ESG Professionals Group

I work for a large, publicly traded professional services company.  We have decided to set a Net Zero by 2050 goal, as well as an interim carbon emissions reduction goal.  We would like to work with a consultant to help us with (1) the wording of our Net Zero statement, (2) substantive advice on implementing a carbon tracking tool, (3) setting interim reduction goals and SBTi tracking, and (4) really importantly, when the SEC climate rule is finalized, working with our finance and accounting teams to set up a credible, auditable set of controls around our public reporting obligations.  

 

Two questions: (1) we'd love to know if companies are working with one consultant that can serve as a one-stop shop for all of these items, or do you have to split the work between a climate change consultant with years of experience, and one of the Big 4 accounting firms for the SEC reporting stuff; (2) would love any recommendations on carbon emissions tracking tools.

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Pooja Knight
AVP of Enterprise Risk Management and Climate Change
Gallagher
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Hey Pooja-sorry for the delayed response here, I'm just getting acquainted. My thoughts on your questions are:

1. You can find experts within the Big 4 to tackle all of these challenges although they may sit on different teams-happy to help introduce you to them. You also likely want to look to your company's communications department/firm on item #1 in regards to the Net Zero statement. 
2. There are so many and it depends on your company's needs-my first step would be to lay out the business needs-things like efficiency in data collection, ability to connect to third parties that hold part of the scope 3 equation, availability of emission factor databases would be things I would look for. You can also see if there are existing technologies in house that have different modules that are available as it might be easier to add those on rather than adopt an entirely new technology (e.g. ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workiva). Hope that helps!

Would also be interested if others have experience-especially hands on in the world of carbon emissions tracking as this is a newer area that technology is starting to support-for some of us that have been in this space for years, Excel was the typical tool for emissions tracking.​

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Mark Mellen
ESG SME
Workiva
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-28-2022 06:09 PM
From: Pooja Knight
Subject: ESG Consultants and Tools

I work for a large, publicly traded professional services company.  We have decided to set a Net Zero by 2050 goal, as well as an interim carbon emissions reduction goal.  We would like to work with a consultant to help us with (1) the wording of our Net Zero statement, (2) substantive advice on implementing a carbon tracking tool, (3) setting interim reduction goals and SBTi tracking, and (4) really importantly, when the SEC climate rule is finalized, working with our finance and accounting teams to set up a credible, auditable set of controls around our public reporting obligations.  

 

Two questions: (1) we'd love to know if companies are working with one consultant that can serve as a one-stop shop for all of these items, or do you have to split the work between a climate change consultant with years of experience, and one of the Big 4 accounting firms for the SEC reporting stuff; (2) would love any recommendations on carbon emissions tracking tools.

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Pooja Knight
AVP of Enterprise Risk Management and Climate Change
Gallagher
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