Directing the disruption

THE PRINCIPAL message of this special report is that companies everywhere urgently need to step up their action against climate change. Its physical impact is already causing many of them serious damage. Pushed by voters, especially younger ones, governments around the world are introducing ever tougher regulations. Lawsuits could yet make firms’ lives harder still. And, although new technology can be expected to help with the problem in time, it will not do enough on its own to meet the enormous challenge of climate change.

One place to start is with better carbon-emissions data. Today few companies even know how much greenhouse-gases suppliers belch out. That means they will struggle to calculate the full environmental impact of their products. Where data do exist, they are often self-reported, inconsistent or too out of date to be useful. But work is under way to fix this.

Along with some other firms, Microsoft plans to launch an emissions reporting standard for suppliers later this year, backed up by sustainability audits. “Science tells us where we need to be, but the data tell us where we are now,” says Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president. In January the Rocky Mountain Institute and other research groups started to standardise greenhouse-gas metrics for mining and industrial supply chains. With help from Google,...

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