Venture capitalist John Doerr’s global climate change initiative has developed a new tool to help companies measure their ecological output and join in the fight to mitigate climate change.
Launching as a part of Doerr’s Speed & Scale platform—named based on his bestselling book on how enterprises can solve the climate crisis—the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions tracker is designed to hold high-volume emitters accountable for their impact. The tracker shows progress on key global climate targets, like the Paris Agreement’s goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
According to the group, access to transparent metrics will help a wide range of enterprises to identify the sources of their own emissions, and arm them with the tools to create a data-driven reduction strategy. “We can’t manage what we don’t measure. We need to publicly track emissions to have a fighting chance of eliminating them,” Doerr explained. “We want everyone to have access to this data to drive high-impact action and to hold our governments, corporations, and communities accountable for progress.”
The Paris Agreement served as the foundational framework for the goal-setting tool, which tracks objectives and results. According to Doerr, individuals, employees and leaders need an a guide to the most realistic, high-impact actions they can take to decarbonize, from switching to electric vehicles to moving away from coal and gas as sources of power. The tracker’s data is pulled from a number of sources, including the International Energy Agency (IEA), BloombergNEF, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the Global Forest Watch, and each data point is linked to its source.
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The Speed & Scale platform contains 55 core calls to action, or targets, like raising $50 billion per year in investment for climate tech startups or eliminating the development of new coal or gas plants after 2023. While the former goal is on track, with $54 billion invested in 2021, hundreds of coal and gas facilities are under construction. The emissions tracker visualizes the progress—or lack thereof—with a color-coded scale ranging from “achieved” to “code red.”
Doerr’s Speed & Scale co-author, Ryan Panchadsaram, said that the tool was designed to provide “robust measurement and true transparency” that will hold bad actors to account. “It can guide individuals in every sphere of influence,” he added. “We can solve the climate crisis—but only if we have access to critical information.”
Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp agreed that the Speed & Scale tracker will help build accountability for stakeholders across the corporate world and state and local government. “There are many pathways to progress, and the Tracker makes it clear where we stand on each one,” he said. “Continuous improvement in the data and metrics will help guide us to effective, fair, and equitable solutions.”