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About scope 3 emissions, and how primary data helps decarbonize.
Learn about scope 3 emissions and how real, primary data from lane-level assets can transform your company’s strategies to decarbonize.
Whether you’re a sustainability executive, transportation leader, or a procurement officer, contributing to enterprise environment and sustainability goals has always been challenging — but is becoming increasingly necessary. To reach your company’s sustainability ambitions, you’ve likely turned toward tackling the largest contributor to your organization’s environmental impact: carbon emissions.
According to Deloitte, scope 3 emissions could be responsible for most of your company’s carbon emissions. But, scope 3 emissions are hard to track. Without shipper and carrier primary data from lane-level assets, it becomes difficult to generate solid insights about your company’s carbon emissions. You’re also stuck in a never-ending cycle of estimation — instead of taking stronger action toward understanding and delivering on your sustainability goals. Real, primary data is the key to measuring, managing, and executing successful decarbonization programs.
In this article, we’ll provide an overview of scope 3 emissions and explain how you can use primary data to decarbonize your supply chain.
Unpacking scope 3 emissions.
Scope 3 emissions are the indirect greenhouse gas emissions that are not directly produced by your company’s operations (scope 1) or from the energy your company purchases (scope 2). They result from your company’s activities elsewhere in the value chain. These emissions can be upstream, such as the extraction and production of purchased goods or materials, and downstream, like the consumption, transportation, and distribution of products.
The complexity of scope 3 emissions tracking.
Because they result from activities not directly under your company’s control, scope 3 emissions are complex to measure, let alone manage. Despite this, understanding and reducing scope 3 emissions is critical for your company to fully address its climate impact, improve sustainability practices, and meet regulatory or voluntary carbon reduction targets. Successfully tracking scope 3 emissions requires a comprehensive view of your company’s supply chain and the life cycle of your products and collaboration with suppliers to implement effective management strategies to decarbonize. But most of the tools available use vague averages of averages, making scope 3 emissions tracking more about approximations and less about concrete insights that can lead to action. When gathering real numbers about carbon emissions, mainstream industry solutions just don’t cut it.
The real value of primary data.
In the past, companies have relied on estimations and averages, making educated shots in the dark about their scope 3 emissions. In your efforts to decarbonize, you might have run into management frustrations about a lack of true scope 3 emissions visibility because they are so indirect. But what if there was a way to stop guessing? What if supply chain and logistics leaders could pool their data in one place, giving their company access to solid and concrete numbers?
Primary data enables your company to precisely and proactively chart its emissions landscape, identifying actual vulnerabilities and opportunities for action. This level of insight, grounded in primary and industry-specific data, transforms the abstract challenge of scope 3 emissions into a tangible, actionable, and achievable agenda. Not only that, but your reports for corporate compliance will be more accurate — solidifying your sustainability reputation both in the eyes of your customers and your own corporate sustainability goals.
GreenSight: Powered by primary data.
Scope23 — a technology company dedicated to making decarbonization easy — built GreenSight, an emissions management solution, to fuse the power of AI and real, primary data. This platform takes the guesswork out of tracking your scope 3 emissions and fortifies your efforts to decarbonize with data-backed, concrete, and actionable insights.
You can track your scope 3 emissions more accurately, compare your environmental impact with other like-sized companies in your industry, and receive customized recommendations to decarbonize your supply chain. GreenSight is the ultimate emissions management decision engine to track, benchmark, and act on your scope 3 emissions — all in one platform.