Out of commitment to the climate urgency, out of trend, or out of obligation, the carbon footprint is increasingly discussed in business circles as a key metric. This is a very significant and indispensable step forward that makes it possible to harness companies’ great capabilities to address environmental challenges through their culture, their business model, their influence, and their partnerships.
However, in these situations there are always several scenarios. There are those companies that structure, support, and track all of their strategic objectives, within which carbon footprint management is embedded; but there are also those where the carbon footprint is merely a figure they hand over—reluctantly—to some stakeholder as a requirement.
In this blog post we will focus on that second scenario, analyzing how to turn the carbon footprint into a sustainability strategy and not just a checkbox requirement.
When we have been part of the team that estimates the carbon footprint of a company, an event, or a product, we know that behind that final result—tons of CO2e—there is a monetary value to get the project underway and the working time of different teams, a deep dive into processes, communication with suppliers, analysis of emission sources, research, calculations, and many more steps that happen behind the scenes. To any company’s leadership, such a magnitude of investment and effort undoubtedly translates into a priority that must be included in strategic planning. Nevertheless, even though many companies have their financial, procurement, logistics strategies, etc., the strategic vision of sustainability lags behind.
So, as the person in charge of leading the sustainability area, what can you do to ensure that your carbon footprint estimation project stops being just one of many tasks and becomes an element that is not only valued but also useful at the corporate level? Let’s start from the inside out:
- First, the uncomfortable truths and the strategic value.
The first step toward turning your carbon footprint into a strategic input is to confront a truth that can be very uncomfortable: your conviction guides the action.
And yes—even though you are passionate about sustainability and have prepared intensively to develop your technical skills and your leadership—the lack of support or the amount of information the area requires can often be frustrating. That is why a key point is to transform the narrative around the project: if, from your role, you perceive it as a burden, you inevitably pass that on to the rest of the organization.
How to begin?
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Assess your context. What, really, will you be proposing to measure the carbon footprint for? Identify vulnerabilities, analyze how to get ahead of regulations, demonstrate the influence on operational efficiency, study how it relates to market and customer access, what it has to do with innovation and your specific company’s competitive advantage, and how to use it to attract financing or savings for your company.
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Communicate correctly the strategic value of what you analyzed: what are the risks/opportunities—operational, financial, market-related, reputational, etc.—that can be addressed/anticipated by managing the carbon footprint? Measuring emissions is not an end in itself, but a tool that makes it possible to identify critical processes, anticipate associated costs, design resilience strategies, and demonstrate management capacity to investors and customers.
Just to examine one facet, the World Economic Forum and Accenture state in their report Business on the Edge: Building Industry Resilience to Climate Hazards (2024) that “hazards such as extreme heat and flooding threaten corporate fixed assets, with companies potentially facing annual profit losses of 6.6% to 7.3% by 2035” (1).
Measuring the carbon footprint makes it possible to translate this kind of global analysis into the reality of your company, identifying which business units, processes, teams, or supply chains are most exposed to both physical risks (operational disruptions) and risks associated with new regulations, taxes, and changes in demand. You can analyze this exercise for the different key areas of your company.
Now, develop a proposal and, together with the highest decision-making body, define those key objectives you are going to prioritize.
- Deciding strategically also means having allies.
At some point you will have to define how to carry out the project. You can always do it yourself, but the reality is that the carbon footprint learning curve is steep and constantly being updated. Choosing the right allies will save you errors, rework, time, and money.
Accessing specialized capabilities for measuring the carbon footprint of your company, product, or event will mean that your internal team can focus its attention and skills on defining priorities, advancing projects, strengthening the area, and making decisions; while your consulting ally ensures technical compliance of the highest quality.
This does not mean losing control or depending on an outside party, but rather gaining scalability and a macro perspective. At CarbonBox we make sure that transparency and knowledge transfer strengthen your team. You can think of the calculation tool like your accounting software: you are the owner of your data, you understand it and steer it, but you don’t wear yourself out on the calculations and automatic updates that the experts provide. Are you going to measure your carbon footprint? Schedule an appointment to learn how CarbonBox works
- The focus of your role: direction and management
After the entire process behind the calculation, you obtain your company’s, event’s, or product’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory. At CarbonBox we can help you clearly identify which sources concentrate the emissions, determine where to prioritize efforts, understand emission control, and know the next steps for your specific case—in short: understand your footprint, know what to prioritize and how.
Now, as a Sustainability Director, the moment arrives when your skills shine most: directing and managing the results.
How?
💡By communicating the footprint results strategically to the organization’s internal and external stakeholders.
💡By establishing the current landscape: what do these results say about the company today, about its product/service, its processes, its team.
💡By reviewing the objective you had for the project—was it met? Should it change? What strategic objective do the results leave you with? Will they move toward neutrality?
💡By analyzing the relationship with other sustainability projects—are you really investing in what is most important/urgent/essential? Or in “green” projects that sound good but are random?
💡By formulating priorities with a series of short-, medium-, and long-term goals, aligned with international standards (such as SBTi) and with the strategic objective.
💡By establishing indicators, activities, monitoring and evaluation systems, and owners.
💡By allocating budgets to the goals and linking them to other strategic goals of other areas of the company.
💡By linking climate risk to its business model.
💡By showing progress over time, obstacles that have prevented advancement, and new risks/opportunities.
💡By integrating sustainability into corporate governance.
You may also be interested in: Carbon credit due diligence: the key to net zero success.
- Cross-cutting: systems thinking
The image we present below is a key aspect of the points we mentioned: sustainability is cross-cutting to the different areas of the company, to its stakeholders, and to its environment. Therefore, when defining and implementing your strategy, you must integrate sustainability requirements at all levels of the organization, as well as consider the implications for your value chain, community, and regulators.
For example, how do you evaluate your suppliers? Do you know the impact of your product not only when it is made but once it leaves your door? What expectations/pressures do your stakeholders have? Is the team trained to achieve emission reductions?…
That is why the carbon footprint, if seen -only as a data point-, changes nothing; it goes from being a strategic investment to merely a cost (and not only an economic one—the full cost of failing to anticipate and prepare for the imminent risks of Climate Change).
What transforms the company, and influences its surroundings, are the decisions you make as a result of it. So yes, the carbon footprint is a key metric because without it the sustainability area would have no direction in climate action, and you, as a leader, have the opportunity to mobilize innovation, service, and your competitive advantage in favor of environmental and organizational sustainability.
References
- World Economic Forum, & Accenture. (2024). Business on the edge: Building industry resilience to climate hazards. p5. World Economic Forum. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Business_on_the_Edge_2024.pdf