Leonardo Centre Chemicals Decarbonisation Lab

The Chemicals Decarbonisation Lab aims to design, test, and scale market-based mechanisms – particularly insetting and book-and-claim systems – for the credible decarbonisation of the chemical sector. Our central question is: How can we create a trusted, transparent market architecture that incentivises low-carbon production across complex, global hard-to-abate value chains? 

Key themes and objectives

The chemical sector faces deep barriers to decarbonisation: high capital intensity, long asset lifecycles, fragmented value chains, and misaligned incentives. Emissions sit upstream while pressure concentrates downstream, creating accountability gaps.

Through this lab, we are building mechanisms to track and reward low-carbon production within supply chains, ensuring environmental credibility and downstream uptake, and thus overcoming the system-wide inertia blocking climate action.