Sustainability has gained traction—and rightfully so—with individuals and businesses alike. And while your personal purchasing habits and environmentally friendly behaviors are nice (keep doing your part!), compared to the scale and impact of businesses, they don’t make as big a dent. Just think about the transit miles to support the millions of products shipped every year from all over the globe, compared to your couple dozen trips to the local grocery store.
Individual initiatives are great, but to achieve progress at scale, you need to quantify the impact of your operations and future emissions reductions. And do that efficiently, you need sustainability management software.
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Companies feeling the pressure from investors and customers to strive for carbon neutrality might typically hire a sustainability expert to help get them there. But filling a dedicated sustainability role or hiring an expensive consultant to track your emissions—not to mention setting and executing on your sustainability strategy—remains out of reach for many businesses big and small. Plus, there simply aren’t enough consultants to collectively limit climate change at scale.
That’s where sustainability software comes in.
What is sustainability software?
While European countries are ahead of U.S. regulations, nearly every business could soon feel the pressure from legislation, customers, and even employees.
Before now, unless you had significant resources to dedicate to sustainable program management and emissions tracking, tackling your environmental footprint was a pipe dream. Previously, if you wanted to track your emissions—from things like your purchased electricity, business travel, office equipment, and the distribution of your products—you had to do so in spreadsheets while simultaneously performing difficult carbon calculations. All that’s to say is that historically, emissions tracking has been complex and cumbersome. Thankfully, now there’s a better way.
A good sustainability software—like Sustain.Life—includes dashboards, data collection, and data management systems for your environmental metrics, which translate your operations into carbon impact.
The adage, “what gets measured get’s managed,” rings especially true here. If you want to make an environmental impact and reduce your emissions, you must step on the proverbial scale and start calculating your carbon footprint. And when it comes time to share your progress with your investors, employees, and customers, sustainability software makes sustainability reporting easy, so you’re not scrambling to generate that end-of-year report.
Sustain. Life’s sustainability software gives you the ability to:
- Measure the carbon impact of your business operations
- Identify your most significant emitting behaviors
- Pursue meaningful reduction strategies across energy, water, waste, and your supply chain, and measure progress over time
- Streamline your environmental and sustainability performance reporting for investors and other stakeholders
And Sustain.Life has hundreds of step-by-step guides that walk you through how to create behavioral change and mitigate your emissions.
What’s the point of sustainability reporting?
Ultimately the name of the game with sustainability reporting software is emissions reduction. And especially as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting have become the norm, having the ability to capture your sustainability data is even more important.
As you progress on your carbon accounting journey, you’ll understand your largest emitting activities and opportunities for reduction, which will help you set key performance indicators (KPIs). Sustainability software and carbon accounting help you look across your supply chain for improvements—from energy procurement and electricity grid supply to material purchases and supplier standards. While doing so, you should ensure that your suppliers’ values and practices align with your own. And if you’re on the other side of that equation—meaning you’re a supplier—being able to report on your sustainability strategy and aspects of worker health and safety help with compliance management.
While efficiencies in energy management and subsequent emissions can help you save money, reporting on your sustainability strategy has other benefits. If you work to curb your GHG footprint, you should also reap the marketing benefits—internally and externally. Sustainability software helps to highlight your sustainability initiatives in reports to customers and other stakeholders.
What makes sustainability software good?
A good sustainability software solution will help you track and manage your emissions across scopes 1, 2, and 3—which include direct and indirect emissions.
Think of emissions scopes as a framework to help you understand all the different activities your carbon emissions come from so you can see where you could have the most significant environmental impact.
Measuring your carbon footprint is an ongoing effort—much like tracking your sales metrics. Sustainability software helps you take action to mitigate your greenhouse gas (GHG) profile by identifying your most emissions-intensive activities. For example, if you’re a software company with a moderate workforce, you may not realize that most of your emissions come from the energy it takes to power your servers. Once you know your most significant emissions sources, you can figure out how to reduce your emissions or offset what you can’t reduce.
So if you want to make an impact, you should find a sustainability software solution that seamlessly helps you create a sustainability program that grows with you. And you’re in luck…
Get started with Sustain. Life’s sustainability management software
Sustain.Life exists to help businesses of all sizes do their part to positively impact climate change. Sustain. Life’s sustainability software walks you through everything you need to do to measure and track your emissions. After benchmarking, Sustain.Life makes it easy to take action—no matter your level of experience.
