Looking for Scope-1, -2, & -3 GHG Emissions Reporting Service Provider Recommendations

Hey Blake! We have a whole separate group that handles ours (as I anticipate most mega-firms do), but I have kept my finger on two (so far) just for awareness:

• The Climate Neutral Certified Standard: https://www.climateneutral.org/standards 
• UL Solutions ESG Reporting: https://www.ul.com/services/portfolios/sustainability-and-environment-solutions/esg-reporting

Hopefully those links work (our firewall does weird things to links sometimes), but if not, the googles should take you there. Hope this is helpful!

Thanks Emily. I'm pushing this message back into inboxes. Not just because Blake is my pal - and I'm hoping to help him counteract that he sent this out on Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend - but because I also want to know this answer. I am contacted (literally) daily by service providers looking to help with ESG and carbon tracking. While it has been great to boost my LinkedIn network numbers with ESG service salespeople, it's extremely difficult to tell who is actually worth considering to follow-up with. I would love for someone who is already using a third party to tell us about their experience and recommendations. At the moment my situation is a little different than Blake's in that this is fully voluntary for our company, but it would be nice to know about third party verification options and certainly about services and software that can help automate this. I've seen Green Badger for construction companies and a couple others including a demo of UL's capabilities, but I'd like to hear from anyone actually using these tools. Thanks! Steven Burke. LEED & WELL Faculty Director Of Sustainability m: 774.462.2044 consigli.com

Keller uses Carbon Intelligence (Carbon Intelligence | For Your Zero-Carbon Future) as our third-party auditor/verifier for Scope 1 and 2 emissions. They also help us with our CDP reporting. We are currently looking for a company to help us track our Scope 3 emissions on our job sites. We have been talking to QFlow. Qflow - Our Company (qualisflow.com) Does anybody use them or recommend a different company for Scope 3 tracking? Thanks! Kimberly Martin, PhD, PE Senior Engineer - Innovation and Sustainability Keller – North America t: 602-454-0988 m: 480-356-1942 F

Blake - we certify as CarbonNeutral through Climate Impact Partners. As part of that we have an independent audit/assessment of our GHG emissions. RSK International is our assessor. Their assessment approach is simply an Excel document that we have to push our data to. I would not call it a sophisticated approach that can be automated... That said, most of our data collection is pretty manual anyway - we just don't have integrated business systems set up for carbon accounting. Since we are relatively small with respect to emissions (our baseline year emissions was ~ 6,000 MT CO2e) it works ok. We do have a well integrated travel system that allows us to get all that data pretty readily and travel emissions is our #1 source (baseline year was about 55% of total). We use Concur and there are some options within Concur that we have not purchased that automate carbon calculations (we didn't purchase them due to cost for our scale and the fact that their emissions calculation method differed from our assessors, so we would have had to have done it twice anyway).  I would look to automated systems for the big sources and the ones that take the most effort to gather. The other items - we have had to make choices abotu the level of effort vs the impact and aur assessors are understanding in that regard around data quality. An example is water consumption - we don't get that data as a leasor of office space, so we just use national average type data. That is OK as emissions associated with water./wasterwater is <1% of our total.  I have heard that the LFRT may be exploring Persefoni but we have not trialed it yet.    There is bound to be an explosion of providers in this space over the next couple of years, especially if the SEC goes ahead with its reorting requirements. But I would also expect a similar contraction/consolidation as the market matures. Hopefully we can all pick winners the first time...

Two parts to mention:
1. Carbon Accounting:  we're working with Persefoni for the Carbon Accounting for Scopes 1, 2, 3 (some) emissions tracking.  I also got them to agree to provide their essentials package to all LFRT firms for free (and we could get that to include our SDL firms too).  (Message me if you want the contact person.)

2.  Carbon Offsets:  the LFRT sustainability group will be coming up with some guidelines for how to purchase carbon offsets/RECs that aren't bunk (including which registries to trust), but I have a dream of combining our shared buying power and having every firm contribute to funding REAL carbon removal projects (planting mangroves, soil sequestration, ag projects...).  Please share any insight you have on a grand carbon purchasing consortium that we can all use!

