We Need Better Carbon Accounting. Here’s How to Get There.

April 12, 2022

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Summary.

The Rocky Mountain Institute reports that the average company’s supply-chain greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are 5.5 times higher than the direct emissions from its own assets and operations. Any effective system of GHG accounting, therefore, needs to measure accurately each company’s supply-chain carbon impacts, providing visibility and incentives for it to make more climate-friendly product-specification and purchasing decisions.

Robert S. Kaplan is a senior fellow and the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development emeritus at Harvard Business School. He coauthored the McKinsey Award–winning HBR article “Accounting for Climate Change” (November–December 2021).

Karthik Ramanna is a professor of business and public policy at University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and was previously a professor and the Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School. He coauthored the McKinsey Award–winning HBR article “Accounting for Climate Change” (November–December 2021) and is author of The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World. He is cofounder and principal investigator of the E-liability Institute, a global not-for-profit advancing the urgent accounting upgrade needed to drive green innovation.

Read more on Accounting or related topic Sustainable business practices

We Need Better Carbon Accounting. Here’s How to Get There.

Summary.

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