After mapping comes planning. Sustainability professionals, warehouse managers, CFOs, or whoever uses the platform are given a to-do list for decarbonization. “It explains specifically what kind of materials you need to switch to, what stakeholders you need to involve, and who is responsible for this decarbonization activity,” Jordanova says. The science-based approach to analyzing company data and setting targets is particularly important to Jordanova.
The next step is reporting: important for investors, business partners, and increasingly for consumers and regulators too. The platform generates automated reports on a company’s environmental, social, and governance impacts, which are roughly divided into three groups: Scope 1 are direct emissions from resources owned and controlled by the company; Scope 2 are indirect emissions from purchased energy, such as electricity, heating, or cooling.
Let’s return to the example of BMW. The group already buys electricity from renewable sources for its plants—there are even four wind turbines on its site in Leipzig. But what happens before and after production is also crucial. For example, around 70 percent of current emissions occur once the cars and motorbikes are being driven by their new owners.
In October 2022, Plan A introduced a module that also allows companies to track emissions along the value chain . Specifically, this means that third parties such as suppliers or logistics partners are invited to feed their data into the platform. “This creates network effects for the whole decarbonization assessment,” says Jordanova.
For companies to avoid greenwashing, it is important that they disclose all areas of emissions in their reports. Otherwise, their goal of achieving net-zero emissions may look good on paper but bad in practice—and well-meaning investors, partners, and consumers could be misled. ESG reporting has become even more important in recent months as regulators in Europe and the US are cracking down on greenwashing, causing companies to shy away from big decarbonization announcements, Jordanova says.