This diagram shows how sustainability data can flow through a (NOVA-aligned) structured, governed market to enable trusted decisions. It begins with raw inputs and ends with real-world outcomes, and maps the various steps in-between, including how the sharing of data is governed. 

At its foundation are codified science, raw data, and algorithms. These come from science and standards bodies via sensors or related data providers. They are structured through harmonised (using existing standards) models, taxonomies, and ontologies, and stored or managed through technical systems such including databases, data lakes, and aggregation platforms. This layer provides the basic ingredients for sustainability intelligence.

In parallel, the policy and legal layer defines the rights, responsibilities, and protections that govern the underlying data. This includes statutory and voluntary rules, contract structures, redress mechanisms, liabilities, access management, terms and conditions, and pathways for conformance and dispute resolution. Policy frames what should be done and the legal frameworks encode these requirements into enforceable commitments for all participants. Together, these provide guardrails to ensure data sharing is lawful, ethical, and accountable, enabling organisations to operate with clarity and confidence.

Sitting above this layer are the technical infrastructure and metadata practices that ensure consistency, provenance, and interoperability. Principles, standards, and commitments guide how data is produced, maintained, and exchanged. 

Together, these feed into Scheme definitions: where multilateral licences define the full rules for publishing, accessing, and using data. The Scheme rules cover policy, legal, technical, and security needs, and are the basis for pre-competitive collaboration.

To drive adoption and make the Scheme rules operational, a data governance process brings together domain experts, implementation bodies, and market catalysts, policy, assurance practices, and verification. This layer ensures that the market can ‘go far together’.

To enable scale, Schemes can be delivered using Trust Frameworks (which address identity verification, assurance processes, onboarding, monitoring and enforcement). These enable safe participation for organisations across supply chains and sectors to share data effectively.

Above this, discovery and access interfaces allow both humans and machines to find, request, and use data. Portals and aggregators can surface what is available using standard web processes for search.

The next layer brings in tools for analysis. These turn data into insight, ranging from impact assessments to risk identification, forecasting to exposure analysis, vulnerability assessments to reporting. These are the analytical bridge between raw data and meaningful insights.

All these tools can feed into a wide range of applications: analytics platforms to reporting systems, dashboards to insights engines, or tools that support financial, operational, and policy decisions. 

Using these insights, organisations can design or support financial instruments, including loans, insurance, multimodal investment, transition bonds, or other products that depend on consistent, assurable evidence (the data). 

At the top are outcomes that deliver impact: market-facing solutions, actionable research and derisked innovation, leading to better decisions: targeted investment, effective transition planning and implementation, improved resilience and adaptation, disaster risk reduction, mitigation, and reconstruction.

Combined, this diagram shows how sustainability data can be made usable, dependable, and valuable to support society-wide decision-making.

Examples:

• Perseus
• Open Energy

The report shares insights into market trends, costs, and the challenges SMEs face in carbon reporting. It aims to help businesses navigate carbon reporting and support their transition to net zero. It includes extensive research, covering over 270 carbon reporting solutions as well as in depth results of surveys and interviews of SMEs and solution providers. You can find the full long list of carbon reporting solutions here.

Access our comprehensive report here

The report features:

• Comprehensive list of solutions on offer: A detailed overview of 270 carbon reporting tools available, segmented into 10 solution types
• Guidance on choosing the right solution: Advice tailored to the specific needs and scale of a business, helping SMEs navigate through the plethora of options.
• Key considerations: Insights into what SMEs should look for in a provider, such as cost-effectiveness, ease of use, data accuracy, and scope of emission coverage.
• Learnings from other businesses: Real-world examples and insights directly from SMEs who have navigated and implemented carbon reporting solutions.
• Future trends and developments: Analysis on emerging trends in carbon reporting and how they might impact SMEs

How to get involved:

• Sign up to our newsletter to receive the report and updates from IB1
• Learn more about Perseus, the programme enabling automated emissions reporting for every SME in the UK.
• Get in touch to contribute and connect: research@ib1.org

Perseus home page

Join us for an enlightening webinar, designed for UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We’re delving into the comprehensive report by Icebreaker One, commissioned by the British Business Bank. This session will empower you with the knowledge and tools needed to understand carbon reporting and will help you to find the right solution for your business.

Report: https://ib1.org/ecosystem/2024-carbon-reporting-solutions-report/

Video recording

What You Will Learn

• Extensive Solutions Catalogue: Explore over 270 carbon reporting tools, systematically categorised into 10 distinct types.
• Personalised Guidance: Receive expert advice on choosing solutions that align with your business’s size and requirements.
• Essential Provider Criteria: Gain insight into key factors to consider when selecting a carbon reporting solution, including cost, user-friendliness, data accuracy, and emission coverage.
• Success Stories: Learn from the experiences of other SMEs who have successfully implemented carbon reporting solutions.
• Future Outlook: Stay ahead of the curve with updates on emerging trends and how they’re shaping the future of carbon reporting for SMEs.

