Product Tour: Carbon Accounting with Pulsora

Thanks to all for joining us today. We're really excited to have you here. Welcome to Comprehensive Carbon Management with Pulsora. First today, we'll do quick introductions, and then we'll take a look at where carbon management stands today and the challenges that organizations are facing. We'll take a look at key capabilities and what to consider when you're looking for a carbon management solution. We'll dive right into the demo and then we will save time for questions at the end. Please send those along throughout the session, and we will get to those at the end. I would like to note that we are recording this session, and you will receive the recording in a follow-up email.

Speaker introductions

My name is Brooke Morrissey and I'm a product marketer here at Pulsora. So excited to have you all here today. I'm joined by my colleague, Jessica Mathis, who will introduce herself.

Hi, everyone. My name is Jessica Mathis and I lead our carbon product here at Pulsora. I'm very excited to be giving you the walkthrough today for this product. To briefly introduce myself, I've spent my entire career working in various sustainability roles, and most recently prior to Pulsora was working at the intersection of AI and climate.

About Pulsora

Pulsora is the all-in-one platform for enterprise sustainability management, and this includes carbon accounting. Our platform really empowers companies to better manage their sustainability footprint. Today we will focus on Pulsora's carbon management capabilities.

As a team, we're a global team of over 170 members. We have more than 500 companies around the world using the platform. Our comprehensive solution is purpose-built and designed to meet regulatory reporting requirements and ensure transparency in sustainability, and importantly, in carbon data. We really help our customers move away from spreadsheets and emails that are extremely error-prone, onto one system of record built for audit and assurance. We enable complete value chain emissions data collection, built to position our customers for success today and in the future as ESG reporting needs and regulations evolve. We also work with strategic partners like Accenture and Workday as they empower their customers to improve their sustainability performance and GHG emissions reporting.

The state of carbon management today

Where do companies stand today when it comes to carbon accounting and carbon reporting? More than 34% of the world's largest companies are now committed to net zero. However, nearly all will fail to achieve these goals if they don't at least double the pace of emissions reduction by 2030. While some of this can be improved by setting multiple shorter-term targets versus a single lofty future target, a lot of this really comes down to better data and better data collection.

In addition to these missed targets, there's increasing regulatory pressure to disclose GHG emissions and actually show reduction progress over time. With reporting for the CSRD beginning in just a few months, which will include Scope 3 requirements, and this will be followed by the California Climate Acts and others in the years to come.

Assurance and disclosure pressure

With some of these emerging disclosures, there's actually a new element to this mandatory disclosure environment, and that is assurance. These disclosures, such as CSRD, require some level of limited or full assurance depending on the wave that you're included in. This really increases the need for a true robust platform to manage the data collection and carbon accounting aspects of this whole process.

Common challenges: monster spreadsheets

At Pulsora, I've heard this story time and time again of moving from spreadsheets to software, and some of the challenges they were previously facing at their companies. Sometimes, I've heard this a couple times, companies will call these "monster spreadsheets" where they're previously using an Excel document that had maybe 100 tabs, perhaps thousands of people collaborating on these various cells and all inputting different data with different levels of granularity and traceability, in order to try to come up with these massively aggregated data points to be able to report against Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and track progress towards various targets and goals.

Five challenges in carbon management

I want to outline a few of these challenges today, and then we'll also have a poll, because we're very interested in hearing from you and what your companies are facing today.

The first two are critical for just the gathering piece of data. Data fragmentation: there are a lot of these different aspects of inputs that go into a carbon accounting system that might be stored at a very specific level within a facility or a part of your business that is desperately located and perhaps hard to reach, or it's maybe not part of their core job. Even more than that, Scope 3 requires data from your supply chain and from your customers and from these other more external aspects of your value chain. Being able to gather requests and track and gather that data with a very high degree of audit and transparency and ultimately trust in that data really requires moving from an Excel-based approach to a software platform that's really robust and able to manage those workflows.

The next two in the middle: what do you do when data is not there? Sometimes data cannot be relevant for a specific site. A platform is really important to help keep track of what fuels or what aspects of emission sources and sinks are really relevant to those specific sites, so that you're only requesting data that is material and relevant to those locations. Also, sometimes data is just very hard to gather, so in the instance where there are gaps and the absence of data, being able to perform robust estimations with traceability and granularity on those methodologies is really important.

Finally, audit and assurance are increasingly important for companies today. Being able to trust the accuracy of your data, the comprehensiveness and quality of your data, as well as the ability to export data from a system or even invite an auditor to participate on a software platform and dig into details are all challenges that can be solved with a software platform.

