The Carbon Disclosure Project has expanded its partnership with environmental consulting and software firm FirstCarbon Solutions, under which FirstCarbon processes the greenhouse gas emissions and carbon management data of global corporations responding to the CDP Supply Chain program.
According to CDP’s 2011 Supply Chain Report, more than half of an average corporation’s total carbon emissions comes from its supply chain. The CDP Supply Chain program aims to help companies with the challenge of measuring greenhouse gas emissions beyond the corporations’ walls, by measuring climate change risks and opportunities across the whole supply chain.
In its scoring, FirstCarbon uses methodology is standard across all CDP programs, developed by CDP with consultation from scoring partners, responding companies, and others. These scores and their associated sustainability scorecards allow the 54 CDP Supply Chain members – including Vodafone, Pepsico, Walmart and their suppliers – to benchmark performance and aim for year-on-year improvements.
As scoring partner, FirstCarbon Solutions will score responses from thousands of suppliers in the coming months to determine the quality of disclosure and the level of climate change performance. Upon request, FirstCarbon Solutions will provide participating suppliers a summary report with more details regarding their score and will offer analysis into the scoring of their submission.
The two organizations first partnered to score the CDP Supply Chain program in 2011. That year FirstCarbon Solutions scored submissions from nearly 1,300 suppliers to determine both their climate change performance and the quality of their disclosure.
In the resulting report, FirstCarbon found that Asian and European suppliers received an average score of 52 and 53 for disclosure but North American suppliers scored just 45 of a possible 100. Only those suppliers with a disclosure score of 50 or above were scored for performance (see chart above).
