LEADING Sustainability

The growing urgency around climate change has placed it at the forefront of global issues. To avoid its worst impacts, global greenhouse gas emissions must be halved by 2030 and lowered to net zero by 2050. Against this backdrop, we wanted to explore the role of data in this process. We found that the net zero ambitions that organizations have set for themselves suffer from various inadequacies. Most, for instance, fail to cover all emissions scopes. Worryingly, the coverage of scope 3 emissions, accounting for a significant 65‒95% of a company’s carbon footprint, is especially low. 

The reality for most professional services organizations engaged in supporting their clients’ business transformations is that the greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction impact that they can have with their clients can potentially be hundreds of times their own operational footprints. Created in collaboration with Forum for the Future, this report seeks to stimulate an important debate about how professional services companies and other organizations working to deliver sustainable outcomes for their clients can meaningfully measure these impacts. It introduces the GHG Impact Methodology for calculating the GHG emissions either during the design phase or at the end of a project, empowering organizations to optimize business projects and maximize their sustainability impact.