CarbonCount metric sets industry standard for gauging true impact of green investments

Deutsche Bank on Tuesday became the first company to use the Alliance to Save Energy’s CarbonCount metric system, which provides a wide-scale ranking system that organizations can use to determine the true level of eco-friendly investments.

CarbonCount is a scoring and certification system that gives investors and stakeholders transparency about the true cost and potential impact of green investments.

Deutsche Bank was the first company to use the CarbonCount scoring system to rank green loans issued for the company’s HA Rooftop I, LLC, residential solar loan program. By using the scoring system, the bank found that 0.18 tons of carbon are reduced for each $1,000 of the asset’s value.

“The beauty of the CarbonCount scoring tool is that it provides a single, key metric for determining the ‘shade of green’ of an investment,” Alliance to Save Energy President Kateri Callahan said. “CarbonCount certification holds the promise of providing markets with an analytically robust but readily understood standard to compare the environmental performance of varying investments made through green loans and bonds.”
 
The CarbonCount certification could be groundbreaking in the finance industry by providing a quantifiable measure by which investors and stakeholders can see the actual impact of investments. Such a quantifiable measure could also increase green investments, furthering the U.S. green initiative to decrease carbon emissions and fight global warming.