Digital carbon emissions accounting journey

The annual procurement spend (Scope 3 upstream) amounts to several billion USD and spans various categories, business units, regions, and suppliers. The goal was to understand the baseline of Scope 3 emissions caused by specific procured goods and services using Spendscape’s carbon emissions accounting solution.

Within 12 weeks, the client was able to meet their goal and optimize their decarbonization strategy by balancing the impact and cost of abatement.

McKinsey’s spend analytics solution has enabled clients to transform their management of Scope 3 emissions. By utilizing Spendscape, a proprietary procurement software and carbon emissions accounting solution, in conjunction with Catalyst Zero, an end-to-end decarbonization solution, clients are equipped with robust carbon and sustainability analytics. This empowers them to transcend traditional procurement spend data, gaining insights into the factors driving spend and consumption-based emissions.

The client gained transparency into their estimated emissions baseline by mapping spend activity to a proprietary database of over 300,000 spend- and consumption-based emission factors.

Identifying and refining emission consumption hotspots increased the granularity and accuracy of the emissions baseline, helping the client understand the emissions drivers.

These principal material drivers were then matched to a McKinsey database with more than 1,200 abatement levers to evaluate abatement business cases.