From setting Net-Zero targets to implementation – a global perspective

Incentives and pressure from investors and regulators have continued to increase since 2020 to more and more net zero commitments of industry-leading companies across all sectors. Establishing baselines for corporate GHG Accounting has been the focus in recent years and now the attention is on implementation. Since 60-90% of the potential reduction for Green House Gases can only realized together with the supplier-network, the product-perspective is crucial to substantiate commitments and the road towards net zero. This leads to two necessities: first scaling product carbon footprints (PCF) to all products within multinational companies, and second to increase the use of supplier specific PCFs over time to ensure that GHG reduction monitoring becomes based on supply chain specific data where it is material. This means replacing industry-average data, which is always used in the first iterations to assess and calculate PCFs, with supplier-specific data.

The keynote will provide an overview of industry initiatives on harmonizing calculation methods and PCF sharing and the implications for organizations that belong to or deliver into various sectors. Initiatives taken into account include Together for Sustainability, Catena-X, Pathfinder by WBCSD. The presentation will furthermore give insights into the journey towards automated PCFs and Life Cycle Assessment (LCAs) from organization of the sectors Chemical, Automotive and Electronic. The audience will understand how IT solutions as well as internal and external collaboration are used as an enabler to address the challenges of complexity in products, supply networks and/or highly inter-connected global production systems, when scaling PCFs.