Climate and Sustainability Data Exchange
What is the Climate and Sustainability Data Exchange?
The Climate and Sustainability Data Exchange (CSDX) is open network for decision-grade climate and sustainability information. Built on the Decentralised Data Marketplace (DDM) vision, CSDX creates a common rail that allows any authorised actor—a supplier in Pune, a bank in Nairobi, a regulator in Brussels—to publish and access sustainability information through a common infrastructure, at near-zero marginal cost.
Like the internet or container shipping, CSDX is minimal by design. Data stays governed at source. What travels is trust: every record is digitally signed, timestamped, and linked to its origin—from a meter, an invoice, to a GST record—so it can be verified and reused across buyers, financiers, auditors, and regulators without being recreated.
CSDX serves three interconnected systems: ESG management, carbon accounting, and climate risk, turning fragmented, costly reporting into shared infrastructure that embeds sustainability into markets, regulation, and everyday decisions.
Shared rails enable us to scale climate action
Climate action is not failing due to lack of solutions: solar and wind power, regenerative agriculture, carbon markets, electric vehicles are all technologies that exist. What is missing is the data infrastructure that lets them compound.
Today, sustainability data is fragmented, expensive to access, and fragile in trust. The same factory reports “Scope 3 Category 1” differently for a buyer questionnaire, a CDP survey, and a BRSR Core disclosure. Smaller suppliers-a textile unit in Coimbatore, a garment exporter in Ho Chi Minh City-lack the tools, incentives, and support to participate at all. Capital is mispriced, supply chains are invisible, and progress remains unknown.
Shared infrastructure is how systems scale. Standardised track gauges connected continents. The ISO container collapsed freight costs. TCP/IP made the internet universal. UPI made real-time payments available to anyone with a phone. Built on the shared infrastructure provided by the NFH fabric, CSDX applies the same logic to climate data by consolidating the exchange, lowering the barrier to participation, and enabling trust to compound. This drives more coverage, better models, lower cost of capital, and faster decarbonisation. Every new connection strengthens the whole.
How CSDX works
CSDX is organised around three parts. A shared infrastructure including a registry (DeDi), verifiable credentials (OpenCred), transaction protocols like Beckn, financial layers like Finternet UNITS, policy enforcement, and audit capabilities enable end-to-end , interoperable, and verifiable value transactions. A neutral network facilitator stewards standards, onboarding, and verification rules. Network participants like supply-chain actors, financial institutions, public agencies, assurance firms, and builders, connect to facilitate exchange and flow of information. These network participants could be Climate Information Providers (CIPs), Climate Information Users (CIUs), assurance providers, data and software providers, or innovation and market makers.
Join us. This is not a finished blueprint, it's an invitation to co-create!
Climate and Sustainability Data Exchange (CSDX) in action
Live, comparable Scope 3 across entire value chains
Suppliers of every size publish standardised activity records (energy, materials, transport, process outputs) once, with clear units, timestamps, and proof-of-source. Buyers subscribe to these records and assemble product-level footprints without new surveys or manual reconciliation. Disclosures become a by-product of operations, and progress can be tracked at different frequencies.
At a mid-sized auto supplier in Pune, Ravi logs his monthly diesel and electricity use into a simple mobile application. Each entry is timestamped, tagged with meter photos, and signed at source. Up the chain, Anika, a procurement lead at a global OEM, subscribes to Ravi’s records alongside hundreds of others. Her dashboard assembles product-level emissions footprints, without another round of surveys or reconciliation. At the bank, Luis runs the same data through financed-emissions models to evaluate loan terms, while Mei, a regulator, pulls verified aggregates into a national disclosure system. What once took a year of spreadsheets now flows monthly, transparently, and with built-in trust—turning routine operations into continuous Scope 3 visibility.
