Peer benchmarking is one of the most requested outputs of a disclosure review and one of the easiest to get wrong. Each figure may be accurate and the comparison still mislead. Before putting two numbers next to each other, check six things.
1. Units
Emissions appear in tonnes, thousands of tonnes and kilograms of CO₂ equivalent; energy in megawatt-hours, gigajoules and gigawatt-hours. Convert to a single unit before comparing, and show the conversion. One megawatt-hour is 3.6 gigajoules — small conversion errors are a common source of apparent conflicts.
2. Reporting periods
A company with a financial year ending in March reports a period that overlaps two calendar years. Its “FY2025” runs from April 2024 to March 2025. Comparing it with a calendar-year company is often unavoidable, but the difference should be stated beside the figure rather than hidden.
3. Consolidation approach
The GHG Protocol allows emissions to be consolidated by operational control, financial control or equity share. The same group can report materially different totals under each. A benchmark should record each company's approach and flag differences.
4. Scope 2 method
Scope 2 emissions can be calculated on a location basis, using average grid factors, or on a market basis, reflecting contractual instruments such as power purchase agreements. A market-based figure is often much lower. Compare like with like, and label any figure whose method is not stated.
5. Source quality
A value read from a scanned appendix, or one that differs between a company's own documents, deserves a caveat. In Veridion, values read by OCR carry their confidence, and companies whose documents disagree are flagged in the benchmark.
6. Missing is not zero
The most damaging error is the quietest: treating an undisclosed metric as zero, or as poor performance. A company that has not quantified Scope 3 emissions has a disclosure gap, not small value-chain emissions. Show it as “not disclosed”.
Putting it into practice
In Veridion's peer view, every cell carries its value in a common unit, its period and its source page, followed by notes for each of the checks above that applies. The overall verdict for each metric — directly comparable, limited comparability, or insufficient disclosure — is stated in words, because a chart alone cannot carry the caveats.