‍Let’s imagine that the future is like this. Quality data about emissions is shared within our organisations as much as we share financial data. The reliability of the emissions data is as good as financial data. We have a good idea about the emissions for all our operations, all our purchases, and any investment or operational decision we might make. We are comfortable signing financial agreements which include clauses related to emissions.

We are ready to take on new projects which offer to reduce emissions. We can set emission reduction targets and understand our emissions well enough to achieve them. We can easily share our emissions data with anyone who asks for it and we want to share it with – including banks, customers, regulators and investors. We can work with ‘upstream’ (supplier) and ‘downstream (customer) emissions related to our company’s products, as well as our operational emissions.

This does not need too much imagining because most of this is already here, but we can expect a lot more of it.

But company capability for working with emissions like this is not yet here. We are getting by with our requirements with a lot of estimated data, otherwise known as assumptions, ‘proxy data’ or ‘reference data’. But this needs to be gradually replaced by actual numbers – just as our financial planning may begin with estimates, but the estimates need to be replaced by calculated costs.