No, you do not need more data!

Don’t get me wrong, I love data. Before becoming a self-professed sustainability geek, I had another career in management accounting. Covering everything from sales reporting to costing and financial due diligence; Excel was my jam. Think spreadsheets with macros, never-ending formulas and vast amounts of data.

Fast forward to the early 2020’s. At this point, I had switched from $K to kg COe in my spreadsheets but that request kept coming: “Can we have more data?”; “We need better data”. And I tended to agree. Especially when you think about it in terms of the age-old Peter Drucker quote “What gets measured, gets managed”, it made sense.?

And then it didn’t.

I can precisely pinpoint the moment in time when that changed: It was when I read the summary report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), an eight-year long undertaking from the world's most authoritative scientific body on climate change. The conclusions were clear: “To limit global warming to 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025. They then drop rapidly, declining 43% by 2030 and 60% by 2035, relative to 2019 levels”. By that time, the apparel & footwear industry had also worked out that between 70 & 90% of its GHG emissions were in their scope 3. Yet, the request for more data & better data kept coming. That’s the point where it stopped making sense for me.

"If a company is confident that between 70 percent and 85 percent of its 2022 supply chain greenhouse gas emissions come from manufacturing xxx, then how much time, effort and money should be spent narrowing that uncertainty by engaging with suppliers, consultants, and software?".

Data is critically important to work out whether we’re going in the right direction and if we’re making progress. But only up to certain level of detail. Key words here are "a certain level of detail." Beyond that point we are, to quote Professor Ken Pucker in a 2021 article from the Harvard Business Review: “We’re confusing output with impact”. I’m convinced we’re closing in on that “certain point’, where more granular data, more analysis and more disclosure will fail to create change, even becoming counterproductive. So yes, data is important. It can be sliced and diced, it can make other data more significant and give the illusion of precision. But not any data.?

“Wouldn’t those resources be better spent using the data it already has to work with product developers, suppliers, industry, researchers, or governments to establish new designs, contracts, standards, studies and policies to incentivize emissions reductions?”.

We are now in a car heading toward a cliff at high speed. We don’t need to figure out whether we’re going at 79.3 miles an hour or 82.4 mph. We should be trying to turn around. So if you’re still wondering at what point we need to start acting on this: the answer is right now! And if you have no idea where to start, instead of obsessing about the data, focus on your largest environmental impact and identify the way you can start reducing it; this year!

As for the next steps, let's discuss them together.?

Sources & Inspiration:

• https://www.greenbiz.com/article/sustainability-professionals-shouldnt-and-dont-want-be-accountants-dont-make-them
• https://hbr.org/2021/05/overselling-sustainability-reporting????? ?