Carbon Accounting Conference 2026

The Carbon Accounting Alliance (CAA) annual conference’s purpose is to inspire a radical acceleration of climate impact within the carbon accounting industry. It will bring together thought leaders, academics, experts and professionals together through a series of technical, challenging and collaborative sessions.

The event is designed for those with experience in measuring carbon emissions, whether that be in an in-house sustainability role, an independent or a service provider. The agenda is still being designed, in collaboration with our community.

We want to make meaningful progress as an industry, all the whilst we achieve our 3 objectives:

• Education: To ensure delegates are more informed on practical ways to have more climate impact
• Demystification: To demystify controversial topics and provide delegates with nuanced views
• Collaboration: To enable collaboration and technical alignment on key topics

The conference will be hosted in Senate House, part of the University of London, which is an iconic Grade II listed heritage site full of history and character. The event will run for the whole day and include, coffee/tea, snacks and lunch. Doors will open at 8:30am, with sessions starting around 9:30am and ending at 5pm. For those who wish there will also be networking drinks in the venue 5pm - 7pm and an afterparty from 7pm in The Chancellor's Hall, an iconic space with a wonderful grand piano on the first floor of Senate House. 

Afterparty tickets are being sold separately and will include canapés and small bowls - equivalent to a 3-course meal per person - as well as drinks and live music. 

The event is being recorded, all ticket holders, both in-person and virtual, will be given access to watch sessions back post event.

Any surplus from the event will help the CAA fulfil its mission as a non-profit.

In the afternoon, you’ll choose one of three parallel breakout tracks. Whether you want big-picture debate, practical tools you can take straight back to work, or an interactive delegate-led discussion, each track is designed to offer a different way to engage. Tracks 1 and 2 will be available for both in person and virtual attendees and Track 3 will be for in person attendees only. 

• Track 1: New Thinking
  How can we professionalise our industry whilst achieving scale?
  Carbon accounting is at a crossroads. Investors, regulators and boards increasingly expect emissions data to meet the same rigour as financial data. The launch of the RCAA professional register is a landmark step. But professionalisation creates a tension: the industry needs to scale rapidly to meet demand, yet higher standards risk creating bottlenecks. This session explores how we navigate that tension and what it means practically for everyone in the room, whether you are an independent consultant, an in-house sustainability lead, or a service provider trying to hire.
  How can we responsibly leverage AI in carbon accounting?
  AI is reshaping carbon accounting, but between the hype and the reality, what does it actually look like in practice? This session brings together a variety of voices to share real-world examples of how AI is being applied across emissions measurement, data quality, and reporting. Expect honest accounts of what is working, what is not, and where the technology genuinely accelerates progress versus where it introduces new risks around transparency and over-reliance on automated outputs.
  
• Track 2: Practical Skills 
  

  Pragmatism over perfection: how do we make PCFs work at scale?

  Product Carbon Footprints are supposed to be driving decarbonisation. Instead, for many companies, they have become a bottleneck: tangled in methodological debates, expensive, manual, and finished long after the design decisions they were meant to inform. What's the most pragmatic route to PCFs? What analysis is most useful to drive decarbonisation and when is it worth doing an LCA, vs. a quick PCF? What would it take for PCF data to aggregate reliably into a Scope 3 inventory? This session brings together a standards body, a technology provider, and a practitioner to ask what PCFs are actually for, and what has to change before the data starts changing decisions.

• Which accounting method for which decision?

• Corporate GHG inventories answer one question: what emissions should we attribute to this organisation? But that's a different question from: will this decision actually reduce emissions in the real world? In this session, Matthew walks through his thinking comparing attributional corporate accounting, consequential life cycle assessment, and project/policy-level accounting, using case studies to show where the three methods give strikingly different answers.

• Track 3: The unconference (in person only)
  A highly interactive delegate-led session where both the topics and the format are decided by popular vote. Delegates pitch ideas (30-second pitches), then vote on what to explore. The audience also chooses how each topic is discussed, whether as a panel, fishbowl, small group discussion, debate, or another format entirely. All under Chatham House Rule. Maximum 50 delegates. This session will not be recorded.

If you have any queries regarding the event or tickets, please contact events@carbonaccountingalliance.com