How are ESG or sustainability metrics evolving?
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President and National Managing Principal in Software2 years ago
My CEO sees a lot of opportunity for us on the ESG side, so we've been looking into different things. In a sense, we write compliance reports so that companies can get customers. ESG is interesting in that context because, if you look at the financial statement audits, companies are starting to include their sustainability and ESG goals in their annual reports. The fact that companies are publishing and making assertions about these ESG goals is slowly starting to generate some standards, which is great. As an assessor, you need something to measure against. And it wouldn't surprise me if we get to a point in a couple years where we're able to assess a company's ESG controls and programs.CEO in Manufacturing2 years ago
There's a company called Ledger8760 that does real-time carbon tracking for cities and they're rolling into data centers. And we’ve started to drive a carbon sticker for devices that’s just like a nutrition label. The carbon sticker will show the embodied carbon so it can be reported in that manner. We have to align on a standard and taxonomy for our industry, because we don't want the government to come in with regulations to fix us. We need to lead this journey because we're technologists, and we should be able to apply technology to the sustainability problem.We should be able to measure the sustainability of our industry and the contributions to it. And then we can drive things to actually get that carbon footprint lowered. For example, we now know that a data center has an embodied carbon footprint from the concrete to the steel, and we know its source energy. We also know its volume of packets in and packets out, so you can start to do a carbon tax on every packet that goes through that facility. Then you'll know what the exact real-time carbon is for any consumption.
President and National Managing Principal in Software2 years ago
Without a strict standard for everyone to follow, it’s difficult to know if a company is doing what they’ve committed to. Because sustainability may mean different things for different companies, different industries or use cases.