CO₂ Subway Map

Measuring one’s own CO₂ emissions seems to be more popular among consumers than among businesses. According to news agency Bloomberg, smartphone apps that track individual CO₂ emissions from purchases are very much on the rise. For example, users of the Commons app earn points towards gift vouchers when they purchase products labelled as sustainable. The problem is that the CO₂ footprint-related information for these products is completely inadequate, because the true data about the end-to-end supply chains, up to and including final delivery to the consumer, is not really available.

In Europe, the CSRD guidelines mean that an estimated 55,000 companies – from small businesses to large publicly listed multinationals – must start measuring the complete CO₂ emissions of their products. And since most of those emissions are Scope 3 emissions, generated outside the company’s own operations and elsewhere in the chain, this is quite a task. As a result, measuring carbon emissions is not very popular among companies.

Booming market for supply chain sustainability software

Calculating Scope 3 requires data about the actual energy consumption of all suppliers, customers and logistics providers in the entire supply chain. For this, companies need software solutions to record, analyse and ultimately report all this data to auditors. Consequently, the supply chain sustainability software market seems to be booming. English analyst firm Verdantix forecasts this software segment to grow worldwide from $1.7 billion in 2023 to $7.7 billion in 2029.

Because of this predicted ‘gold rush’, new vendors of supply chain sustainability software are popping up like mushrooms, particularly in Europe and the USA. The disparate overviews of vendors – especially those with corporate logos – by consulting and analyst firms are literally dizzying for anyone seeking a vendor. The different designations of software categories in this market create further confusion. And the vendors themselves – with their mostly resounding claims – don’t exactly dispel that confusion either.

ESG IT Subway Map Europe

Since 2011, I have been publishing a popular IT Subway Map visualizing the Dutch and European supply chain software markets, based on clearly specified categories (ERP, WMS, TMS, S&OP, etc.). After much research, I have now created the first Subway Map for this new market of CO₂ software solutions. Hopefully this ESG IT Subway Map Europe will make it easier for companies to find the right software partner on their journey to sustainability.

Martijn Lofvers, Chief Trendwatcher Supply Chain Media
martijn.lofvers@supplychainmedia.nl