A practical guide to hitting your Scope 3 target with confidence

This guide, published by Martin Chilcott, CEO of Manufacture 2030, is a very practical guide that provides a clear step by step approach to reduce your scope 3 emissions. The recommendations of this article are based on many years of experience in that specific field.

In general, the author identified the following overall strategies to reduce scope 3 emissions:
1. Change ‘ingredients’ where possible to lower carbon
2. Change your suppliers if they cannot or will not lower their carbon impact
3. Offer your suppliers support to reduce their carbon emissions

For those suppliers you are going to engage with to reduce their emissions, the following three steps are recommended by the author:

Measure: go beyond historical, enterprise-level data collection and measure in detail each supplier’s baseline carbon emissions (Scope 1, 2 and 3) and their estimated glidepath towards your target based upon their reduction action plans.
Manage: use the glidepath data you have collected to understand your supplier’s gap to your target and manage their progress to close that gap.
Improve: accelerate improvement by building the supplier’s capacity, focused specifically on closing their identified gap to your target.”

This guide consist of four concise articles, that guide you through each of the three steps mentioned above. It includes references to helpful tools, such as the GHG Protocol’s Scope 3 evaluator or the  GHG Protocol Scope 3 Guidance and Standard and explains how these tools could be helpful for you.

What I found remarkable about this article is the message that one should set up the scope-3-emission-reduction-plan as a program of support and not as a program of demand. Procurement needs to transition from a transactional relationship with their suppliers to a collaborative partnership. Martin states: “What’s needed to really succeed is to develop a much stronger sense of partnership with your suppliers; a sense of joint ownership with them (and with your peers/competitors if possible). After all, the challenge you face is a shared challenge and the consequences of not meeting that challenge are also shared.”

Based on this attitude of joint ownership it becomes possible to unlock the know-how that is often stuck in silos somewhere in your supply chain, and to share this know-how with peers. This way existing solutions can be scaled. To see one example of how one can share knowledge among supply chain partners, watch the webinar that is part of the last article.

Links to the articles:
Article 1: Introduction
Article 2: Measurement
Article 3: Management
Article 4: Improvement

(Picture by Andrew Coop, Unplash)