Dive Brief:
- Workiva launched a carbon solutions platform to help its clients comply with the rising demand of climate-risk reporting and global disclosure regulations, the ESG reporting software firm announced Tuesday.
- The “Workiva Carbon” subsidiary will collect information across companies’ data management software systems and track the greenhouse gas emissions generated by their facilities. The firm said this will allow companies to automatically calculate their carbon footprint across scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.
- Workiva announced it had acquired carbon accounting and emissions reporting startup Sustain.Life the same day it launched the carbon management tool. The startup’s CEO and co-founder, Annalee Bloomfield, said the consolidation would “simplify emission tracking and ensure transparency in emissions data.”
Dive Insight:
Workiva Carbon seeks to build on the firm’s existing ESG and sustainability reporting platform by offering decarbonization, carbon accounting and carbon management solutions, the company said.
Workiva said the tool would help companies in the wake of multiple global regulations requiring climate disclosures, including the Securities and Exchange Commission’s now-stayed climate disclosure rule, California’s two climate bills — SB 253 and SB 261 — and the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.
Corporate sustainability and finance teams are “looking to automate carbon-emission reporting and accounting” against the rollout of multiple regulations, Workiva said in an emailed press statement. The firm said the tech and compliance support offered by its new platform would “enable companies to prepare and file audit-ready financial and non-financial reports.”
“Now our customers can streamline greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions tracking, set science-based targets, and meet stakeholder demands amidst the changing investor and regulatory landscape,” Julie Iskow, Workiva’s president and CEO, said in the release.
In addition to helping companies manage their emissions data, the firm said Workiva Carbon will curate supplier engagement surveys that will obtain critical information businesses need to decarbonize their supply chains, set science-based targets, emissions reduction plans and ESG risk-assessments.
The collected data will then be consolidated into one body of work and distributed across different business departments, including sustainability, finance, legal, audit, risk and accounting. This will help eliminate the margin of error associated with multiple and contrasting data reports, per the release.
Once this emissions data is compiled, it will be automatically aligned to voluntary and mandated reporting frameworks entered into Workiva’s platform, delivering “consistent disclosures for regulators, investors, and other audit-ready stakeholders.”
