Leading carbon accounting engine Normative has launched Engage, a suite of features that enable enterprise businesses to collect primary emissions data from suppliers throughout their value chains.
“We started to work with Normative to get an accurate representation of our full carbon footprint throughout our value chain to identify impactful reductions for our business. Armed with a comprehensive and detailed overview of our full emissions, we’re able to pinpoint high-emitting products and suppliers, helping the wider business to make strategic decisions to decarbonise our activities,” says Isaac Pelham-Chipper at The Restaurant Group, a customer of Normative and one of the UK’s biggest hospitality businesses with a portfolio operating approximately 400 restaurants including Wagamama and Frankie & Benny’s.
For most enterprises, around 90% of emissions can be found in the value chain. Value chain emissions – classified as scope 3 emissions by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol – include a business’s direct suppliers, service providers, investments, and other upstream and downstream activities. For an enterprise to make significant emissions reductions, it must focus on reducing value chain emissions.
Normative Engage empowers enterprises to collect primary emissions data from their entire value chain with consistency and scientific rigor.
- Collect supplier data – Businesses can invite their top-emitting suppliers to share primary carbon data in a Greenhouse Gas Protocol-aligned format.
- Engage suppliers in reduction – After collecting supplier emissions data, businesses can examine which suppliers have the highest potential for reductions, determine realistic reduction actions for those suppliers, and support suppliers that are early in their net-zero journeys.
- Connected calculations – By integrating primary supplier data, businesses can refine their carbon footprint calculations to pinpoint targeted opportunities for emissions reduction and verify the impact of those initiatives over time.
The size and complexity of global value chains and the inconsistency of supplier carbon data have been significant barriers to calculating scope 3 emissions with consistency and scientific rigor. Enterprises have grappled with the time-consuming process of manually engaging with suppliers and synthesizing different kinds of supplier reporting. Moreover, incorrect or incomplete carbon data can lead to risks involving compliance, procurement, and brand reputation.
“Normative has greatly improved the way we engage our suppliers and collect emissions data. The simplicity of the supplier engagement module has made it easier to bring our suppliers into our net-zero journey, no matter how mature they are in their own climate work,” says Kirsten Motyl Senior ESG Officer at The Pebble Group, one of the early users of the new suite of features.
With scalable solutions for collecting scope 3 data, Normative Engage delivers actionable insight into the environmental impacts of the enterprise value chain. The level of granularity in the carbon data ensures high-quality reporting and long-term compliance. The detailed supplier analysis can be used for proactive decision-making in procurement and to prepare for audits. These insights can also support value chain engagement initiatives, leading to emissions reduction, innovation in sustainable operations, and progress towards net zero.
“The effort to source value chain data manually has been a huge barrier to accurate carbon calculation and reduction,“ says Kristian Rönn, CEO and co-founder of Normative. “Primary data, straight from the source, is the best way to achieve calculations that are detailed enough to uncover value chain insights, boost reduction initiatives, and catalyze new business opportunities as the world transitions to a net-zero economy.”
Scope 3 is just one part of an enterprise’s carbon footprint. To ensure complete coverage across all scopes, Normative’s calculation engine draws from millions of environmental data points and intakes financial data, material usage, business activities – and now primary supplier data – to deliver an exceptionally accurate carbon calculation. The granularity and detail in Normative carbon accounting ensures it can be used for reporting, compliance, and business innovation.
With this release, Normative continues to deliver solutions that facilitate accurate emissions calculation as well as expert knowledge that empowers businesses to take significant emissions reduction actions.
Find out more here.