On the subject of carbon offsets (perhaps slightly tangential to the topic at hand).  The recent ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 228-2023 "Standard Method of Evaluating Zero Net Energy and Zero Net Carbon Building Performance" has some interesting things to say about carbon offsets, in Chapter 8 of the Standard.  Of particular interest are these clauses: 

• "8.8 Carbon Offset Procurement Registration Protocol and Retirement. Procured carbon offset retirement shall be documented in accordance with one of the following carbon offset registration protocols: a. Verified Carbon Standard, b. Climate Action Reserve, c. Gold Standard, and d. American Carbon Registry"
• "8.9 Carbon Offset Project Restrictions. Carbon offset projects shall be limited to technologies and strategies that permanently sequester carbon for a minimum of 200 years that are assessed to have a de minimis risk of release of sequestered emissions."  I think that pretty well excludes most biogenic sequestration, like forestry or grassland preservation.

Hi Eric and all, We have a local (Seattle) small group looking at the same things for 2): guidelines and group purchasing, so I’m very interested in what the LFRT comes up with. We also are asking some larger clients if we can essentially add our few dollars to their high-quality carbon purchasing since they have full time people figuring out what is credible. Re: Scope 3, is the LFRT effort suggesting that architecture firms consider embodied and/or operational carbon of our designs within this category? I have never gotten a clear answer on this but suspect we should answer ‘yes.’ This is what LMN spends a vast majority of our effort on; it’s also roughly 600x larger than our office footprint (including airplane travel). https://lmnarchitects.com/lmn-research/02-whos-responsible-for-carbon-emissions-anyway -Kjell From: E

Hey, just chiming in along with Kim about the value of carbon offsets. I’m interested in ASHRAE 228’s approach to permanence, and I spoke to Kim about that and various other issues for an article on the new standard (defining NZE and NZC buildings) that’s coming out Monday. In the meantime, Kim also commented on an April newsbrief titled "A New Effort to Ensure Carbon Offsets Mean Something .” ASHRAE 228 is very concerned about permanence—hence its very strict requirements. The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market is dealing with this in its standards by saying offset programs must “compensate reversals,” i.e., return the money if the programs fail. I’m not sure how realistic or enforceable that is, but I was intrigued by the tacit admission that such a mechanism is needed. === Paula Melton, she/her, LEED AP BD+C Editorial Director BuildingGreen , Inc. 122 Birge St. #30 Brattleboro, VT 05301 Email: paula@buildinggreen.com LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook BuildingGreen champions the changemakers in sustainable design and building with trusted insight, unparalleled education, and communities that are transforming the industry.

@Kjell:

For right now, LFRT is only looking at Scopes 1, 2, and 3 emissions for the company itself, and we limited Scope 3 to company travel.  We are NOT (yet) looking at the embodied carbon impacts of the buildings we construct each year.

BTW:  your neighbors at MillerHull are offsetting their project embodied carbon with a brilliant model (I believe they divide it 1/3rd each between Owner, Contractor and themselves.)  Chris Hellstern or Kristen Dotson at MillerHull explained it to us.

