How See Through Carbon helps small and medium sized enterprises who can’t afford to pay experts for carbon reduction advice

As we move from voluntary to mandatory carbon reporting, See Through Carbon aims to help the vast majority of enterprises who produce most of the world’s business emissions but can’t pay for professional advice.

SMEs, carbon consulting, and cost

The See Through Carbon website details the limitations of current carbon accounting standards. As well as outlining the problems with the inaccurate, costly, opaque and proprorietary (ICOP) status quo, it lays out the rationale behind STC’s accurate, free, open-source, transparent (AFOT) alternative.

See Through Carbon’s seven pilot schemes offer a variety of participants, from music venues to farmers, health-care providers, fashion labels and industrial multinationals, the chance to assess STC’s methodology and services.

Each pilot offers participants three services, each with specific outputs.

1. Semi-automated carbon footprint calculation (output: ‘See Through Carbon Report’ pie chart)
2. Expert auditing of initial baseline data provided (output: transparent audit trail in public page as default)
3. Basic carbon-reducing consultancy (output: ‘List of Solutions’, each with its carbon reduction ‘price tag’) 

These pilot services are provided by STC’s global network of pro bono experts, and would cost any small and medium sized enterprise (SME) hundreds, or even thousands of dollars. The ‘catch’, or quid pro quo, is that their carbon footprint and historic reduction data is made public by default, rather than at the discretion of any PR or marketing departments.

The problem is that until carbon reporting becomes a legal requirement for SMEs, almost no small business, however ‘green’ its owner might be, can afford to pay such fees.

Other articles explain STC’s zero-budget model, and barter-based alternatives to conventional fundraising. Whether this approach can survive beyond the pilot stage remains to be seen.

This article addresses the pros and cons of including the advice element – the third, carbon-reducing consultancy element – at the pilot stage.

Instead of presenting it in a SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threat) model used by management consultants, this article simply identifies Risks and Benefits for each area. Areas of debate are listed in random order.

Don’t Get Distracted

Risks

• Accurate measurement of carbon footprints (i.e. ‘The Pie Chart’ element of the public page dashboard) should be STC’s only mission. The consultancy element (i.e. the ‘List of  Solutions’ element) is secondary.
• Providing such bespoke, human-moderated ‘Lists of Solutions’ at scale is impossible or over-ambitious, so should not be part of our strategy.

Benefits

• Because 100% of our Pilot participants are going to be, to some degree or other, audited by our pool of experts, we have an opportunity to test the feasibility and use of providing basic consultancy in addition to simple, objective, measurement.
• Offering the List of Solutions as well as the Pie Chart is opportunistic, in the sense that the same people doing the Audit can also provide the List of Solutions, and the marginal effort to do so is reduced because the audit has already familiarised them with the participant’s basic operations.
• The Pilot is testing whether it might be possible to automate this function to make it useful, better than nothing, and a net benefit. The Consultancy element is disposable, but it seems prudent to test its possibilities.

Education and Awareness Raising

Risks

• The technicalities of carbon accounting are complex enough without introducing an educational element too. These functions should be kept separate. Adding consultancy risks ‘mission creep’, deflecting STC from its core mission.

• See Through News already includes an ‘educational’ element as a means to the See Through end of measurable carbon reduction. Keep STC as a technical mechanism, not proselytising platform.
• A narrow focus on measurable carbon reduction is too simple an approach for a highly complex problem.

Benefits

• Poor educational elements is a weakness of current commercial standards, and a See Through strength. We should play to our strengths.

• The List of Solutions element, in the limited form suggested below in the Rules, adds a significant educational/engagement element, possibly at relatively little marginal effort, for the Pilot stage at least.

• The status quo of public, and even business, understanding, of carbon accounting is so primitive, any solution must include some kind of educational element.  

Blowing Volunteer Goodwill

Risks

• Applying 100% human intervention to the STC Pilot for auditing is onerous, but a prudent precaution to maintain quality control. It’s feasible for the Pilot, as STC administrator can dynamically balance demand and supply, only permitting as many pilot participants as our pool of human experts can manage. But auditing is relatively simple compared to the far more complex and time-consuming task of carbon consulting. At best, including consulting might be an inefficient allocation of limited human resources. At worst, it could discourage carbon consultants from offering their pro bono services even for the auditing.

Benefits

• It’s too early to assess whether this is true. Abandoning the possibility even for the Pilot stage guarantees we’ll never know. Why not continue the experiment, and review it vigilantly?

Potential AI application

Risks

• The number of data points required to form a high-quality data training set for an AI is much higher than STC’s pilot could possibly generate.

Benefits

• No AI expert inside or outside the See Through network has yet been able to venture even an order-of-magnitude guess as to how many Pilot participants would be needed to train an AI. STC can re-assess if/when they can.