The top two challenges I'm seeing in the poll are data fragmentation and data availability. This is perhaps no surprise. Especially in that data fragmentation piece, having a software platform that can manage your organizational hierarchy and keep track of what data is coming from different pieces of your business or of your value chain is really critical. And the data availability piece, being able to maintain some information about what is relevant to different sites will very dramatically improve these processes so that you're not lost in back-and-forth emails or digging into previous spreadsheets.

Carbon management checklist: five pillars

I want to move into what the checklist looks like for a robust carbon management platform. We've talked about challenges, but I also want to talk about how a platform can add value beyond that in terms of workflow and carbon management aspects.

Here we have five pillars that we think about at Pulsora for our carbon management checklist. The first three are really how you get a full carbon inventory together. We're collecting data, identifying those gaps, tracking all these data requests down your cascading data hierarchy, performing gap-filling and estimations, digging into data quality and validation issues, and then having a full auditability aspect so you can really have trust in the data managed on the platform.

Then perhaps something really important to be thinking about is, why are we doing this? Why are we developing this entire inventory for the purpose of measuring our carbon emissions? Really what you can do with it is two things: actions and engagement. Pulsora and software platforms can help support these two pillars in a very value-additive way.

Within actions, we can support setting goals, tracking progress against goals, alerting when you're off goals, and also things like purchasing of RECs or offsets, keeping track of those aspects to make sure you're meeting any of your goals in the timeline that you're interested in.

Similarly engagement: a company is nothing without engaging with its internal and external stakeholders. The ability to pull all that data into relevant communications and reports, and then of course as we've been mentioning, these mandatory disclosures are critical as well.

Demo: Net Zero dashboard

I'm going to start here on our Net Zero dashboard. This is something that maybe a Net Zero owner, sustainability manager, or executive would be looking at to keep track of emissions over time and look at any hotspots or anomalies and issues. I can see here that I'm tracking my different scope emissions. I have some information about my year-over-year trends, so I'm tracking towards my 2050 goal, I'm keeping track of my offsets and my emissions.

I also have a full profile of how my emissions break down across various scopes and categories. In Pulsora, all of our calculators are purpose-built according to the GHG Protocol and PCAF for financed emissions. All of this is in that standard methodology if you think of breaking things down by Scope 1, 2, and 3, and then within 3, there are 15 different categories.

I also have visibility in my dashboard of the geospatial information in terms of where my emissions are coming from. It looks like there's a big focus on Italy, for example. Coming down here, I also see information about the materiality of my different Scope 3 categories, so which ones are most pertinent to my business. I want to be focused on decarbonizing those, as opposed to one like maybe downstream leased assets, which is very low impact to my overall footprint.

Something I want to call attention to here: we have some comparisons to industry benchmarks. Over here, I can see I have 42 megatons of CO2 that I'm emitting on an annual basis in my Scope 2, but actually that's way over what the industry benchmark looks like. I'm going to show you how, maybe as a focus for my next year, I'm going to go through my data collection and data quality and comprehensiveness and audit review with a focus on my Scope 2 emissions, because I'm going to implement projects to reduce this.

Demo: Tasks and data requests

Getting started here, the first thing is to gather data from various sources. In Pulsora, we have a few different ways to get data into the system, but in this instance, I want to show you how we do tasks. Tasks are important for getting data from disparate sources down in my organizational hierarchy, from people who could provide me with that manual data that's not necessarily stored in a system.

In this instance, I'm going to look at this request for electricity information from my New Jersey warehouse. Let's say I am a facility manager in New Jersey and I have visibility and responsibility over my electricity consumption there. I can go into here and actually add and review any bills for electricity for this period.

All this information, you can see, doesn't require me to know really how this is going to apply into carbon emissions accounting. This is just providing information about the period that this bill was from, the meter, an amount of energy and units, etc. I can also attach evidence. For example here, I've added an electricity bill that's showing an invoice that I received, providing a little bit more contextual evidence in the case that down the line there's some kind of audit and we want to make sure there's full trust in this data that was provided.

I can save that there. I can also go through and add another one. I can also add a note or an explanation. Maybe I've gathered multiple bills together and I put them together into one entry. I can provide some explanation there to make sure that it's clear what this data represents. As I save and submit those, these are going to go into my Scope 2 calculator for others to review.

