Decreasing the impact of climate change in value chains by leveraging sustainable finance

Abstract

Scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are frequently the most relevant element of a company's total emissions since they account for more than eighty percent. However, they are difficult to calculate since many stakeholders in the value chain are involved and emission data are usually not shared among them. Sustainable finance could provide a link to this discussion by providing data, digital data infrastructures and evaluation instruments. However, the existing research today is either limited to analyzing the levels of scope 3 emissions or to calculating them based on different measurement methods. How to implement scope 3 emissions reporting by solving the data sharing challenge remains mainly unexplored. This paper aims to close this gap by developing an approach, which chooses sustainable finance as a connecting element that (1) combines different calculation methods, (2) integrates cross-value chain data from different stakeholders and (3) combines primary and secondary data in a single model. The approach was developed in a prototype that uses real world data from collaboration with the UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance to evaluate its applicability. The findings of the prototype indicate that a digital data infrastructure can improve the calculation of scope 3 GHG emissions by improving data availability, accessibility and reliability and at the same time shows that the calculations are only as good as the data, which fuels this calculation. With this, the paper contributes to the theoretical and practical discussion about scope 3 GHG emission data.