation for accountability, innovation, and scale.
CSDX is built to serve three interconnected value propositions: ESG management, carbon accounting, and climate and nature risk. This network is intentionally designed to prevent sustainability metrics from being relegated to serving as annual disclosure parameters alone; rather CSDX reimagining them as data points that can be used to guide markets, inform regulation, and drive business decisions. For example, CSDX could enable an exporter of machined goods in the Global South to disclose up-to-date climate data (such as emissions, energy mix, and water use) to an importer in the European Union (EU) via the shared auditable infrastructure, instead of across a set of fragmented ESG, audit, and compliance systems. Banks, clients, insurers, and regulators can securely pull the same trusted records should the exporter ever need to disclose information to these stakeholders—for a value-chain assessment or regulatory disclosure requirement as an example. In aggregate, CSDX can enable improved pricing of sustainability and climate risk, drive real-time sustainability compliance, and empower innovative market mechanisms to reward sustainable performance at scale.
Built for climate action and designed to bridge a key infrastructure gap, CSDX leverages a shared data rail to unlock coordination at local, regional and global scales. The guiding principle behind the network is to facilitate the strategic compounding of key factors: unification improves quality and access, access broadens participation, participation builds trust, and trust attracts capital and innovation.
We invite governments, businesses, financial institutions, and civil society to steward this digital rail together, mindful of the fact that every new connection strengthens trust, accelerates decarbonisation, mitigates risk, and scales collective action.
Interested in joining us? Write to us at contact@stepchange.earth.
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