Demo: Data sources and integrations

One other way, in case this data does exist in a source system, we can also bring it in through an integration, or what Pulsora calls data sources. Integrations can take the form of an API, an SFTP, or even a sort of file upload in the format of a templated CSV, Excel, or JSON, which we provide for all of our carbon calculators. These kinds of templates, in case it's easier for you to export from a system and then upload directly through here, you can do that very easily.

We find that a lot of customers have a balance of these kinds of manual requests where they're keeping track of who's answered the requests and what evidence they've provided, etc., and able to issue reminders for folks who may not have replied, and/or they can use data sources.

One other thing that is important to note about these data requests: any member of your entire value chain can be a recipient or a data provider for those requests at no additional cost. You can have your suppliers or customers or any other people be assigned to those kinds of data requests as well.

Demo: Carbon module overview

Now we have brought some data in. We've answered that request for the New Jersey facility. We've added in a data source. I want to go through our carbon management module and show you what that looks like.

Here we are in carbon. We have some information about all of the various scopes and categories that we cover. You can see we have information on Scope 1 and 2 emissions. We have specific calculators designated for renewable energy and for offsets.

Each of these calculators is built in much the same way. At its core, carbon accounting is getting some activity data about what's going on in your business, what kind of activities are being performed, what kind of purchases are being made or fuel is being consumed, and then applying an emission factor to basically translate that activity information into a carbon accounting number. Then there are some unit conversions along the way. In each of these calculators, we're keeping track of the relevant activity data, performing those calculations, and then providing full traceability to what that looks like and any updates or conversions or anything along the way.

Demo: Scope 2 calculator deep dive

I want to use the Scope 2 calculator as an example, since we were just providing some information for that one. I'm going to go to my New Jersey facility, and I can see here these first two lines are actually the ones that I just submitted through that task. Some key things to keep track of, or just point out in the way that this calculator view looks:

On the left, we have our hierarchy component. This is where we're modeling the organizational hierarchy, including, like I mentioned earlier, your facilities, your suppliers, your business units. All those kinds of things can all be modeled here so that you're looking at relevant data for that relevant piece of your business. This can also be modeled in a geographic way as well.

In this grid, each row represents one activity. One activity that I'm applying the emission factor to, in order to create that emissions calculation. At the top, I have some information on sums of my total emissions, and in this case for Scope 2, we have multiple methodologies that we are surfacing here, both location-based and market-based.

In this chart, I can also see some critical information, which is, for example, the start and end date of this activity, so for this electricity consumption, how much electricity was consumed at different units. Different data might come in from different providers using different units. How much money was spent, and then if there's any information about renewable energy, RECs, things like that, I can show you what that looks like a little bit later. All this is kept at the period level, so when you're doing your reporting on an annual period, you can be focused on just the data for that year, but you still have reference to previous years as well.

Demo: Activity details and audit trail

Clicking into one of these activities, I can see some information and details that really help to bring that level of trust to the forefront, whether for someone reviewing the data for approval purposes or an auditor who's investigating some very specific detail. Everything is really stored in this Activity Details pane.

You can see some characteristics about the activity. You can see the emission factors that were used, and we even break that down by the various different component gases. You can also see, even for these emission factors, the actual source link to the very site where they were downloaded from and extracted from. We have full traceability. Those emission factors are perhaps one of the most important pieces to getting an accurate inventory together, because by selecting the right emission factor, you're increasing the accuracy of that ultimate emissions calculation.

Coming down here, we also have our conversion factors. We have any evidence that was added. For example, in one of the two records that we had provided, we had that evidence file here. Here's that electricity bill. We also have an audit log. Any changes that are made are all kept track of in here, and the value that the emissions were at that time.

Demo: Calendarized data and estimations

This is how I'm keeping track of all of my emissions data and having that full traceability. We also mentioned another challenge was the estimations and the availability or the gaps that sometimes occur when you're collecting such large volumes of data.

I want to show you this Calendarized Data page, which basically illustrates, for different facilities, where we're missing data, where we have estimates to fill those gaps, and also what the actuals data looks like, so that you can view it on a calendarized or time-series way. For example, here, you can see this is the New Jersey warehouse we were just looking at. They have some actuals information for January from that bill we provided, but then there's some time that is actually estimated, in this case based on a square footage intensity factor.

I can see and compare different facilities to each other. I can also compare estimates to actuals and see that this is a really big gap. All of these things are helping me to both evaluate my patterns over time, perform estimates (so if I had new information I wanted to incorporate into estimates, I can select estimate here and new estimates would run), and also look at, for example, maybe this location, this electricity is really not relevant because they weren't using electricity at that time. Maybe it's only a temporary-use facility for a few months later in the year. All of this is helping me to understand that pattern nature of my data.

Demo: Reports (CDP example)

Now I'm confident with my Scope 2 data. I've filled all of my gaps, I've collected all of this information, provided my audit. We talked a little bit earlier about what the purpose of pulling this entire inventory together is. It's really for that action and engagement piece.

The last thing I want to show you in this product tour is an example of how we can do reporting through the platform. For example, here we have a CDP report. Pulsora is a gold partner of CDP. We have an API connection with them as well.

For this report, I can actually publish a preview and go and take a look at what my data looks like. Maybe share it internally, make sure that everyone is in agreement, or share it with an auditor, and then go ahead and submit that online. I'm going to look at my previous history and download an earlier version of this to show you what that looks like.

The Pulsora reports are manageable in several different formats. You can see here there's templated information, which wouldn't change every time I run the report. But the actual data that is populated in each of these fields is the latest and greatest for the selected period that I had chosen in that reporting module. There's a lot of different ways that you can format and templatize these reports. This is just one example of CDP since that's a very common one using carbon data that our customers are using. There's a limitless set of reports that you can export from the system.

What's coming: AI-generated mitigation projects

We have some exciting new product updates coming, so we're launching a new feature under that Act pillar very soon. Be on the lookout in November for some information about that, where we're using AI to help generate projects for mitigation measures in case you are off track for an upcoming net zero goal and you're at a loss for new project ideas, using generative AI for that brainstorming.

I'd be remiss not to mention, the Pulsora Carbon product, a lot of its value also comes from the fact that it's sitting on top of the Pulsora platform and is natively integrated with our ESG reporting module and our sustainability data management. All those components I walked you through today around data sources and requests and workflows and reports and analytics are all underpinned with the same platform. This just streamlines that trust and compliance piece further because you know that all that same source-of-truth data is being used in these various capabilities.

Q&A: Are ESG and CSRD reports automatically generated by Pulsora?

The reporting feature I just showed you: yes, we can do entire CSRD reports. We're doing this with several of our customers now to satisfy their first CSRD report. What that takes is making sure that the data is all collected and audited on the platform. Then the reporting piece is really pulling it all together, collating it into the appropriate template with those topics and subtopics and sub-subtopics and metrics. The data I showed you in the Pulsora Carbon module is these carbon calculators. We also have what's called a catalog on the Pulsora platform, which is basically the master data management for all of your E, S, and G metrics. Those aggregated carbon accounting metrics are pulled into the catalog. Any catalog metrics for other CSRD disclosure points are also kept there. They can all be pulled into that same report. You can do all of your CSRD reporting within the system.

Q&A: Can we share information about emission factors used for Scope 3?

Pulsora has a very robust emission factor library that we provide out of the box, as well as capabilities to ingest custom emission factors or custom emission factor libraries. We're always adding to our emission factor library, both to keep data sources up to date and to increase the set of data providers we're getting these emission factors from. We have all the industry-standard publicly available emission factor datasets that you would think of, such as EPA and DEFRA, and also some other international ones, because we have many global customers. We want to make sure we're providing location- and geographic-specific emission factors for their fuel and electricity consumption. We also provide IEA emission factors. If there are any specific emission factors that you're looking for, we can follow up with you directly after this.

Q&A: How is industry benchmarking determined?

We can do benchmarking a few different ways. The particular dataset we were looking at today was coming from the Climate Neutral API they have called BEE, which is the Business Emissions Estimator. Essentially, we take information about your company profile, like the location of your facilities, some financial information, your industry, and it gives us an industry benchmark through our partnership with them. If you have your own benchmarking datasets, we can use those as well, or we can pull from other datasets. The benchmarking capabilities are there, and there are several different options depending on your needs for what data we would surface.

Q&A: Does Pulsora support integration with electricity company systems via API?

Yes. One of the ways we can ingest data through data sources is with APIs. We have some set of out-of-the-box APIs, and we also have customizable APIs. Depending on your specific electricity provider, if they make that information available from an endpoint, then we can connect with it directly. It would probably require some specific details to understand your particular data source.

Q&A: When direct electricity data isn't available, does the system support location-based emissions factors?

Yes. We have location-based emission factors. We have information on residuals. We can keep track of your purchases in terms of Renewable Energy Credits or any other market-based instruments like Energy Attribute Certificates. Those kinds of certificates can all be incorporated into your market-based emissions. We have several different options for electricity emissions factors and grid-based factors that we can explore.

Closing

Thanks so much for joining, everyone.

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