Moving Sustainability Goals From the Boardroom to the Control Room

Jane Ren explains how artificial intelligence can help achieve sustainability goals by providing visibility into the carbon effect of production activities.

- Jane Ren

The drive is on across the world to reduce our carbon emissions and move towards a net zero future to mitigate against the effects of climate change. In the relentless pursuit of establishing their green credentials companies are setting ambitious decarbonization commitments in the boardroom without the ability to translate these goals into action on the shopfloor.

Currently, many companies are focusing on target setting with the challenge that these targets are often not supported by operational pathways to achieving these goals. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) reports that at least one-fifth of the world’s largest public companies have committed to meet net zero targets.1 In the last few years, thousands of Chief Sustainability Officers have been appointed to help drive these targets. These companies need to quickly understand the carbon levers in their operations, because they have already made public commitments and need to avoid being perceived as “greenwashing”. Setting the next level of concrete metrics that can align and mobilize managers and frontline employees are essential to making measurable progresses. Investors and customers of these companies will increasingly expect to see carbon performance communicated in terms of measurable improvements.

One such example is the BMW Group who have committed to reduce carbon emissions from its productions by 80 per cent from 2019 levels by 2030. To translate this target into executable plans they must understand three key insights—carbon attribution, operational carbon levers, and carbon intensity variance.