Hi All: I have been reading all these e-mails and meaning to share the story of what HKS has been up to. It is a bit more than the specific ask, but I like context. Here it is … * We started by trying to understand the impact of our business about 5-6 years ago. I realized that this was going to be a lot of new information that was not in my architectural wheelhouse. I have learned a lot and that has been a ton of fun. In order to get things started we engaged a consultant to help us with the first carbon footprint. The approach was to work through materiality, to create the methodology, and to build internal capacity. We built an excel based approach and still use it. This depends on relationships with people in accounting, travel, procurement … to accomplish. We have looked at automation of this data and have not yet found a good solution. For the time being we are sticking with the relationships and excel. It does get easier as people get accustomed to the process. The weak link in this is that the institutional knowledge is in a few core people. At the start, we used a consultant who some of you may know, Mike Stopka. He has moved on from his consulting company. His strengths were knowledge of the architecture profession and GHG accounting standards. Independent of Mike, a knowledgeable consultant was extremely helpful. More on this below. Personally, I am hopeful that the LFRT work (I think Eric mentioned this) will be a tool for everyone with an agreed upon method for us to all use. * Working with the consultants (Mike Stopka and The Verdis Group), this is what we settled on for HKS. * Scope 1: Direct Control * 1.1 Natural Gas * 1.2 Owned Vehicles * 1.3 Fugitive Emissions * Scope 2: Utility Provided * 2.1 Purchased Electricity * Scope 3: Value Chain * 3.1 Purchased goods and services * 3.2 Capital goods * 3.5 Waste generated in operations * 3.6 Business travel * 3.7 Employee commuting * 3.8 Upstream leased assets * We felt like the work was pretty solid and covered the Scope 1, 2 and 3 areas that were material, but also wanted to get another set of eyes on it. I reached out to a friend at the Arbor Day Foundation and based on that we engaged the Verdis Group to audit the methodology, data, and verify that this did meet global standards. We adjusted a few data points, the methodology was verified, and the overall GHG impact audited. The Verdis Group would be a fine option for the initial consultant. They were knowledgeable, and enjoyable to work with. We also asked the Verdis Group to guide us on the priorities for the purchase of credits/offsets. We had a solid number for tons of GHG and now needed to figure out how to address this. This is where we encountered the Oxford Offsetting Principles. We also had the Verdis Group work with HKS to determine what was important for us. We settled in on … * Verifiable * Additionality * Permanence * Enforceable + Real * Co-Benefits * Value Chain / Industry Adjacency * Geography * Cost * Narrative + Storytelling * To build internal engagement, I framed all of this around the following Monitor – Reduce – Offset reduction steps. We are in varying stages of this work. * Business Operational Adjustments * Procurement Adjustments * Customer / Client Engagement * Product and Service Design * Now the question was how to find an offset portfolio that met our values. I had been going to GreenBiz for a few years and found this extremely useful for making connections to this part of the carbon offset market. I quickly realized that this is extremely complex and there are others who can do this with much more knowledge than I. We spoke to a bunch of companies that play in this space in varied capacities, Carbon Cure, Family Forest Carbon Program, Arbor Day Carbon, Native Energy, Cool Effect, 3Degrees, BEF, NCX and Cloverly. I discovered that there are a lot of business models and players in the market, offset programs (organizations that produce offsets directly), offset brokers, and marketplace advisors. These discussions could go on for a long time and I’m sure there are many other good options. After we felt like we understood a bit more about the structure of the marketplace we focused on finding a marketplace advisor partner. We settled into a relationship with Cloverly. They have … * A high market intelligence and a globally informed database of offset programs * Can create a custom portfolio of a group of offsets/credits that address the values listed above. This is really important to hit both the budget and value points. * Have relationships with many programs globally and can manage the retirement of credits. * Support our U.N. Global Compact and Sustainable Development Goal objectives and annual reporting requirements. * Have connections with the design + construction industry. Cloverly has been quite easy to work with. For anyone who worked with Carbon Cure in the past you may have encountered Christie Gamble. She is now at Cloverly and is super helpful with a lot of knowledge about our industry. * With the assistance of Cloverly we have now completed the purchase of offsets and are finally (after all these years) a carbon neutral company. This is a big deal for HKS. The offsets are being retired and we are working on the next cycle. Budgeting for HKS is in the early fall and this is now an included budget line item. As you might imagine this puts pressure on reducing the GHG tonnage, which in my opinion is precisely what we want to happen. That’s it for the moment. Hopefully, that is helpful. If anyone is interested in details that are not above, feel free to send me an e-mail. Cheers, Rand Rand​​​​ Ekman , FAIA, LEED Fellow Chief Sustainability Officer Partner [HKS, Inc] 125 S Clark St, #1100, Chicago, IL 60603 +1 312 262 9750 | m +1 847 420 5577 | www.hksinc.com From: Paula Melton