The move towards net zero carbon emissions has become a top priority for businesses around the world.

With stricter climate-related legislation and the increasing demand for environmentally responsible actions, an organisation's carbon footprint has a direct impact on its ability to attract and retain customers. As the frequency of extreme weather events only continues to raise public awareness of climate change, we are seeing the importance of sustainability gaining more attention in the corporate world.

What is net zero?

Taking a step back, net zero is when an organisation not only reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, but also ensures that any ongoing emissions created are balanced by activities to remove emissions, therefore zeroing out the impact on the environment. Reducing emissions helps to lower global warming, and this is the best way to tackle climate change.

The challenges with attaining emissions data

Data plays a crucial role in addressing the current climate crisis. It not only highlights the need for urgent action, but also enables it. Data-driven decisions can help organisations make significant progress towards achieving net zero targets, rather than simply making commitments.

However, collecting comprehensive and reliable data to measure emissions in an automated way can be a major challenge for many companies. The process of manually entering data into spreadsheets is time-consuming, and difficulties with data collection and fragmentation can result in inaccurate data.

In addition to this, the increasing need to measure indirect supplier emissions further complicates the issue. Emissions measurement is evolving from ‘core operations’ measurement to full value chain measurement with a focus on completeness and coverage to improve data quality over time. This requires organisations to shift from a spend-based methodology to physical quantities and supplier-specific data.

Obtaining data directly from suppliers provides the most accurate information, but it can also be the most time-consuming due to manual data ingestion processes. Often there are no APIs for integration due to legacy databases, or supply of this type of data is a low priority for suppliers. To overcome these challenges, there are now value chain data approaches that use predictive models to estimate emissions more accurately in your value chain. This helps companies focus their efforts on the highest-emitting areas of their business.

Introducing Footprint

At Data Insight, we have been using our data and analytics expertise to help companies on their footprint measurement and reduction journey. Data Insight has developed Footprint, an automated solution that measures your carbon footprint and reduces the time and resources required to create your carbon inventory.

Footprint supports businesses at all stages of their data maturity journey, enabling you to move from fragmented data to integrated and automated data solutions. It helps organisations understand their underlying emissions drivers and reduction opportunities, creates visually appealing infographics to drive sustainability awareness, includes a pre-built library of reduction initiatives, and produces audit-ready outputs for certification.

Data is a crucial but often problematic aspect of a company's journey towards net zero. Footprint streamlines this process, and our team is ready to demonstrate its benefits to you.

Contact us today for more information or to request a demo of Footprint.