You Have Emissions Data. So Why Can't You Act on It? The Measurement-to-Action Gap in Carbon Accounting

Ask most mid-to-large companies today whether they measure their carbon footprint, and the answer is almost certainly yes. Ask them whether they know, with confidence, which specific supplier, material, or purchasing decision is driving the largest share of that footprint — and the answer gets much shakier.

This gap between measuring emissions and acting on them is, according to sustainability practitioners speaking at a recent Climate Week Zurich panel on embedding sustainability into business decision-making, the defining challenge of this stage of corporate carbon accounting. Not a lack of ambition. Not a lack of regulation. A lack of the right kind of data.

The Numbers Say Measurement Is Basically Solved

A benchmark cited at the panel, conducted by Deloitte Switzerland across companies listed on the Swiss stock index, found that roughly 98% now report Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, with at least partial Scope 3 coverage. That's a striking level of adoption for a reporting practice that was niche a decade ago.

And yet the same panel discussion converged on a consistent theme: only a quarter to half of companies currently quantify the financial risk tied to their sustainability data — meaning most organisations still can't connect their own emissions numbers to a business decision with money attached to it. Measurement has scaled. Usability hasn't caught up.

Why the Gap Exists

Three structural issues repeatedly surface when organizations try to move from "we have a number" to "we can act on it":

1. Sector averages tell you a category, not a decision. The fastest way to produce a first carbon estimate is spend-based accounting: take total spend in a category — steel, electronics, logistics, packaging — and multiply by a generic industry-average emissions intensity for that category. It's a legitimate way to get an initial, company-wide figure quickly. It is not a way to find out which of your actual suppliers is driving your footprint, because by design it treats every supplier in a category as identical. In fact, recent global data from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) shows that while most companies report overall Scope 3 numbers, the depth remains shallow — for instance, only 52% of consumer goods companies report at least five Scope 3 categories, and far fewer track it down to the supplier level .

2. The right data often already exists — just not where decisions get made. Product-level and supplier-level data frequently sits somewhere in the organisation — in procurement systems, supplier scorecards, quality records, or finance platforms — but not connected to the sustainability team, and not visible to the people making sourcing or design decisions. The data isn't missing; it's disconnected.

3. Sustainability data isn't spoken in the language decision-makers use. Executives think in currency and financial risk. Procurement thinks in cost per unit. A number expressed only in tons of CO2e, disconnected from cost or revenue, often simply doesn't make it into the conversation where a sourcing or capital decision gets made. The stakes here are high; missing supplier data delays bids and costs manufacturers hundreds of thousands in lost contracts annually .

What "Finding the Hotspot" Actually Looks Like

When companies do get past this barrier, the results tend to be strikingly specific — not abstract sustainability language, but concrete operational facts.

For example, in late 2025, a mid-sized food packaging manufacturer learned they had 90 days to provide verified Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) data for their materials or face losing a multi-million dollar contract with a Fortune 500 food company . The buyer's validated science-based targets for 2030 meant that retaining a high-carbon supplier with poor data was mathematically incompatible with their compliance requirements.

In these cases, the hotspot only becomes visible — and therefore fixable — once the data moves from a category average down to the level of an actual material, supplier, or shipping route.

What Activity-Based, Invoice-Level Data Changes

This is the practical distinction between spend-based estimation and activity-based accounting:

As companies shift to activity-based data, they are discovering that spend-based methods were often wildly inaccurate. According to recent research, spend-based emission methods overestimate a company's footprint by up to 557% when compared directly to commercial supplier datasets .

Activity-based carbon accounting — especially when anchored to verified reference data such as Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), widely regarded as a gold standard for product-level carbon claims — effectively turns records you already generate as part of doing business (invoices, purchase orders, bills of materials) into a footprint map at the resolution where decisions actually happen: this supplier, this material, this shipping lane, this component.

The Data-Quality Risk Nobody Talks About Enough

There's a second, less-discussed reason granularity and consistency matter: not all carbon data is directly comparable, even when everyone involved is acting in good faith.

Different databases and methodologies — different system boundaries, different regional grid assumptions, different allocation rules, different update cycles — can produce meaningfully different results for what looks, on paper, like the same product. Companies that haven't standardised on a transparent, defensible methodology risk exactly the kind of situation that's becoming more common as carbon data moves from internal reports into customer-facing comparisons, retailer rankings, and tender scorecards: two honest actors, two different numbers, and a business outcome riding on which one gets used.

From Insight to Action

Finding the hotspot is only the first step — the harder, more valuable work is what happens next: renegotiating with a supplier, redesigning a component, shifting a shipping mode, or building an entirely new low-carbon supply chain. None of that is possible, though, without first being able to answer a simple question with confidence: which specific purchase, supplier, or process is actually driving our footprint — and can we trust the number?

That's the layer most organisations are still missing, not for lack of ambition, but because their carbon data was never built at the resolution needed to answer that question. Major CPG brands recognize this; they are setting mandatory phased timelines requiring Tier-1 suppliers to provide product-level carbon footprint data between 2026 and 2028 .

At Simple., this is precisely the gap our platform is built to close: converting supplier invoices and bills of materials directly into activity-based, EPD-grounded carbon data — so instead of a single company-wide average, you get a clear, defensible view of exactly where your footprint is coming from, supplier by supplier, purchase by purchase, and where a greener, often cheaper, alternative already exists.

This article draws on the ecoinvent Climate Week Zurich panel "Beyond the Pledge: Embedding Sustainability into Business DNA," featuring speakers from ABB, Schindler, Deloitte, and IBM. Watch the full panel recording here .