Printed but not benchmarkable: most building-decarbonisation disclosure cannot be matched to the pathways that stranding regulation assumes
Abstract
Cities are beginning to enforce carbon limits on existing buildings. Science-based decarbonisation pathways set those limits one asset type and one jurisdiction at a time. Owners, however, report for the whole firm. We measure what that mismatch costs on two sets of public corporate reports: a census of 502 reports from the 119 listed built-environment firms with a collected report inside a 2,246-firm panel (2003-2023), and 519 real-estate reports from 101 firms (2007-2024). BeDA, a multimodal language-model tool whose reliability we test first, read them. Running the pathway frameworks' own entry tests over published disclosure: 16.5% of census reports (43.7% of real-estate reports) print an operational carbon intensity per square metre; 6.6% (25.0%) can be matched to a pathway for their property type in a covered jurisdiction; and only 5.0% (16.4%) disclose the floor area they divided by. Of the failures at the pathway test, 82-84% follow from reports lumping the portfolio together and 16-18% from a missing curve in the pathway library. The obstacle is the reporting unit, not missing data. The rate is roughly twice as high for European as for US listings (65-71% versus 35% in listed real estate). We also show that a US portfolio's carbon verdict cannot be worked out from disclosure at all. Within one climate zone, the pathway's carbon limit varies by up to 2.79-fold with the electricity subregion, which no report names; its energy limit does not move. Extraction is checked against the source PDFs (97.3% of extracted intensities appear verbatim) and repeats on a second extractor (kappa = 0.97). Recall of the non-disclosing class was 95.1% in a blinded hand audit of 122 reports. The fix follows from the measurement: split intensity by asset type and jurisdiction, and report floor area.
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BibTeX
@misc{xu2026printed,
title = {{Printed but not benchmarkable: most building-decarbonisation disclosure cannot be matched to the pathways that stranding regulation assumes}},
author = {Jingyi Xu and Minghui Cheng and Anchen Sun},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2607.22006},
eprint = {2607.22006},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22006},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Printed but not benchmarkable: most building-decarbonisation disclosure cannot be matched to the pathways that stranding regulation assumes
AU - Jingyi Xu
AU - Minghui Cheng
AU - Anchen Sun
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/22
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2607.22006
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22006
AB - Cities are beginning to enforce carbon limits on existing buildings. Science-based decarbonisation pathways set those limits one asset type and one jurisdiction at a time. Owners, however, report for the whole firm. We measure what that mismatch costs on two sets of public corporate reports: a census of 502 reports from the 119 listed built-environment firms with a collected report inside a 2,246-firm panel (2003-2023), and 519 real-estate reports from 101 firms (2007-2024). BeDA, a multimodal language-model tool whose reliability we test first, read them. Running the pathway frameworks' own entry tests over published disclosure: 16.5% of census reports (43.7% of real-estate reports) print an operational carbon intensity per square metre; 6.6% (25.0%) can be matched to a pathway for their property type in a covered jurisdiction; and only 5.0% (16.4%) disclose the floor area they divided by. Of the failures at the pathway test, 82-84% follow from reports lumping the portfolio together and 16-18% from a missing curve in the pathway library. The obstacle is the reporting unit, not missing data. The rate is roughly twice as high for European as for US listings (65-71% versus 35% in listed real estate). We also show that a US portfolio's carbon verdict cannot be worked out from disclosure at all. Within one climate zone, the pathway's carbon limit varies by up to 2.79-fold with the electricity subregion, which no report names; its energy limit does not move. Extraction is checked against the source PDFs (97.3% of extracted intensities appear verbatim) and repeats on a second extractor (kappa = 0.97). Recall of the non-disclosing class was 95.1% in a blinded hand audit of 122 reports. The fix follows from the measurement: split intensity by asset type and jurisdiction, and report floor area.
ER -