Our research spans climate technology innovation, corporate decarbonisation, and carbon markets.
Development and diffusion of climate technologies by entrepreneurs, corporations, and governments.
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Corporate net-zero commitments and whether company strategies lead to real emission reductions.
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Integrity and impact of compliance and voluntary carbon markets, and their role in corporate and government climate strategies.
Read more ↓Close ↑Understanding climate innovation at a global yet granular level requires new data sources that go beyond traditional datasets. We need real-time information that spans the full range of innovation activities, from early-stage R&D to large-scale deployment, across countries and technologies.
In recent work, we used large language models to analyse 26 million LinkedIn posts, constructing a global network of 166,459 organisations and 442,250 collaborations representing approximately 1.4 million direct partnerships across 189 countries. The dataset spans 27 climate technologies and 17 collaboration types, from demonstration projects and product launches to adoption decisions and equity investments, providing an unprecedented view of how climate technologies move from concept to deployment.
This work establishes a scalable methodology for real-time monitoring of innovation ecosystems. We are now pursuing dedicated downstream projects that apply this methodology, such as:
These projects demonstrate how network analysis can provide early warning signals of ecosystem fragmentation or how incumbent interests shape innovation systems.
View publications →Achieving net-zero emissions requires not just the development of novel technologies but their widespread deployment. Firms are among the most important adopters of these technologies. This deployment demands corporate transformations that are fundamentally different from past environmental initiatives: more comprehensive, more radical, and unfolding over longer planning horizons than most previous environmental targets.
Yet we lack empirical evidence on whether the drivers of incremental environmental innovation, such as regulatory pressure, stakeholder demands, and competitive advantage, are sufficient to drive the revolutionary changes required for net zero. More critically, we lack methods to systematically assess whether corporate climate commitments translate into genuine strategic transformation or merely sophisticated greenwashing.
Our research tackles this challenge by developing scalable approaches to analyse corporate climate strategies across thousands of companies over time. Using large language models, we extract and classify climate innovation initiatives from corporate sustainability and annual reports, enabling systematic tracking of both the quantity and quality of corporate climate action. We are now pursuing dedicated downstream projects that connect corporate disclosures to actual emissions outcomes:
Carbon crediting mechanisms are a rapidly growing form of carbon pricing, aiming to channel billions of dollars into mitigation projects, and are increasingly central to corporate and governmental climate strategies. Yet fundamental doubts persist about their environmental integrity. Do carbon credits represent real, additional emission reductions, and do they deliver the promised co-benefits to local communities?
Our research provides the first systematic evaluation of these questions at scale. In a 2024 Nature Communications study, we synthesised evidence from rigorous experimental and observational studies covering 2,346 carbon mitigation projects. The analysis encompasses nearly 1 billion tons of CO₂e, approximately one-fifth of all credits issued to date. We demonstrated that less than 16% of carbon credits issued to the investigated projects constitute real emission reductions, with substantial variation across project types. These results raise fundamental questions about the integrity of corporate net-zero strategies that rely heavily on offsets.
We are now pursuing dedicated downstream projects:
We translate our findings into tools, programmes, and publications that reach policymakers, entrepreneurs, and the broader public.
We co-run ACRA, a 6-month accelerator supporting carbon dioxide removal startups in Sub-Saharan Africa, together with remove, sus.lab (ETH Zurich), Strathmore University, and Nuvoni.
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Ben Probst and Marian Krüger authored Race to Zero, a book on negative emissions and carbon removal. The book was launched at a parliamentary breakfast on Negative Emissions at the German Bundestag.
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An open, research-based assessment of carbon credit quality, drawing on studies covering nearly 1 billion tons of CO₂e. Based on our research published in Nature Communications.
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