Each year organizations invest significant resources in collecting, organizing, and submitting greenhouse gas data to CDP. This enables better business decision-making by companies and their stakeholders.
Slowing climate change starts with tangible steps like this. Measuring and understanding environmental impact is how we collectively make progress toward building a sustainable economy.
Key Updates for This Year’s CDP
This year’s developments in CDP reporting focus on tracking organizations’ transition to align with a 1.5 degree world with a special focus on activities located near biodiversity-sensitive areas. By delving into organizational structure to inform emissions responsibility, accounting for emissions in subsidiaries, and building upon carbon credits and pricing, CDP continues to expand the environmental issues covered in its questionnaires.
You can find helpful information and new technical notes for annual submissions on the CDP Guidance Page.
Don’t Leave “Money on the Table”
Now is also the time to learn if your organization can boost return on investment from its CDP initiative.
For example, is this a catalyst to opt out of spreadsheets or to stop using a “bolt-on” tool not purpose-built for sustainability or carbon accounting accuracy? If you’re interested in this issue, read our related blog, Good Tidings to All: Beautiful Things Come in Smaller Packages.
Second, can the sustainability data you’re preparing for CDP reporting be used and re-used for continuous improvement towards organizational goals?
Can Scope 5 help prepare your CDP report, from data collection to submission?
Absolutely.
Scope 5 can help with these questions and others. For example, how to automate your data collection at a more granular level to drive more timely actionable insights with less effort.
Put Scope 5 to Work for You
Scope 5 helps organizations improve environmental and economic impacts by tracking progress, revealing waste, and driving action.
The benefits of using a cloud-based solution like Scope 5 are numerous:
- Take stock of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced directly (Scope 1) and indirectly (Scope 2 and 3).
- Track electricity and fuel in buildings you own and occupy, or use occupied area or other in benchmarks metrics if you’re a tenant.
- Examine GHG emissions as employees move around in aircraft, trains, buses, and cars.
- Measure the impact of indirect (Scope 3) emissions up and down the supply chain. In addition to emissions, a sustainability data platform like Scope 5 can also help you identify opportunities to improve in other areas, such as water, waste, and even social and governance sustainability metrics.
A Deeper Look at Scope 5’s Benefits
Using Scope 5 to save time and money are valuable benefits. There are others too. For example, Scope 5’s analytics can reveal powerful insights that warrant immediate action. Charting and reporting functionality help you communicate progress and drive business decisions.
For example, a user might decide to chart their facility’s energy use intensity (based on facility area) relative to other facilities. Such charts reveal outliers; facilities that are using much more energy per square foot than the average (or much less). This leads to energy and cost savings.
Another advantage of using a solution like Scope 5 is the power that comes with setting targets and modeling changes for emissions, energy, or other metrics. This helps connect the dots between targets and improvement projects, so you easily share the story with executives, customers, suppliers, investors, and citizens.
And by using a tool like Scope 5, you can move from a yearly scramble to collect and crunch data into an automated platform that always puts up-to-date emissions inventories (or other sustainability metrics) at your fingertips.
We’re Ready to Help With CDP Reporting!
If you’d like us to support your CDP reporting project, we can. If you’d like our help translating this annual effort into sustainable organizational value using data, we’re ready.
Learn more about our perspective on why sustainability reporting doesn’t have to be maddening.