Company: The Open Group Open Footprint Forum
Founder: Jim Hietala
Website: https://www.opengroup.org/openfootprint-forum
About The Open Group Open Footprint Forum
The Open Group Open Footprint® Forum is a vendor-neutral, membership-based organisation working to collaboratively tackle vital challenges around emissions data and digitalisation in the sustainability space.
The modern enterprise experiences a range of pressures driving it towards a more mature and holistic approach to emissions and sustainability data. Governmental regulations increasingly mandate sustainability disclosures; consumers demand ever more transparency around business impacts; and the ability to help achieve sustainability targets is becoming a bigger part of business-to-business procurement.
This, in turn, has stimulated a new industry of software and services designed to help organisations to measure and report more effectively while overcoming significant skills shortages in the sustainability space. Both new start-ups and established enterprises have entered this market, driving significant innovation to make the future of carbon accountancy as robust as financial accountancy is today.
However, there has been a missing link in this emerging ecosystem in terms of sharing the data that these platforms generate beyond an organisation’s borders. Just as financial accountancy is only fully useful if that work can be communicated to third parties as evidence about or insight into the organisation, carbon accountancy needs to be shareable in order to have a real impact in terms of stimulating footprint reduction and improved resource efficiency.
In practice, barriers to sharing that information can be as simple as whether the measurement is recorded in terms of grams or kilograms of CO2e – or as complex as needing to precisely define the lifecycle of a product from original resource extraction to end-of-life disposal in terms that everyone can understand.
The answer to this challenge is one which has also made much of the digital age possible: we need transparent, mutual, open standards that remove barriers to information flow.
Standards are why any two machines can, in principle, communicate via the internet, and why USB devices can be freely mixed and matched across computers. That same principle, which empowers people and businesses to invest more into actual outputs rather than just processes supporting those outputs, is what the Open Footprint Forum is targeting in the context of emissions data.
Specifically, the Forum is developing a data model which can accurately and flexibly describe an organisation’s emissions footprint, as well as a reference architecture that end-users can leverage to quickly operationalise the data model in their workflows.
Together, member organisations including Fujitsu, Shell, and PwC recently delivered a snapshot version of the Open Footprint® Data Model Standard. The outcome is a clear, accessible system which can act as a single source of truth for reporting into frameworks including the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, The California Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s reporting policies.
In the future, the Forum’s work will further integrate with the sustainability reporting ecosystem while empowering organisations to use sustainability data as a business input, including as a data training source for AI tools.
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