CEI Seminar - November 2026

Financial statements are built around time — they tell us what happened in the past, what’s happening now, and what’s expected in the future. But greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting doesn’t work that way. Current methods add up emissions from across a product’s entire life cycle, blurring the lines between past, present, and future. That makes it hard for investors and decision-makers to see when emissions actually occur or to link them to financial performance and risk. The impact: roughly $1 trillion of climate-related investments could be being misallocated.

This talk will introduce General-Purpose Life Cycle Assessment (GP-LCA), a new way to align environmental reporting with financial reporting. GP-LCA treats carbon and energy data the way financial statements treat money: with a carbon balance sheet for past emissions, carbon releases and withdrawals for the present, and a carbon pro forma for the future.

By borrowing the data structure of financial accounting, this framework lets us synchronize environmental data across time and disciplines. The result is a clearer picture of how today’s business and engineering choices shape tomorrow’s climate outcomes. GP-LCA offers a foundation for more coordinated action between finance, sustainability, and technology, and opens exciting new directions for climate research and reporting.

About Jimmy Jia:

Jimmy is the Lead, Saïd Business School–Smith School Initiatives at the University of oxford. He researches the accounting systems behind climate and finance, especially how energy and carbon move through financial transactions and build up as assets and liabilities on corporate balance sheets. He has sat on the technical advisory committee during the recent refresh of the GRI climate standard, an editor at Carbon Management, the Chair of the Centre for Sustainable Energy, a San Diego-based company that is decarbonizing California’s transportation system, and a Fellow at Chapter Zero. He received his BS and MS in Material Science and Engineering from MIT and an MBA and DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Location: SWIOT Computer Lab, University of Exeter, Streatham Campus
Date: 18 November 2026
Time: 15:00-16:30

This is an in-person seminar. Refreshments will be provided.