The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) announced today the launch of the Carbon Transparency Pathfinder, an initiative aiming to enable Scope 3 emissions transparency and accelerate decarbonization through the widescale exchange of primary, carbon emissions data.
The WBCSD is a global, CEO-led organization of over 200 leading businesses, representing combined revenue of more than USD $8.5 trillion and 19 million employees, working together to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world. According to WBCSD, the new Pathfinder initiative is being introduced to help address key challenges that companies face in their decarbonization efforts, including a lack of consistent methodology to calculate and allocate GHG emissions, a lack of accurate and granular product-specific data on GHG emissions, and complex value chains with only limited inter-organizational emissions data exchange.
To address these issues, the initiative includes a comprehensive methodology and technical infrastructure for sharing granular, consistent and verified product-level data on primary emissions across value chains. The methodology will build on and improve existing emissions reporting standards to increase consistency, granularity and integration of emissions data, while the technical infrastructure will set standards for inoperability between company and industry-level solutions, enabling all businesses to advance wide-scale, consistent and safe exchange of emissions data towards achieving net zero.
John Revess, Senior Director, Net Zero Transformation at WBCSD, said:
“Carbon transparency can only be achieved by broad collaboration between a diverse range of experts from business, science and technology. The Carbon Transparency Pathfinder is creating a broad ecosystem committed to defining a model for all business to exchange carbon data and accelerate our shift to a sustainable, carbon neutral economy.”
According to WBCSD, the initiative started with the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry, and it will to scale into new connected and independent sectors, building a cross-sector ecosystem committed to carbon transparency. Several companies supported the Pathfinder initiative, including Dow, Unilever, Nestlé, BASF and Chevron.
Joanna Fowler, Global IT Sustainability Manager at Nestlé, said:
“We recognize that we cannot solve what cannot be measured and tracked. This is why we are actively engaging in the Carbon Transparency Pathfinder to collectively develop a transparent solution to share primary data along sectoral value chains and ultimately decarbonize industries at scale. There is an urgent need for an ecosystem of committed companies and stakeholders to tackle this planetary issue and we are excited to contribute to this global transformation.”
Mary Draves, Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President of Environment, Health and Safety at Dow, added:
“Dow is highly committed to collaborating across the value chain to drive transparency and consistency of product carbon footprint reporting. We’re supportive of efforts such as the Carbon Transparency Pathfinder to address a systematic approach to data collection and calculation methodologies based on broad stakeholder consensus. Consolidated and consistent external reporting standards will allow for comparable and decision-useful data for investors, customers and other stakeholders; and it will facilitate data exchanges that support decarbonizing the value chain.”
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