Calculating data and reporting Scope 3 carbon emissions is a crucial step in determining the environmental impact and the sustainability of an organisation’s operations. At the same time, it is one of the biggest hurdles for businesses because these emissions are largely out of their control.
Additionally, reporting Scope 3 emissions is getting even more critical for companies. It can open up new avenues for increasing their environmental impact and demonstrating an engagement with sustainability and responsible governance.
This was one of the main topics of Reuters IMPACT. ESGnews.bg is a media partner of the event.
Sandra Latner, Vice President of Sustainability and Social Innovation at Pearson and Anthony D’Arcy, Head of ESG Enablement and Communications at Nokia, participated in the discussion.
Changing conventions in data and sustainability reporting
The thing that changed is the understanding of what we wanted to measure, what we measure at the moment and how we are measuring it. And when I say ‘measuring at the moment’ I don’t mean how we measure it internally. Most companies measure a lot of things internally. The real challenge is collecting data on the labor force in the supply chain, which is not under our control, “ said Anthony D’Arcy, head of ESG at Nokia.
He pointed out that there is a lot of time before companies need to start collecting quality data. Meanwhile, the tech industry has a very long and complicated supply chain.
You spend 10 years training suppliers – what is data, how to measure it, what is it used for, how to set up goals, how you track those goals. All these things take years to build until, at some point, we can call the data that we have ‘stable’. In some regions we can go to the mineral mines and look at the social aspect of the mine, the workers and the labor, modern slavery… all those things. We need to become much more transparent for the entire process,” he continued.
According to D’Arcy, one of the main supply chain challenges is to analyze who has the incentive and who is causing the problem.
The technology we deliver touches the end user, so it’s important to who you’re selling to. You have human rights and rigorous checks so that no one can misuse our technology in a given situation.”
The right partners
Sandra Latner, Vice President of Sustainability and Social Innovation at Pearson underlined the need to find the right partners.
For us, financial institutions are a key partner in the transition, but also the strategy and finding the right partners. You need to look at a new skillset, that we do not have. We are all learning together and have different skills that we can use to tackle the problem.” she said.
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