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Company highlights:
Committed to achieving carbon neutrality, a category-leading e-commerce platform set ambitious science-based climate action targets to reduce its environmental impact. Specifically, they aim to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 80%, and own-brand Scope 3 emissions by 40%, all by 2025. But how are they planning to reach these goals?
For several years, the company had been using consulting services and spreadsheets to track its carbon footprint. Over time, their sustainability lead realised that this approach was insufficient for accurately measuring progress towards such ambitious targets. The process was disconnected, opaque, heavily dependent on manual data entry, and too slow. With 20,000 employees, operations in more than 20 active markets, and a large variety of use cases for carbon insights, a standard carbon accounting tool would not be able to handle the company’s complexity. They concluded that the most future-proof approach was to bring this capability and expertise in-house.
“No large company would outsource their whole financial accounting expertise, so why do it for a similarly sensitive issue: carbon accounting?” — Senior Manager for Data & Analytics
Similar to financial data, carbon emissions constitute a critical business metric. This means the company prioritises it on the same level as existing core KPIs. It aims to enable every single team on the ground to receive the insights they need to make emission-reducing decisions. For instance, the logistics team is looking to reduce operational shipment emissions, while the procurement team is asking for order-level insights into the carbon emissions of their purchased raw materials.
For the new setup, the team defined a number of requirements:
To solve this challenge, the company is building up an industry-leading centralised sustainability data hub at its heart. The data hub takes in all relevant data points across operational divisions, enriches the data with carbon insights, and feeds the results back to different teams where it’s used for reporting, scenario planning, integration into operational systems, and decision processes. And it’s all done without teams having to worry about data collection, cleaning, and transformation.
Project Team:
One of the biggest challenges in designing the sustainability data hub was figuring out how to provide a carbon insight layer. Instead of sinking internal resources into time-intensive and error-prone manual selection and emission factor mapping, the team wanted a partner that could provide access to robust, transparent emission data across all relevant emission areas via a scalable API. Climatiq was the perfect fit.
“Climatiq got us closer to what we needed immediately — reliable, manageable, and well-documented emission factors with rich metadata.” — Senior Manager for Data & Analytics
Based on the company’s data strategy and the possibilities enabled by Climatiq’s carbon calculation engine, the following setup is now being implemented by the data and analytics team:
Setting up this kind of data management system requires assembling a multidisciplinary team, designing a scalable architecture, and breaking down complex workflows into smaller projects to allow for continuous improvement. While this might sound like a heavy commitment, after just a few months, the benefits already clearly outweigh the costs. Here’s what they already have in place:
Has all this got you thinking about how to best set up your own organisation’s carbon management system? Contact Climatiq to learn more about how you and your team can accelerate your net-zero journey by automating emission management and creating carbon transparency within your company. Get started today for a greener tomorrow.
