The need for usability for ESG/carbon accounting tools and resources
A discussion with Alyssa Rade, CSO at Sustain.Life
Alyssa Rade is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Sustain.Life, where she leads the company’s strategy for customer-facing sustainability content. Sustain.Life, SAP.iO alum, is a sustainability management SaaS platform. Her 10+ years of corporate sustainability experience guides the program recommendations, emissions tracking, and third-party certifications featured in Sustain.Life’s software. Before joining Sustain.Life, Alyssa directed the sustainability program at Vornado Realty Trust. She managed green building certifications, waste and recycling, energy efficiency, health, and wellness for over 30 million sf of commercial office space. Alyssa is accredited as a LEED and WELL AP and holds an MPA in Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia University and a BA in Environmental Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Read on for highlights from our discussion with Alyssa.
Tell us about your platform and how your customers use it.
Sustain.Life has deep carbon expertise that helps future-proof businesses by taking climate action. We are tailor-made for small and medium-sized enterprises looking to streamline and automate their carbon accounting for audit-grade emissions inventories across scopes 1, 2, and 3. As a tech-first solution, our platform is API backed, and integration-heavy, making it easy for our users to connect their existing business data and let technology do the work. We support customers across various industries- everything from fashion, apparel, consumer goods, crypto, agriculture, and more. Most users come to our platform looking to calculate their emissions baseline, set meaningful science-based targets, engage with their supply chain to drive reduction and automate annual ESG reporting. As small and medium-size enterprises, our users are looking for an accessible, intuitive tool to support their carbon and broader sustainability needs.
What is the current landscape of ESG tools and resources available today?
The ESG SaaS landscape is a crowded one. A lot of tools focus on reporting, essentially guiding companies through reporting frameworks, to outline what data is required for disclosure. While this is a helpful time-saver, and something we also do in the Sustain.Life platform, we feel it’s critical to help our users grow and actually improve their sustainability programs and performance. To that end, we provide over 120 guides on operationalizing sustainability, and integrating it into your core business processes and culture. There are also many carbon accounting platforms; although buyer-beware, they are not all created equal. Many have limited coverage across scopes 1, 2, and 3; others rely solely on estimated or modeled data and don’t reflect business-specific operational improvements that drive reductions.
With all SaaS products, seamless usability is key; how user-friendly is your product for someone with limited sustainability expertise?
We’ve designed the Sustain.Life platform to be incredibly user-friendly, removing the entry barrier to climate action and ESG. You don’t need a sustainability degree or deep applied experience to interact with the app. The whole ethos of Sustain.Life is to empower every business to take climate action. This platform is not meant for niche industry experts but for operators, business owners, and lean sustainability teams to engage. By designing an intuitive UI where we translate industry jargon to more approachable business language, you can get a stable footing and drive forward with meaningful programs and powerful data.
Why must organizations understand how to measure, manage and report their carbon emissions now vs later?
Both the market and regulations across the globe have made it clear that climate risk is a business risk. 194 countries signed the Paris Agreement, meaning collectively, the global powers recognize the need to maintain global warming to below 2 degrees, ideally 1.5. This is imperative to support our global societal systems- where and how we grow food, access clean water, build infrastructure, and invest in our economies. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and so to achieve the Paris Agreement goals and maintain the 1.5 degree threshold, businesses need to measure, manage, and report their carbon emissions now. We don’t have time for later; we used it all up. We NEED emissions to hit net zero by 2050 to protect the delicate ecological and societal systems we depend on.
Many organizations want to start sustainability programs but don’t know where to start; how can your platform help them?
Sustain.Life was born from single mission of making sustainability more accessible to the businesses that want and need to take climate action. For businesses without deep in-house expertise or deep pockets for expensive consultants. We aim to lower the entry barrier for sustainability because this is an all-hands-on-deck problem requiring an all-hands-on-deck solution. It can’t just be the Fortune 500 enterprises driving sustainability. It has to be the entire value chain- the tier 1, 2, 3, and 4 suppliers. That’s whom we focus on supporting at Sustain.Life.
We help businesses that are launching, digitizing, and scaling their sustainability efforts by guiding them through how to think about this through the lens of their business operations. Our onboarding takes about 90 seconds, and our platform can recommend target focus areas based on your company’s characteristics. By helping businesses understand where they can have the most impact and the level of effort involved across initiatives — we then guide users through how to implement programs across their organization: what stakeholders to engage, questions to ask, providing tools to measure, communicate and assess impact effectively.
Whether you’re pursuing B corp status, publishing your first sustainability report, disclosing across ESG standards, or growing your sustainability practice from the ground up, Sustain.Life provides the education, context, and tools to grow your efforts.
What guidance would you share for businesses looking for the right ESG platform?
In selecting the right ESG platform, assessing your needs against the offering is critical. Some things to consider:
- Does the platform help with data collection and automation — this is often the most challenging part of monitoring and reporting on sustainability. Look for data integrations with utilities to automate energy performance, scope 1 and 2 emissions, and ERP and accounting platforms for scope 3. This is especially critical for larger organizations.
- Does the platform have sufficient geographic coverage? From a carbon standpoint, emission factors vary by geography. For example, the emissions intensity of the electric grid varies regionally depending on what sources generate that power. Make sure you understand the carbon accounting methodology to ensure it reflects your regional needs.
- Breadth vs depth — some platforms focus on carbon management without broader sustainability or ESG support, while support just scope 1 and 2 emissions with limited support for only certain categories under scope 3 (remember there are 15). If you’re looking for a comprehensive tool, make sure it can support carbon accounting for scopes 1, 2, and 3 and your operational sustainability needs across areas like energy, water, waste, etc.
- Consider how the platform helps you manage and reduce your impact. Data collection and reporting are important but should be byproducts of meaningful sustainability actions.
