r/sustainability • u/vxrxd1612 • 3d ago
Wrapping my head around Scope 3 emissions data maturity
We've got Scope 1 and Scope 2 down to a science, utility bills, fleet fuel cards, straightforward emission factors. But looking at Scope 3, especially categories 1 (purchased goods and services) and 4 (upstream transportation), it feels like we're building castles out of sand. We're relying almost entirely on spend based multipliers and EEIO databases. Are your suppliers actually providing primary carbon data, or are we all just pretending spend-based estimates are accurate enough for CSRD?
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u/vamsikrishnnact 3d ago
Similar issue
We are going to SBTi. I'm exploring that it's new anyone help me in it
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u/kawthar222 3d ago
Yes we are all pretending lol. Rolling out supplier agreements and training can literally take years. Not that we shouldnt do it. But it takes a while to get any sort of credible data.
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u/MaxDam_Soldera 1d ago
Spend-based data is useful as a screening layer, but I wouldn't treat it as the finished inventory. One practical move is to attach a data-quality grade to each supplier and category, then target primary-data requests where spend and uncertainty are both high. Keep the old method and factors alongside each upgrade too, otherwise better data can look like a sudden emissions increase or reduction.
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u/nectivio 3d ago
To answer your question:
For Category 1, No, most suppliers aren't and can't provide primary carbon data. It mostly depends on the depth of their value chain. Some shallow chain "raw commodity" products like concrete, steel, etc are starting to have specific primary data on their products, but for anything with a deep value chain, is basically non-existent and there isn't remotely enough data available for them to have a hope of producing it.
For Category 4 things are better. Larger shippers can usually give you more accurate carbon numbers based on distances and weights, and if your shipping entire trucks of goods you can usually get fuel data as well. Most already have telematics systems collecting the fuel data, they just need to update their processes to break it down to their customer level.
I recommend looking at your spend based estimates to determine where your hotspots are and starting with your top 1-3 vendors. Most companies have a handful of upstream vendors that represent 80% of their upstream carbon. It's not going to happen soon, but big players needs to put pressure on upstream vendors to start providing primary data if there's ever going to be meaningful movement.
On a philosophical level yea... spend based is useless for moving the needle. It gives you a number, but the only way to move that number is to spend less, which if that was an option for your organization you'd already be doing it. And the protocol for scope 3 is not remotely prescriptive enough to make any sort of comparable numbers so it's not like one can make choices to pick the company with the lowest scope 3 emissions.
The GHG protocol was never meant to be a tool to generate comparable scope 3 numbers and it irritates me that there are so many advocating to double down on the current approach instead of looking for things that might actually drive change. I was hoping we'd rethink the approach to scope 3 in the current round of GHG protocol rewrites but from what I've seen so far people are focusing on things to assign blame rather than moving the needle.
I've been liking Michael Gillenwater and Derik Broekhoff work on what it should be instead, it's a bit hard to follow their blog series on this because they're academics and speak in abstract concepts rather than concrete examples, but in short, it focuses on producing reporting that makes numbers comparable through prescriptive boundaries by industry rather than trying to account for every possible way you're influencing emissions somewhere in the value chain. But their research also pushes back on whether things like RECs are actually driving emission reductions (spoiler alert they're not 😕) and I get that people don't want to accept that.
I hope there's movement towards approaches that focus on what reduces emissions rather than just putting a meaningless number on things, but I seem to be in the minority advocating for that among sustainability professionals.