COP26 Brings fresh focus to Scope 3 emissions. Has an omnipotent silo ruined it again?

The Climate Change Conference, COP26, kicks off today and is focusing most of its attention on scope 3 emissions. All 197 nations attending will spend most of their time on that, having not achieved their goals in Scopes 1 and 2.

The irony of segmentation of system behaviour into silos like this, is not lost on us. The epitome of school-kid error continues to play out as the house burns down around us.

Harking back to our experience and that of others from respective times working with UN teams, the organisation has some very solid scientific advisors but also highly diverse political voices. Many not particularly scientific. So communication was a key part of the need to simplify. But have we simplified too far and got it wrong?

Greenhouse Gas Protocol: Emission Scopes

If you're not familiar with them, scope 3 emissions are the emissions caused by related activities associated with “arms length” activities in a value chain. For example, using products once you have bought them, employee transport to work, transportation and distribution, investments etc. They don’t include the fossil fuels used or wholesale gas energy that’s purchased, as that’s regarded as direct emissions.

While such a segmentation works well for communication, it's also a barrier to solving the problem. The reason why is that there is almost nothing we create or service, that doesn’t touch all 3.

The problem will be familiar to those who have been through Six Sigma green and black belts certification's. If you carry out a six-sigma green belt exercise you optimise within each scope and if you carry out the black-belt activity, you optimise across the scopes.

This creates a necessity for further focus to ensure that suboptimality doesn't creep into the organisation. Often, this can mean "sixsig" green belt work must be followed by black belt work to ensure it finds a global optimum. The trouble is, that approach is flawed, because it assumes the existence of one or more most optimal solutions in the black-belt system, which encompass all the optimisations in the green belt system. That is not always the case and it falls on the skill of the transformation architect to identify the most optimal.

Worked Example

These snippets show the impact of dispensing with the arbitrary scope boundaries and working your organisation as a system. There are a host of benefits our infographic explains and crucially, it is important to remember we are in a race against time. Simplifying it for communication, which then becomes policy, affects our ability to tackle climate change. So communication to lay audiences must remain subservient to the science and science based targets, not the other way round.

Traditional Silos - One Scope at a time

Cross Silo Optimisation

Download our infographic to expand on the detail using identical organisations. While also understanding why global optima are always better by mapping them to scope emissions to show what's happened. The consequence of focusing on scope emissions and their funding, is being completely blind to the potential for larger systemic optimisations and even net-negative technologies. Something policymakers must make themselves aware of if we are to truly bring ourselves back on track.

The earth and its climate are an ecosystem. Thinking about one thing will never be good enough for it.

Download our infographic below: