Microsoft, SAP And Accenture In Carbon Reporting Tie-Up

A partnership between the Carbon Disclosure Project and three prominent technology companies is the catalyst to a forthcoming upgrade to the group’s climate change disclosure system.

The new system is the result of a relationship between Microsoft, SAP and Accenture and was announced late yesterday, as debates on carbon emissions play out around the globe.

For its part, the not-for-profit CDP is looking to make the process of reporting and drawing value from data on carbon emissions easier for enterprises. Its new disclosure system “will make available primary information on corporate emissions performance, collected for use by institutional investors, businesses and the world’s national regulatory systems, to drive greenhouse gas emission reductions and performance improvements,” CDP said in a statement.

The enhanced reporting system is expected to be up and running by February 2010, and is meant to help the CDP obtain better quality data as well as allow businesses to access that data in forms that will make it easier to perform analysis or comparisons between companies.

At the moment, 2,500 companies are providing data to the CDP, underscoring the business community’s growing understanding of the importance of measuring its carbon footprint, Marty Etzel, vice president of sustainability solutions at SAP, told eWEEK.

For SAP, the partnership involves leveraging its own technology to provide new visualisation and analytic capabilities to the CDP in the form of carbon disclosure reports and user dashboards.

Microsoft is tasked with handling the data capture aspects of the project, with the goal of enabling companies to report more detailed and standardized climate change information. Accenture’s role will be as solution integrator.

“The barrier to entry, and the barrier to reporting your data, has to remain … [an] absolutely low or zero barrier to get your data up there, because that achieves the highest purpose,” David Abood, executive director of Accenture’s climate change group added.