With better carbon accounting, the same can and should be true for emissions. No company would launch a new product, make a strategic decision, or make capital investments without fully understanding the financial implications. For companies to make good on these commitments and know where to focus their reduction efforts, they need emerging carbon accounting systems to understand their current emissions and the broader climate impacts of their decisions. While informed by earlier forms of accounting, a new set of carbon-specific building blocks is needed to allow buyers and sellers, auditors and entrepreneurs, software companies, and sustainability professionals to build and deploy interoperable systems that are as accurate and ubiquitous as those for traditional accounting.Īs climate awareness increases along with social and regulatory pressure, over 800 of the largest publicly traded companies have made net-zero commitments to reduce their emissions. And though we are beginning to see more efforts like RMI’s steel emissions accounting guidance, efforts at the product level are only just beginning to take shape. However, carbon accounting at the company level has only been around for about 20 years. Accounting does not just predate writing, it is why writing was invented: the earliest written artifacts, such as the cuneiform clay tablet pictured above, were records of commodity trading. Traditional accounting took around 5,000 years to evolve. This brief describes how making data comparable, interoperable, and machine-readable is necessary and explores how data standards, open-source collaboration models, and enlisting the support of the software industry are the means to achieve it. These standards were successful in part because the largest technology companies contributed to and supported them.Ĭarbon data standards and the technologies based on them can have a similar catalyzing effect on our ability to use data to reduce emissions, and this needs to be accelerated if we are to achieve the results we need in the time we have. The browser wars played out over six years and ended only when standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and ECMA defined standards that, among other things, made conformant websites interoperable across browsers. Making emissions data interoperable and comparable via open standards is an absolute requirement if we are to lower greenhouse gas emissions and secure a clean, prosperous, zero-carbon future.
In much of the world, the lazy days of summer are now danger season. Research conclusively ties disastrous floods across Pakistan, droughts across the northern hemisphere, extreme heat and drought in China, and rapid intensification of hurricanes, among many other calamities, to climate change.
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