Achieving your Scope 3 target isn’t difficult. It’s just not worth the effort.

Quantum engineering, which underpins most modern technology, is difficult yet commonplace in our daily lives, from smartphones to hospital scanners. Creating a Covid vaccine in a matter of months was an extraordinary feat, yet Astra Zeneca, Moderna, Pfizer, and others all did so.

Despite the evidence of incredible human ingenuity, there’s a growing belief that achieving upstream Scope 3 targets by 2030 is unattainable. This was echoed at the recent Scope 3 Strategy Summit in Chicago and the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium, where many attendees expressed how difficult they’re finding it. The Climate Board’s January survey revealed that 93% of responding corporations found “significant challenges” in reaching their Scope 3 goals.

Practical Solutions within Reach

Yet, the majority of solutions required to hit our 2030 targets already exist. They are well-known and affordable. Most corporations with Scope 3 targets will confidently tell you they are on track to achieve their own Scope 1 and 2 targets. After all, what is a Scope 3 target but your suppliers’ Scope 1 and 2 targets? While achieving a net-zero emissions economy will require some technological breakthroughs, none are beyond the capabilities of modern science and technology, and we have a couple of decades to get there.

So, why were the pharmaceutical companies able to achieve the seemingly impossible with the Covid vaccine so quickly? It was because it was worth the effort. In contrast, most large corporations and their supply chains are not yet organised, aligned, or motivated in a way that demonstrates achieving Scope 3 targets by 2030 is “really worth the effort”. This discrepancy raises an important question: Why is there a lack of urgency?

Exploring the Urgency Gap

I invite you to explore this issue with me over a series of blogs, join in and add your insights and thoughts. This is a vital conversation we need to have and lies at the heart of the pessimism I mentioned earlier. I will be focusing on two key themes:

1. Understanding the Value: Do corporations really understand the value of achieving their Scope 3 targets? I’ve yet to find a company that has done a proper bottom-up analysis of the real cost of missing their targets. This includes not just the cost of carbon credits, but also potential lost contracts and market share, cost of capital, impact on reputation and share price, inability to hire and retain talent, avoidable taxation, and lost access to certain countries and regions for supply. Why is it that so few corporations have undertaken this most basic step in business planning – identifying the true size of the prize?
2. Sharing the Value: If the “size of the prize” is substantial, how should companies distribute this value throughout their value chain to motivate suppliers and partners to see carbon reduction as “worth the effort”? What roles do Product Carbon Footprinting (PCFs), carbon pricing, and rethinking procurement roles with concepts like Total Cost of Ownership play in this process? Many companies, including some of our clients, are making strides in reflecting the value of carbon reduction across their value chains, and I would like to celebrate what they are doing and why it is so important.