Tackling Scope 3 from a different direction

Here’s the intro from this “Bloomberg Green” article by Alastair Marsh:

The greenhouse gases produced by customers and supply chains typically account for more than 70% of a company’s carbon footprint. This reality means companies cannot credibly pledge to address their environmental impact without tackling this massive source of emissions, known as Scope 3.
At the same time, problematic data issues attached to Scope 3 emissions have become legendary while some have argued companies have limited ability to influence their value chains anyway. The complexity of the topic, unsurprisingly, has proven to be a barrier for some companies trying to set net-zero targets.

But the Science Based Targets initiative, the world’s largest verifier of corporate climate goals, said we may be looking at the issue the wrong way. In a paper published this week, SBTi put forward a possible new approach aimed at enabling companies to “better assess and communicate their climate performance” in a way that goes beyond simply disclosing aggregate Scope 3 emissions.

Specifically, SBTi is exploring how to include new metrics that evaluate the alignment of a company’s procurement and revenue generation with global climate goals. Corporate Scope 3 targets “can serve as a powerful mechanism to integrate our global climate goals into the core of the economy” by focusing on how companies source goods and produce income, SBTi said.

The idea is to measure how “operational expenditure is directed towards and revenue is derived from entities, activities, commodities, products and services that have achieved a level of emissions performance compatible with reaching net-zero emissions,” SBTi said.