Rules, Guidelines & Methodology

Risks

• Volunteer consultancy experts need a clear set of mutually agreed guidelines before they can start to consider contributing to the Pilot project. Starting without clear rules risks wasting valuable volunteer goodwill, or handicapping recruitment of new volunteer experts.

Benefits

STC’s panel of carbon accounting experts is currently discussing the following draft guidelines to create the List of Solutions, based on the pilot participants’ audited baseline report:

• Target: If one emissions source is more than 50% of the total, focus only on that one source. If there are two or three roughy equal major sources, allocate one or two Solutions to each.
• Rule of 3: Itemise 3 discreet carbon-reducing options/actions/solutions.
• Price Tag: Calculate the estimated carbon reduction of each option if implemented.
• Diplomacy: Option 1 should reduce carbon by up to 50%, Option 2 by up to 25%, Option 3 by up to 10%.
• Each option should be tagged according to the following taxonomy:
  • Generic: could be applied to almost any business, e.g. changing energy supplier from fossil-fuel to renewable.
  • Sectoral: could be applied to any business in the sector self-defined by the participant, e.g.’Farmers’ recycling bio-waste for heat or energy.
  • Bespoke: largely applicable to that individual participant or small subsection, e.g. equipment transport costs for a symphony orchestra vs a solo harmonica artist.

Quality Control

Risks

• At individual enterprise level, ‘gold standard’ professional consultancy is ideally done on a detailed, one-to-one basis. This involves lengthy and costly work like field visits, forensic analysis of operations, detailed study of supply chains etc.

• Practically, STC’s consultants can only base their List of Solutions on cruder, flimsier, scanter, data. 

• Providing three solutions and ‘price tags’ for the List of Solutions may be simpler and faster than a full-fat commercial carbon consultancy report, but risks being too simplistic/reductive.

Benefits

• Maybe, but there’s no way of knowing for sure without trying. This is the point of a Pilot.

Possible vs. Perfect

Risks

• Pro bono experts may not have the time to both audit the results, and provide a good-enough List of Solutions. STC’s carbon accounting volunteers may be expert at auditing or consultancy, but not confident or qualified to do both to a high enough standard. 

• For paying customers, carbon consultants usually spend days/weeks compiling a detailed, multi-page report, covering many different aspects, angles and variables. 

• Condensing such complex work into a ‘quick and dirty’ 3-point List of Solutions, based only on online evidence, risks producing poor quality outputs that are not worth the effort.

Benefits

• All true, but that doesn’t mean the ‘quick and dirty’ output isn’t good enough/better than nothing. Such risks should be weighed against the potential practical, credibility, reputational or educational benefits (see below).

Expectations

Risks

• Even if including the List of Solutions in the Pilot is feasible, STC risks raising expectations unrealistically if it turns out to be impractical/ineffective when automated at scale, after the human-moderated Pilot phase is over.

Benefits

• Could be mitigated by making it clear the List of Solutions is a ‘Pilot-only bonus extra’ feature.

Usefulness

Risks

• The Pilots may not be able to generate enough data points to provide a useful data training set for an AI. 
• STC’s rudimentary taxonomy described in the Rules below may be too crude to generate a useful AI training dataset.
• Relying on participants to self-describe their ‘sector’ may be too subjective a categoriser for an AI to clear up post-hoc, compared to, say, a drop-down menu using HMRC’s taxonomy.

Benefits

• Carbon accounting is too immature to have produced the research, or case studies to conclude any of these things for sure, or for any experts to predict them with any confidence. Part of the purpose of the Pilot is to test these risks, if no one else has yet done so.

Pushback from Potential Allies

Risks

• Offering a free-to-use alternative to commercial carbon standards is already likely to create some degree of pushback from companies currently monetising commercial standards. STC can’t afford to pose a threat to commercial carbon consultants too. 

• The profile, understanding and importance of carbon reduction is almost invisible to all but a small number of people working in the carbon accounting sphere. Businesses need to become habituated to paying carbon accounting professionals for bespoke advice, in the same way they currently do for financial accounting. Providing free, but sub-optimal consultancy, may affect professional carbon consultants negatively by ‘eating their lunch’.

Benefits

• STC is aimed at the vast majority of SMEs who can’t afford the additional cost of carbon consultancy, however much they may benefit from it, so is not in fact competing with professional consultants. Indeed, by providing a ‘better than nothing’ version, STC is promoting the very idea of carbon consultancy. As soon SMEs see a benefit in paying for more bespoke service, they’ll pay for it. Far from threatening carbon consultants’ livelihoods, STC’s ‘good-enough’, ‘better-than-nothing’ Lists of Solutions promotes their industry by raising the profile of carbon accounting in general, and its pro bono experts in particular.

The issue of whether, and how, to include a consulting element in See Through Carbon’s pilot phase is being actively debated, and constantly reviewed.

In the spirit of See Through’s principle of transparency, all feedback and suggestions are welcome – please use the Comments to contribute your thoughts on any of these points.