It’s no longer a question: the future success of businesses will in large part depend on meaningful climate action today. As the climate crisis worsens, companies need to put their money where their mouth is and get serious about reducing emissions. Committing to the green economy goes way beyond just setting distant targets and buying offsets.
Organisations that build climate consciousness into their products today will be the most successful over the long-term. Every aspect of a business’ success—from employee retention to customer loyalty—will be affected by how willing a company is to participate in safeguarding our planet through minimising the environmental impact of its activities.
But even with the best intentions, it can be hard to understand how to reduce emissions while still driving business results and efficiency. However, lowering emissions doesn’t have to mean lowering speed or even increasing costs—you just have to choose the right tools to inform your decisions and make meaningful reductions.
Understanding and improving the carbon footprint of your products and services no doubt adds significant value. And when developing products and optimising operations, you are ideally looking for accessible measurement solutions that inform the improvement of your products and services without slowing you down or adding needless overhead.
It is for these reasons that Climatiq launched the Open Emission Factors Database (OEFDB) - to provide data that you can utilise to incorporate emission insights into your business operations. The database currently includes over 1,400 emission factors, all of which are rigorously and scientifically vetted and normalised. This makes it possible to compare data across a range of different sources, categories, and regions in a way that is simple, transparent and accurate. In other words, companies operating across multiple sectors and locations can now find all their emission factors in a single place.
Moreover, the OEFDB is growing fast. The project invites contributions and partnerships and is continuously expanding the number and variety of available emission factors. By collating, normalising and standardising all of these sources, the OEFDB lightens the workload involved in finding and updating emission factors. A further advantage of this is that the OEFDB is kept up-to-date so you don’t have to trawl through data every year to ensure you are using the right emission factors for your activity.
And as the database feeds directly into the Climatiq API, it allows for real-time emission calculations directly inside your existing software. The API enables you to automatically convert business activity data to accurate emission measurements, with a few lines of code.
For product leaders, the OEFDB is a simple, reliable and inexpensive way to inform climate-positive impacts on your operations and products. Open solutions empower development teams to build and innovate in new ways, and engage a community of like-minded, forward-thinking individuals who want to invest in making the entire system better.
Too often, making more sustainable choices becomes a secondary consideration, as it is simply too hard or too expensive to understand and measure. Open data helps solve this, ensuring environmental impact can be baked into decision-making, regardless of the stage of your company, where you’re based, or how much capital you have to hand.
In order to minimise the impact of our business activity on the climate crisis, there needs to be global access to good data that can inform decisions which actually result in change. Every innovator knows that the first step to solving a problem is to truly understand it; so we hope that by providing open, robust data, we’ll enable you and your team to make smart, climate-positive decisions—fast.
