Normative, helps businesses reach net zero emissions. As the world’s first carbon accounting engine, Normative enables businesses to accurately and comprehensively measure their carbon footprints. Working from these measurements, Normative recommends tailored reduction actions and climate investments to bring businesses to true net zero. As members of the Exponential Roadmap Initiative, Normative supports the 1.5°C Business Playbook– a guideline for exponential climate action- and are taking action across the 4 Climate Pillars of the Playbook.
Reducing own emissions
Normative has committed to the UN’s Race to Zero campaign with a target to reach net zero by 2030. Pursuing this commitment, Normative is developing a detailed reduction plan to get there, and reports progress annually.
Reducing value chain emissions
Most of Normative’s emissions are in Scope 3. Within Scope 3, purchased goods and services make up the largest share. In particular, office rental space, professional services, and IT equipment are some of Normative’s largest sources of emissions.
Normative has a sustainability policy in place to kick-start its net-zero journey. This policy focuses on always choosing the lowest-emission option available, including for electricity, travel, and catering.
Integrating climate in business strategy
The third pillar of the 1.5°C Business Playbook involves integrating net zero into a company’s business model. When it comes to contributing to the Race to Zero, Normative’s biggest impact potential lies in its work- supporting businesses on their path to Net Zero. Normative helps businesses reach net zero emissions by providing accurate emissions measurements, tailored reduction advice, and effective climate investment.
Supporting businesses with value chain carbon management is vital to bringing companies to net zero. Around 90% of emissions occur in the value chain, but companies have a difficult time measuring and reducing these emissions because they occur outside company walls. Poor data is also a barrier to value chain emissions measurement, and businesses report an error rate of up to 40% when measuring emissions.
This is the accuracy gap: the delta between the emissions a business thinks it’s emitting and the emissions it’s actually responsible for.
To close this gap and measure a business’s full value chain emissions requires collaboration among many entities – especially for large businesses with thousands of suppliers. Normative uses scientifically-sourced emissions data to provide transaction-based measurements of a business’s value chain emissions, then helps the business refine those measurements with activity data obtained from the supplier. This hybrid methodology is recommended by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to ensure that emissions are accounted for in as accurate and comprehensive way possible.
By providing accurate and comprehensive emissions measurements, Normative empowers businesses with the insights they need to minimize their emissions, reduce inefficiencies, and engage their value chains in sustainable or circular initiatives.
This work not only helps businesses meet climate goals, but also gives them competitive advantages like improved brand equity and better risk management.
By providing the tools to give businesses a 1.5°C-aligned path forward – and highlighting the advantages businesses on that path experience – Normative is working to bring more businesses into the Race to Zero.
Influencing climate action in society
Normative builds collaborations to bring every business to net zero. As part of its role as founding software partner of the SME Climate Hub, and with support from Google, Normative developed the Business Carbon Calculator to help small companies measure their emissions.
Measuring emissions not only empowers small businesses to begin reductions – it also enables them to report their emissions to the larger companies they supply to, reducing the accuracy gap and facilitating the larger companies’ reduction efforts.
In order to provide committed businesses of the SME Climate Hub with a supportive ecosystem of tools and resources, Normative is working closely with the Exponential Roadmap Initiative and the We Mean Business Coalition on both the software and the future strategic direction of the SME Climate Hub.
Together, these parties have supported CDP in developing a disclosure framework tailored to small businesses, while also working with enterprise-sized businesses– including the Exponential Roadmap Initiative’s 1.5 Supply Chain Leaders – on topics around value chain engagement.