Developed with Lucid Capitalism. This report summarizes our assessment of the highest-quality carbon accounting tools in 2022 to help investors and operators pick what’s best for their organization.
If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
To seriously tackle your company’s carbon emissions, you will need a tool that helps you keep track of them over time. This report summarizes our assessment of the highest quality carbon accounting tools in 2022 to help investors and operators pick what’s best for their organization.
Through market research, demos, and independent expert interviews, we reviewed over twenty carbon accounting tools in this analysis and narrowed it down to the top five tools for our members. Our target audience for this report includes venture capital firms, limited partners, and high-growth technology companies.
We plan to update this landscape next year to capture what we expect to be substantial continued innovation and improvements among these tools. Here’s a brief outline of the document:
Carbon accounting is only one step in a company’s climate strategy. At scale, a robust climate plan will incorporate strategies to actively reduce and manage all environmental externalities an organization is responsible for including, but not limited to, carbon emissions.
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have increased since 2010 across major sectors globally, and fossil fuels and industry accounted for 65% of the total emissions in 2019 alone.
These emission levels demonstrate that the goal of limiting warming to 1.5° Celsius is becoming less and less likely. With growing consensus and pressure for businesses to act, measuring our carbon footprint is becoming the standard for every industry. While tech company emissions only account for 23% of global emissions today, their share is projected to increase to over 14% by 2040, making the imperative to manage emissions early on even more pressing.
The carbon accounting industry is expected to grow by $9.1bn from 2021 to 2026, with main drivers being utilizing carbon accounting to identify areas for cost savings and regulatory pressure.
Operating in a decarbonizing economy will require the uptake of these tools by companies of all sizes.
Carbon accounting aims to quantify and aid an organization’s reporting of GHG emissions. This is important because recognizing the biggest emissions drivers in your organization enables more efficient management and reduction of your carbon footprint. Not only is there growing stakeholder pressure from investors, regulators, and consumers to account for emissions, but transitioning to lower-carbon practices also creates value: it reduces energy costs, mitigates supply-chain risk, and ensures organizations’ long-term viability in a decarbonized economy.
As companies gain awareness of their emissions and responsibility to act, many have set ambitious climate goals—and subsequently rely on carbon offsets to reach those very goals. Carbon offsets are essentially reductions in carbon emissions (typically through projects such as reforestation and renewable energy production) to compensate for emissions elsewhere. While these offsets are popular among corporations, they cannot deliver the outcomes needed, as they effectively shift responsibility for emissions reductions to others—and allow companies to continue polluting. To credibly contribute to a reduction in global emissions, companies need to actively reduce their absolute carbon footprint and, if possible, support the removal of carbon from the atmosphere.
The carbon accounting landscape is emerging and constantly changing as vendors offer more and more capabilities to stay competitive.
While incumbents innovate, more nascent players jump in to capitalize in this young industry. Demonstrated in our landscape scoring, there is a relatively tight range of scores, confirming that carbon accounting tools do not currently have much differentiation on functionalities or services yet. That’s good news for buyers, as it means you have a number of decent options. At the moment, the most significant difference across tools and the ultimate deciding factor is price.
Why is there such a large price range? The wide range across tools is due to uncertainty in the value of carbon accounting across customer archetypes and the growing demand for lower-cost services for SMEs. Historically, more established players in the space capitalize on the highest-impact accounts, which are often large global enterprises and financial institutions. However, the space for small-business-focused carbon accounting tools is quickly becoming inundated with automated SaaS tools, which aim to reduce the need for high-touch consulting approaches. As carbon accounting becomes a must-have for companies, automated SaaS tools will be best able to rapidly meet the growing demand.
While the carbon accounting SaaS space is in its infancy, we expect the field to greatly improve its ability to produce accurate activity-based measurements, including upstream and downstream (Scope 3) emissions. In our assessment, many tools offered spend-based estimates, which takes the financial value of a purchased good or service and multiplies it by an emission factor. Spend-based estimates are less accurate than activity-level estimates, which utilize quantitative data (gallons of fuel consumed or miles traveled) to determine the emissions output of a given activity. Secondly, the field will also need to mature in its ability to service other budding industries such as Web 3.0, which is receiving increasing speculation for its energy-intensive characteristics.
We hope to provide a transparent view of this developing field to support the uptake of emissions management services by providing discounts to RIL members and, we hope, push the field towards greater accessibility.
In this review we’ve focused on what these tools do today. But we recognize that, in markets where new tools are emerging and the whole category is still being defined, buying decisions can be as much about the expectation of future capabilities as about current ones. There are some tools, like Watershed, that appear to be emerging as leaders and putting together the resources, team and advisors to continue to be at the forefront of the industry. For many users, this future potential–although hard to evaluate–will be an important factor in the buying decision.
All 3 vendors have good technology, offer streamlined scopes 1,2, and 3 measurements, support reporting to TCFD, CDP, and SASB, and have experience supporting pre-market, rapidly scaling companies.
Industry Focus
Price
Startup Friendly
Data Hygiene
API integrations for automated data collection, portability (downloadable data)
Implementation
Ability to learn and implement tool into the company, interactive dashboard
Quality and efficiency of customer service
Onboarding process to get all data uploaded and measurement process initiated
AND
Responsiveness and quick responses throughout demo and introductory phase:
Measure
Report
Manage
VC Needs
The following section will define some of the most relevant sustainability concepts and stakeholders, as well as goals that the private sector can set to take an active approach in the climate crisis solution.
Climate Goals
Emissions Scopes
Guiding Bodies
Carbon Offsets and Carbon Removal
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