At Sage Earth, we have made it our mission to tackle the complexity of measuring scope 3 emissions head-on. In contrast to most other carbon accounting platforms, Sage Earth starts with the assumption that all of your emissions are scope 3. Scope 1 & 2 emissions are found and re-tagged as scope 3 using a combination of automated identification logic and prompts for input from platform users.

We do this because the reality is for most companies, scope 3 emissions account for most of their environmental impact.

“When analysing over 4,000 companies’ emissions inventories, upstream emissions (scope 3) are on average over twice that of a company’s own operational emissions.” (CDP Report, 2015).

Looking at how and why a business is spending its money - its accounting data is the most consistent source from which we can interpret scope 3 emissions arising from the purchase of goods, services and assets. There are other sources of scope 3 emissions that won’t necessarily appear in spending data (employee commuting for example) so in these cases we provide an additional layer of customer-led data capture to build a more complete picture of your scope 3 footprint.

There are some scope 3 categories that we do not currently have the functionality to include in a footprint, we will soon publish a detailed description on the current boundary of scope 3 categories. We are always working to make Sage Earth as accurate, complete and specific as we can so customers can expect ongoing product updates and new features to realise this.