The Open Footprint® Data Model
A foundation for sustainability data

The Open Footprint Data Model Standard helps organizations build trustworthy, well-structured sustainability data. This can support better decision-making for reducing corporate impact on the planet, as well as compliance with tough new reporting rules.

Dealing with the climate crisis is a hugely complex global challenge involving governments, organizations, and citizens. To solve it, we need bold innovation, as well as new skills in learning how to live more efficiently.

Many governments and organizations across the globe are setting out net-zero plans that declare ambitious targets for carbon reduction in the next couple of decades. Alongside this, many governments are introducing tough sustainability reporting rules, such as the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, all to ensure that organizations declare their environmental impact.

With all these plans being published and regulatory reporting rules being introduced, it seems like everyone is starting to get with the beat and make progress towards reducing our impact on the planet.

Right?

Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Organizations need reliable, trustworthy sustainability data to drive decision-making and produce regulatory reporting, and this data is far from trivial to collect and analyze.

GHG reporting is complex

Let’s consider the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) domain, which is only a part of the wider sustainability domain alongside water use, land use, biodiversity, and other topics. GHG reporting is divided into three scopes as shown in the illustration.

Scope 1 covers direct emissions generated by an organization’s activities. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions generated by purchased energy. Scope 3 covers the remaining indirect emissions generated by upstream and downstream activities such as the supply chain and product distribution, use, and disposal.

For many organizations, Scope 3 emissions far outweigh those from Scope 1 and Scope 2, especially if they have complex supply chain and distribution ecosystems. However, Scope 3 emissions are often the hardest to quantify as they involve gathering detailed sustainability data from potentially hundreds of parties across complex, global ecosystems.

In research published by the Capgemini Research Institute in its Data for net zero report, only 22% of surveyed organizations say they are measuring Scope 3 emissions.

The Open Footprint^® Data Model Standard

The recently published Open Footprint Data Model Standard enables organizations to capture and share sustainability data in a consistent, transparent, and traceable way, regardless of industry sector or ecosystem complexity. By using this standard as part of their data discipline, organizations can set up a solid data foundation that supports better decision-making and opens the way for more innovation in tackling the climate crisis.

The standard has been produced by the Open Footprint Forum, part of the Open Group. The Forum includes sustainability and data experts from a wide range of member organizations, including Capgemini. Version 1.0 of the standard covers all air emissions. Later versions will cover other aspects of sustainability.

The model covers all the key information that is critical to recording and sharing sustainability data, including:

• How an organization is structured
• How it works with other organizations
• What facilities and assets it has
• What activities it conducts that contribute to emissions
• What emissions are generated or captured
• How those emissions are calculated
• How emissions relate to a product over its lifecycle
• What emissions are included in which sustainability report against which reporting standard

A key principle of the model is the ability to support full traceability of data from source to report. This is critical for building trust in sustainability data with stakeholders such as regulators, shareholders, and the public.

“Organizations can set up a solid data foundation that supports better decision-making and opens the way for more innovation in tackling the climate crisis.”

How the model helps organizations

Standardizing data within the organization. Often the first battle is to get a coherent view of sustainability data within the organization. This involves collecting data from a diverse set of business units and organizing it to support analysis and reporting. Basing this common view on a robust, fit-for-purpose data model is an essential step that must be taken early. The Open Footprint® Data Model is ideally suited to this task.

Sharing sustainability data between organizations. Organizations need to share sustainability data with partners, customers, and other stakeholders. Using the Open Footprint Data Model to standardize how this data is provided reduces friction, increases the utility of the data, and offers a way of proving provenance to increase trust. This is especially true for GHG Scope 3, which involves integrating data from many parties.

A foundation for sustainability insights from analytics and AI. Deciding which activities an organization needs to stop, change, or accelerate is key to meeting net-zero commitments and making concrete reductions to environmental impact. Looking past simple mitigations to find the bigger wins requires aid from more advanced analytics and AI. This kind of analysis relies on sustainability data that is consistent, comprehensive, and of excellent quality, fused with other business data. Basing the sustainability data on a robust model is an essential foundation to this task.

Support for regulatory reporting. Tough rules on sustainability reporting to regulators are already in place for some types of organization in many areas. Over time, these rules are expected to get tougher and widen in scope. Some reporting standards require an organization to not only state the measureof an environmental impact it has made, such as a GHG emission, but how that measure was calculated. Having a data model that supports traceability from source to report, including a record of the calculation steps, is essential for this task. This was one of the main use cases that the Open Footprint Data Model was built around.

Acting on sustainability data

To crack the climate problem, or at least help to minimize an organization’s impact on the planet, we need trustworthy sustainability data. Adopting a common data standard is a clear enabler to building a solid data foundation on which we can rely for evidence-based sustainability decisions. This foundation is also a critical enabler for the innovation we need to apply to the climate problem, so we can look after the one and only planet we live on.

Innovation takeaways –

Sustainability decision-making needs trusted data – Any decision-making needs to rely on trusted data, but this is especially true for the sustainability domain. It is a new topic for many organizations and the stakes are high when it comes to placing bets on what interventions are going to make a material difference to reducing environmental impact.

Base sustainability data on a robust model – The sustainability domain is a complex issue. Therefore, a simple data model trying to capture those complexities isn’t going to cut it. It is better to start off with a robust model that can properly cope with the intricacies of the domain rather than having to migrate data repeatedly as simpler models fall short.

Align sustainability data across ecosystems. Having standardized data within an organization is a great start, but a business’ ecosystems often include many organizations and geographies. Sustainability data needs to be aligned using well-founded standards, so that sharing data is low friction and high value.