Data Insights Driving Environmental Progress Forward

Introduction

Environmental data has a peculiar failure mode. Organisations collect a great deal of it, publish an annual report drawn from it, and change almost nothing as a result — because the reporting cycle is a year long and the decisions it should inform are made weekly.

Reporting and operating are different jobs

A disclosure framework exists to make companies comparable to each other. An operating dataset exists to make one company comparable to itself last month. They need different granularity, different latency and, usually, different systems — and conflating them produces data that is audited annually and used never.

Start with the meters you already have

Half-hourly electricity data is available to most sites today, at no cost beyond the effort of asking for it. It will usually reveal a baseload running through nights and weekends that nobody has looked at, and that baseload is typically the cheapest reduction on the site.

Uncertainty is information

A footprint quoted to four significant figures from spend-based emission factors is not precise; it is overconfident. Publishing ranges, and saying which parts of the inventory are measured rather than modelled, is what lets a reader tell progress from a change of methodology.

The test of a good dashboard

Someone who is not an analyst should be able to open it, find the one number their decision depends on, and know whether it moved for a real reason. Very few environmental dashboards pass that test, and the ones that do tend to be small.