The Open Group Open Footprint™ Forum today published a white paper that provides an overview of the GHG emissions data management area, regulations that are driving activity, and the work of the Open Footprint Forum. The Forum is making significant progress in our standards work related to building a standard data model for emissions, and related open source tools to ease adoption.
The white paper may be downloaded from The Open Group library here: https://publications.opengroup.org/white-papers/w234 (note, requires creating a free account to download)
With some significant regulations in place (including the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive , or CSRD) and with adoption timelines for reporting already started, and with accelerated progress on regulations happening in various other geographies, it is important to get started on more effective emissions data management and to ideally get ahead of this now. The Standards work of the Open Footprint Forum is critical to enabling more effective emissions data management, particularly for scope 3.
Notable progress has been and is being made by the Open Footprint Forum in these areas:
- The data model standard is now on it’s 3rd major iteration. The first version, released in May, 2021, provided coverage for scopes 1& 2 emissions, along with a demo platform. The second version, released in June, 2022, added support for scope 3, for WBCSD/PACT product carbon footprints, and initial reference schemas. The third version, slated for public release later in 2023, was recently frozen, and adds numerous updates including unit of measure conversion, support for assurance requirements, support for IRA act credits, support for other environmental parameters (e.g. NOx, and SOx), and more reference schemas.
- Significant effort has been put into ensuring that the data model and other deliverables align with existing GHG standards and frameworks, including those from GHG Protocol, WBCSD/PACT, and PCAF.
- Work is ongoing on reference api’s for data ingestion and data consumption. In addition, we expect an open source reference platform to be made available that will help to accelerate adoption.
- A business guide is being developed that will describe the emissions ecosystem, and how the data model standard will impact the various organizations and actors in the ecosystem.
- Numerous use cases are being explored and worked by Forum Members, including for emissions reporting, scope 3 emissions data sharing in value chains, CCUS, methane data management, data ingestion/data integration, utility usage recording, and software and IT infrastructure emissions management. These use cases will be applicable to firms across many industries.
The Open Footprint Forum Members are meeting in Houston Oct. 31-Nov. 2 to make progress on these and other Forum projects. As always, we encourage firms from all industries to consider getting involved in this important work. To learn more, and express your interest in getting involved as members, please visit: https://www.opengroup.org/openfootprint-forum
The Forum is also planning use case workshops in Chicago (Nov. 9th), and in Munich (Nov. 15th) to share more about the work of the forum, and to test the fit for the data model in various industries. The workshops are targeted at large end user organizations who are determining their data strategy for GHG emissions data. For information on these workshops, and to express your interest in participating, please visit the event web page: http://events.opengroup.org/OFP-GHGworkshops2023