Tag: limited assurance

How reliable is your company’s carbon footprint?

Just how reliable are those carbon footprints that many large companies have been publishing in their sustainability reports?  Even putting aside concerns about greenwashing, what about those nebulous Scope 3 GHG emissions?  As we all know, the SEC is now is the midst of developing a proposal for mandatory climate-related disclosure.  (See, e.g., this PubCo post and this PubCo post.)  The WSJ reports that “[o]ne problem facing regulators and companies: Some of the most important and widely used data is hard to both measure and verify.” According to an academic cited in the article, the “measurement, target-setting, and management of Scope 3 is a mess….There is a wide range of uncertainty in Scope 3 emissions measurement…to the point that numbers can be absurdly off.”