Why Attend?

This webinar isn’t just about understanding the landscape of carbon reporting; it’s about enhancing your business’s journey towards sustainability and net zero goals. Whether you’re starting your carbon reporting journey or looking to refine your strategies, this webinar is the key to unlocking your potential.

Event Details

Dates: Thursday 8th February 2-3pm | Thursday 15th February 12:30-1:30pm

Location: Zoom link, sign up on Eventbrite

Who Should Attend?

This event is ideal for SME owners, sustainability managers, and anyone interested in the intersection of business growth and environmental stewardship.

The open survey is now live via https://ib1.org/2023/10/06/uk-survey-carbon-reporting-solutions

The British Business Bank (BBB) have commissioned Icebreaker One to help understand the landscape of carbon calculators and ESG ‘software tools’ available to UK SMEs.

The key research questions we are aiming to address are: 

“What is currently out there, and what is needed to help accelerate impact to Net Zero?”

Before sending out our first survey, aligned with Icebreaker One’s open approach, we are starting this process by asking for your inputs into what the questions should be. 

We are acutely aware that this is a broad category and there are many, often blurred, distinctions of what solutions provide, and refining this to help bring clarity to the market is part of the work.

If you are either a solutions provider or a user of solutions, we would like your input today.

If you would like to give feedback on the questions, you can comment in this Google Doc, or download this Word Doc version and comment.

We’ll send out the actual survey next Friday 6th October and your input today will help us make it better. 

We will also be reaching out to specific organisations to interview them and gather more detail. If you are interested in participating in an interview please contact research@ib1.org. If you can’t access the Google Document, email that address and we’ll send the questions as an attachment. 

Please be a ‘critical friend’ with your input, and don’t miss this opportunity to shape important national research. 

Notes

We will publish aggregate results of this work openly for the benefit of everyone. The better the inputs we get, the more everyone can orient around what works.

We are not looking for sales or marketing presentations from companies. We are focussed on quantitative and qualitative comparisons that BBB can use in addressing and/or supporting market needs.

We are not looking to assess or review any standards, frameworks, methodologies.

View, add or edit entries here —http://bit.ly/ib1-CFI

[or use this web form]

An embedded view-only version of the sheet is below.

For consultation as part of a development process, this report is open to comment by anyone at: https://bit.ly/ib1-nfdf
[scroll down on this page for re-usable images]

PDF snapshot 2021-04-28

Goals of this document

In the context of environmental information, comprehensive financial and non-financial reporting by organisations, we aim to demonstrate opportunities that could reduce effort and complement ongoing international initiatives. We present the scope and complexity of data sharing across markets, supply and value-chains. We highlight challenges that create friction, inertia and inhibit action in delivering goals, including hard-programmed habits and underlying presuppositions and premises. We highlight solutions that can reduce friction in data-sharing and propose levers of change that can help unlock innovation (e.g. policy and regulatory, perception shifts, behavioural changes). 

Intended audience(s)

Our primary audience includes decision-makers and their advisors who wish to understand the transformative potential of data, and how its usage can be unlocked at scale to enable it to act as a flow of evidence that informs action. While it covers ‘technology concepts’ it is not ‘about’ technology. Rather, it addresses designing the conditions for success that would enable millions of experts, practitioners and organisations to better discover, access and use the data they need to make informed decisions. 

This includes, but is not limited to: policymakers and regulators working on Sustainable Finance, Corporate Reporting and Value Chain Due Diligence; experts working across Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and related reporting frameworks (e.g. TCFD, SASB); Chief Data Officers and related leaders working on data strategy and policy; solution providers seeking to improve scenario modelling; business leaders optimising efficiency and reducing risk in decision-making.

Executive Summary

The wealth of data we have, and that is becoming available, must now be made usable to help us address climate and environmental risks, and to radically improve our investments in, and planning and management of our global infrastructure. While there is an ocean of available capital, the lack of comprehensive, trusted and quality data-flow is leading to a misallocation of resources, missed opportunities and is creating catastrophic risks on our global balance sheets. Our infrastructure for accessing this data is as important as our physical infrastructure in averting our climate, biodiversity and related crises, but it is being dangerously neglected.

Data for non-financial reporting is, and will increasingly be, required across global value chains. Global cooperation will be needed, ensuring timely, trusted coordination to enable data to flow in ways that all value-chain partners can engage with, align with and accept. Data sharing will, therefore, require an industry-neutral, geography-neutral and context-neutral trust framework and governance to underpin sharing in a non-partisan manner.

