The United Nations first raised the issue of climate change in 1972. Since then, the sustainability movement has gained momentum, and the governments of most advanced nations now embrace sustainability as an active issue. For businesses, a variety of competing forces (regulations, market demands, etc.) have begun dictating their need to adopt a sustainability strategy. But many companies are left wondering how to handle the complexities involved in measuring and reporting their sustainability efforts.

For enterprises to have a positive impact on climate change, they need environmental impact data to better understand their carbon footprint and how to take action. This often requires insights they currently don’t have, whether because data is siloed, in spreadsheets, or just not being collected. As such, carbon-footprint measuring and reporting may seem daunting – and understanding an enterprise’s carbon impact (and advances) may seem like a pipe dream.

It doesn’t need to. Businesses simply need a complete view of all data that drives impact, meets stakeholders’ demands, and can help them meet their sustainability goals. Salesforce Sustainability Cloud puts all of this climate data in a single source to help companies monitor their performance and achieve measurable results.

Sustainability Cloud – A New Solution for a New Challenge

Sustainability Cloud is backed by a company (Salesforce) that’s already trusted by more than 150,000 organizations worldwide. As such, it’s a tool that tens of thousands of enterprises have at their immediate disposal.

Sustainability Cloud streamlines the capture and auditing of carbon (greenhouse gas) footprint data. It solves many of the issues with traditional carbon accounting like incomplete or missing records, manual data tracking in multiple spreadsheets, and unstructured data. By having all data in a single source, the efforts involved in data collection, calculation, and auditing activities are streamlined and reduced.This tool can help companies effectively manage their carbon footprint, address the business challenges of sustainability, and provide insights and visibility into all of their sustainability efforts. In the process, customers, employees, and investors will feel confident that they are working with a company committed to documenting its progress and achieving meaningful improvements.

The Business Challenges of Sustainability Compliance

Adopting a corporate sustainability strategy introduces new business challenges; regulatory requirements, new carbon-audit accounting processes, and investors’ increasing demand for sustainability gains are just a few that companies must address.

Sustainability Cloud has assembled required data references including changing regulations and unit conversions, and has united multiple data feeds to simplify how companies address these issues. The carbon-inventory calculations are automated based on the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. The result: Sustainability Cloud does the heavy lifting, and companies need not check calculation accuracy in spreadsheet-driven inventories.

To simplify compliance, the app is preloaded with reference data from:

• US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

  US Energy Information Administration (EIA)

  UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS)

  Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol

Sustainability Cloud generally aligns with widely used and accepted standards of greenhouse gas reporting, such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol from the World Resources Institute. This means it is a reliable tool to disclose carbon footprint data to various reporting bodies. And, because it’s built on the Salesforce platform, it includes tools that facilitate collaboration, project management, and reporting.

Sustainability Insights Drive Performance and Change

As with most corporate endeavors, insights are needed to measure and prove success. Sustainability Cloud includes interactive dashboards that help aggregate data and provide insights about where businesses can focus to address their environmental issues.  By presenting data in one place, companies can quickly measure their environmental impact, gain actionable insights to achieve further improvements, report key findings to stakeholders, and determine relevant climate-action strategies. These insights can then be scaled across organizations and the ecosystem, ensuring that sustainability goals are achieved throughout the supply chain.

Take Steps to Transform to Net Zero

There are a variety of initiatives underway to help companies across the globe navigate the issue of sustainability. One such initiative, Transform to Net Zero, is a coalition of 10 founding companies – including Wipro – with a passion to drive change. Transform to Net Zero has an ambitious plan to deliver an open-sourced library of sustainability resources to help any company navigate this important topic. This library, along with accessible tools like Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, can help any company build sustainability across its enterprise, report its progress for external stakeholders, and chart its own path toward contributing to the global Net Zero movement.