If you are going to pursue sustainability, you need to eliminate your greenhouse gas emissions. This is just one of those non-negotiable things if we want to stop climate change. To reduce your emissions, you need to track your progress. You can only set goals if you have a baseline. You can only celebrate wins if you know how far you have come and how far you have to go. We need to address climate change, the biggest threat we face right now as a society and potentially a major threat to your business. However, there are business benefits to properly tracking your carbon footprint, the first step of decarbonization.

The first and most obvious is safeguarding your regulatory position. You don’t want to be caught off guard by carbon border adjustment mechanisms and other expectations that you know and are reducing your environmental footprint. As regulations move to put externalities back inside a company’s finances, you don’t want to be caught off guard. This extends to stakeholder expectations, such as investors asking for additional disclosure.

Identifying your emissions can also be a way to spot cost savings opportunities. Particularly as you start reducing scopes 1 and 2, there will be a significant amount of overlap in environmental and financial benefits. Things like preventative maintenance and fleet optimization are important considerations. Scope 3 management can lead to optimization in your supply chain, improved customer experience, and employee attraction. If you can tie environmental and financial improvement together, you will have more credit later on when the two do conflict.

Climate change can be hard for folks to grasp as it is not visual. Certainly the effects can be, as floods and wildfires have increasingly demonstrated over the past few years, but, unless you spend a lot of time in sustainability, it can be difficult to see the cause and effect of climate change. Emissions are invisible and can sound downright magical. Certainly the vocabulary in sustainability spaces can be challenging to adopt on first listen. It took me a while to get comfortable enough with science and logic of climate change to feel comfortable examining solutions. Carbon accounting gives you a number to work with, making it both more real and more immediately relevant to your business. Emissions are no longer a massive societal issue, untouchable in creation and solution. Rather, emissions are as real as the trash bags that have to be taken out and are represented in the company by payments to a waste management company. When you have the data, you can play out scenarios on how to change those numbers, real actions that you can choose to adopt or leave out. Your progress will seem real to you and to your stakeholders.