Today, the majority of corporate environmental sustainability data published are delivered ‘somewhere online’, often in a PDF format, often inconsistently, in ways that are then aggregated into portals or commercial services that then attempt to translate them into value or risk assessments. There are substantial gaps in the materiality of much of this data, it is often incomplete or not ‘actionable’. The process of data collection, access, sharing and usage are, at best, not fit for purpose.

Fortunately, there are many initiatives addressing the issues of what data may be material (e.g. TCFD, SASB, GRI, CDSB, GHG Protocol). Given that element of the challenge is well understood, our focus is on how to make the information more accessible, usable and impactful.

The opportunity exists to directly affect two parts of the data value chain. Firstly, we can enable better discovery, access and usage of the ‘outputs’ (e.g. TCFD reports). Secondly, and significantly, we can enable better discovery, access and usage of the ‘inputs’ (e.g. the energy consumption of a factory that generates emissions). 

There is a bold but achievable route to deliver access to the environmental data with the quality and scope that will be needed for the success of Sustainable Finance, corporate environmental reporting and multinational corporate management of Science Based Targets for GHG emission reduction. This solution can overcome the significant political and cultural barriers and challenges to the current situation of access to suitable data for corporate reporting, financial disclosures and systemic risk modelling.

The proposed solution builds on the proven potential of existing shared data standards development (e.g. currently deployed in Open Banking) and those that lie at the core of the EU’s Digital and Data Strategies, including the Green Deal Dataspace.

Open Banking has already used this approach with great success. Open Banking is used by two million consumers in the UK, and Open Banking practices are now in development across over twenty countries, including Australia, Bahrain, Europe, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, New Zealand, Rwanda, Singapore and the USA and beyond. The Open Banking market is projected to grow to over $40B by 2026.

Our direct experience shows that the key features of the creation of data flows are not technical (‘ICT’). Therefore, rather than a focus on ‘which data’, ‘which technology’ or ‘what data standards’ (many exist), instead the solution requires addressing the processes and practices that enable data flows that can unlock continuous improvement — using data as material evidence that drives decisions.  In order to achieve this at scale, across industries and borders, we need a functioning data ecosystem of users and suppliers of data, and the best way to achieve this is to adopt common, open standards for data sharing. To deliver this requires a governance framework for data access that creates trust.

At the heart of the architecture is a federated approach to data sharing, namely that the data is not centrally stored, it is left with the data owner or controller and consent managed to allow those with permissions to access with conditional rules that have been agreed by the market.  

A data governance trust framework addresses three foundational issues. Firstly, it helps align the discovery and access of data in a manner that can scale to millions of use cases. Secondly, it aligns the actors in the system around a secure and trusted environment from which they have a direct benefit to participate (as either a supplier or a consumer of data). Thirdly, critically, a trusted framework can help align organisations around legal, IP, liability and rights issues in a manner that can unlock data sharing between organisations and across borders.

Practical experience in Open Banking, and development of ‘Open Energy’, shows that implementation can grow organically, with strong leadership, appropriate governance, starting small around core use cases, and expanding progressively. Implementation strategies can build on existing experience. 

The approach needs organisations to take forward development together. To satisfy all needs, it is best co-designed by the future participants, with that process facilitated by an independent, neutral body. Whilst there are various international, sectoral and regional initiatives attempting to align data standards (for example around taxonomies and ontologies such as the EU taxonomy for sustainable activities), there is a significant (and unnecessary) gap in initiatives to facilitate data discovery, access and usage. Yet, success in this area is essential and can also resolve or reduce some of the most difficult problems around the alignment of data.

A roadmap for this work would include a 3-6 month process of planning, stakeholder curation and engagement, and scoping of test use-cases. Implementation can be delivered through a continuous development process that combines multi-disciplinary working groups to triage, prioritise and work through specific issues linked to the use-case. In parallel, the use case is developed in an active sandbox environment to test the recommendations and identify material blockers. The solution is tested with users and the outcomes fed back into the scoping process for refinement. This process can be run on a continuous 3 or 6-month loop until viable solutions have been identified, tested and proven.  

Photo credit: @lceusebio, unsplash. Design: Philpott Design

The SERI aim is to create a clear, impactful and detailed data governance framework (the Standard for Environment, Risk and Insurance) that enables government, businesses, consumers and 3rd party developers to understand the potential of sector-wide data sharing in insurance to develop climate-ready financial products. Using industry-defined use cases to frame user needs, it will detail the steps to implementation in the UK and empower decision-makers to mandate, measure and act upon the data-flows that enable Net Zero. 

