As climate disclosure requirements, reporting frameworks, and stakeholder expectations evolve, financial firms are facing increased pressures to account for, reduce, and report their carbon impact. Data shows that 2023 saw the biggest ever yearly uptick in disclosure requirements, which now cover much of the global financial system. The map from UNCTAD below shows the global spread of disclosure requirements.
Record level of new sustainable finance policy measures and regulations adopted in selected economies, in 2023
Source - https://gsfo.org/sustainable-finance-regulations-platform
Fundamentally, disclosure requirements are a question of data. Public and private markets face similar but distinctly different challenges, with data in private markets being much more difficult to access.
Generally, public markets offer more reliable and accessible ESG data due to regulatory requirements like CSRD, TCFD, and SFDR, in which companies are obligated to disclose standardised sustainability metrics, often with third-party assurance, making it easier for investors to evaluate ESG performance and align with regulatory frameworks.
In contrast, private markets face significant data challenges, where ESG information is often missing, inconsistent, or self-reported without assurance. Data must be manually collected through LP–GP relationships, with limited visibility into underlying portfolio companies. As a result, aligning private market investments with disclosure requirements-such as SFDR or the EU Taxonomy-is more complex, resource-intensive, and often reliant on estimates.
S&P Global have estimated that private markets are projected to reach more than $15 trillion by 2025, and more than $18 trillion by 2027 (2024). In practice, this indicates that a huge amount of AUM will face difficulties in the acquisition and application of its sustainability data, both from an investment and reporting perspective. This is troubling for both the asset management industry and sustainable finance objectives more broadly. Without access to quality and timely data, how can firms begin to both understand the impacts of their activities and make the necessary adjustments to move that activity towards net-zero.
The challenge rests in solving these issues of data acquisition, accuracy, and application. Part of the answer lies in the use of tech or data solutions designed to solve some of these problems. But even then, an increasingly disparate and complex landscape of solutions brings its own challenges.
The proliferation of different solutions should be seen as a net positive, precisely because it is the market responding to perceived needs by solving specific problems, but at a technical level, the use of different systems to achieve different goals can be expensive, time confusing, and confusing to use-especially if rotating back and forth between systems.
Harvest is Dasseti’s platform for ESG and carbon data collection, designed specifically for private markets. It enables GPs, LPs, and portfolio companies to exchange emissions data through structured, auditable, and highly customizable templates. At its core is direct data collection, which improves data fidelity and auditability.
Harvest also utilizes AI powered functionalities to expedite and simplify the process of data exchange. SmartDocs, our document scraping tool, can extract any relevant datapoint-both qualitative and quantitative-from unstructured and complex files, allowing institutions to collect data from sustainability reports, utility bills, or internal disclosures without requiring portfolio companies to manually re-enter the information.
Each data point in Harvest is stored alongside metadata that tracks its source, the calculation method used, and its verification status. This structure allows institutions to align their datasets with the PCAF Data Quality Score framework, whilst also helping internal reviewers and third-party auditors trace data inputs back to their origin, enhancing trust and transparency, as well as accuracy.
Recognising that not all emissions data is available or reliable, Harvest supports a tiered methodology for carbon accounting. This ensures maximum coverage while prioritising accuracy where possible.
Tier 1: Direct Emissions Data
Harvest allows portfolio companies to input directly measured data-such as litres of fuel consumed, kWh of electricity, or refrigerant leakage. This represents the highest quality of emissions data.
Tier 2: Activity-Based Estimation
Where direct data isn’t available-especially for early-stage or pre-revenue companies- Harvest offers activity-based estimation via its carbon calculator. This approach uses operational inputs like office size, energy usage, or employee commuting patterns to estimate emissions. These methods are scientifically grounded and provide a defensible proxy in the absence of primary data.
Tier 3: Revenue-Based Estimation
Finally, where neither direct nor activity-based data is accessible, Harvest partners with public proxy data providers to estimate emissions using revenue-based sectoral benchmarks. These models-augmented by machine learning-can fill reporting gaps for hard-to-engage companies or for those that do not or cannot report, particularly for Scope 3 emissions.
By combining these three approaches, institutions can balance coverage and precision, while aligning with regulatory expectations around transparency, data quality, and methodology disclosure.
Standalone carbon tools, even if technically sophisticated, often require duplicate data entry or reconciliation with other platforms. However, accuracy in carbon calculation relies on context, timing, and auditability. With that in mind, Harvest was specifically designed to be an integrated system that ensures carbon calculation data sits alongside the movement of broader ESG data, allowing for intuitive, timely, and cohesive analysis, unified data validation processes, and simplified portfolio-level aggregation, analysis, and reporting- all in the one platform.
In practice, this means simplified working processes, less fragmented use of data solutions, and time freed up for impactful work such as engagement or analysis.
The evolving carbon accounting landscape and complexities of private market data sourcing requires solutions that can adapt to changing regulatory requirements, emerging methodologies, and new ways of thinking. Harvest's platform architecture was designed with this in mind.
At its core, Harvest incorporates mechanisms for continuous adaptation through configurable calculation methodologies, customizable data questionnaires and exchange, flexible reporting formats, and regular updates to emission factors and compliance features. All of this makes sure that you stay future ready with your climate goals in a rapidly changing marketplace.
Sources
https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/market-insights/private-markets#:~:text=Private%20markets%20are%20projected%20to%20reach%20more%20than,likely%20to%20expand%20in%20both%20number%20and%20leverage
https://gsfo.org/sustainable-finance-regulations-platform