• governance and regulatory entities
• agencies, consortiums and research institutions
• assets that generate, produce or supply energy to the country 
• manufacturers, equipment and infrastructure providers
• energy transporters, transmitters, operators and distributors
• energy suppliers
• service providers including brokers, consultants, technology, and other services

We included energy investors and the investment community given their role as facilitators of energy connectivity, especially with regards to the transition to renewable energy and our legal requirements to meet emission targets. 

Our map of this ecosystem shows its complexity and how large energy generating assets (e.g. coal or nuclear plants) centrally transmit and distribute energy to reach the end consumer. 

A number of monopolies are involved, such as the transmission (electricity & gas) and distribution systems (DNOs for electricity & DNs for gas). Ofgem along with other regulatory bodies provide governance to ensure price controls in the wholesale market so that energy suppliers can utilize the transmission and distribution networks fairly, and offer a competitive marketplace for consumers to purchase their energy.

As a result, the ecosystem contains vast amounts of data that are currently fragmented and often siloed.

We believe that harnessing this data through a robust, decentralised and federated data infrastructure is key to modernising the energy system in the UK and attaining our targets for a carbon-net-zero future—we call for the development of an Open Energy standard to help address this.

Acronyms unbundled

• DNO = District Network Operators (Also sometimes District Systems Operator DSO)
• ESO = Electricity System Operator
• NGESO = National Grid Electricity System Operator
• NGET = National Grid Electricity Transmission Plc
• TO/TNO/TSO = Transmission Operators (Network and Systems)

Over the past 18 months we’ve spoken to many hundreds of people representing hundreds of organisations.

One observation is that there isn’t a clear category for those working at the intersections of climate and environment, finance and infrastructure. Another common question is how might Icebreaker One fit with other initiatives out there?

Why are these intersections important?

To address our climate and biodiversity emergencies we need to make the right investment decisions that minimise environmental impact. The largest investments we make—in the $trillions—are around our infrastructure. A common ask from everyone has been “we need better data” (better access to existing data, to better quality data, and to new data).

There are many disparate initiatives, but a fragmented landscape is also a good sign— it indicates there are strong drivers from many organisations who are trying to solve a common problem. At some point many will collaborate or combine or develop specific, localised solutions. We aim to play a role in enabling this. To identify the category of programmes and organisations in this space, we abbreviate to CEFID to cover Climate, Environment, Finance, Infrastructure and Data.

Mapping the CEFID landscape
We’ve identified over 200 collaborative initiatives (so far):  

View, comment and add to
The CEFID directory — http://bit.ly/ib1-cefid

NB: we are not adding individual commercial solutions providers to this list, that’s for another time

What we’ve learned so far

There are many different types of initiatives and many different self-descriptions: which is causing confusion. For example, the word ‘platform’ is used to mean many different things: a ‘platform for discussion’ and bringing people together (e.g. UN DRR), a social network, a database, a dashboard, a technology stack, a funding initiative, or ‘portal’ (which also has many uses).  So, while ‘platform’ works in context, it is too dilute in a broader context, so we have chosen different words (e.g. ‘tool’, ‘network’). 

Some are overarching principles, such as the Principles for Sustainable Insurance (PSI), the ClimateWise Principles or the Poseidon Principles. These are frameworks within which their signatories operate, and standards of reporting to which they conform. 

Others are tools, such as MapX or ResourceWatch, that help monitor the use of Earth’s resources, and make this information available to researchers and policymakers. 

We’ve mapped facilities and programmes such as the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction or the Global Index Insurance Facility, which fund and further specific products or aims. Others are ‘risk pools’, such as the African Risk Capacity or the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Insurance Company which provide insurance at an intra-governmental level.

We’ve looked at partnerships and alliances that bring together diverse actors such as the InsuResilience Global Partnership, the Insurance Development Forum and the Geneva Association.  Each one works with a slightly different set of actors – for example, InsuResilience focuses on the protection gap and increasing the reach of insurance in the V20. The Insurance Development Forum explores how to extend the use of insurance and related risk management capabilities to build greater resilience. The Geneva Association brings together the CEOs of major insurers and reinsurers to support research programmes pertinent to board-level discussions.

Where is Icebreaker One on the map?
We have not found any initiatives in the specific space where Icebreaker One sits—“sorting out the plumbing” (standards) that enable data sharing across businesses for research, tools, analysis, and decision-making.  Icebreaker One seeks to address use-cases and blockers faced between finance, policy and science to help people reduce risk and develop new products, to find efficiencies and create resilient businesses. 

With our partners, we’ve been compiling user-stories based on “if this – then that” scenarios: what if the environmental and financial data they needed to make decisions were easily addressable? What if they were able to make the data they have available easily findable and usable by others (in both commercial and non-commercial settings)?

Action
If you think we might have missed someone, or you’d like to contribute to the map, get in touch with gea@ib1.org or simply add directly using this open spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/ib1-cefid