Equipoise support the decarbonisation of the UK’s largest Housing Association with a Scope 3 Procurement Emissions Analysis 🏘️
Client
Clarion Housing Group is the largest housing association in the United Kingdom with 125,000 properties and more than 350,000 residents.
Clarion’s mission is to provide homes for those who need them most.
Clarion is both a landlord and a developer, building thousands of affordable homes every year.
Challenge
Clarion wanted to measure the Scope 3 Greenhouse Gas Emissions that resulted from the procurement of goods and services.
This needed to include a breakdown of emissions at a supplier and category level so they could identify emission hotspot areas and begin to target spend areas for decarbonisation.
“Equipoise worked closely with Clarion to understand the procurement context so that their calculations were accurate and their recommendations were relevant. This Procurement Emissions Analysis and Equipoise’s insights will help us accelerate the decarbonisation of our supply chain. It has been a pleasure working with the Equipoise team.”
Approach
In just 5 weeks Equipoise:
Worked with Clarion’s Procurement team to build an accurate, historical spend profile that excluded any intercompany accounting transfers and spend on Scope 1 and 2 activities like utilities to ensure the analysis was focused on Scope 3
Ran this data through their carbon accounting engine which applies the GHG Protocol spend-based method and aligns suppliers to the most relevant carbon intensity factors from emission factor databases including but not limited to BEIS, EXIOBASE and GHG Protocol to calculate carbon emission estimates
Presented the initial outputs in customisable BI dashboards to allow validation by the Procurement and Sustainability leadership at Clarion
Incorporated Clarion’s feedback into the emissions analysis and new visualisations were added to the BI dashboards in line with customisation requests like the inclusion of procurement spend forecasts
Presented a report that included expert insight on the dashboards, highlighting Clarion’s emissions hotspot areas. The report also put forward actionable next steps for Clarion to accelerate the decarbonisation of their supply chain
Data shown in Dashboards are for illustrative purposes only and do not relate to Clarion Housing Group
Results
The spend-based GHG emission calculations identified that over 80% of the organisation’s emissions sit in Scope 3 as the result of the procurement of goods and services
Clarion can break these emissions down by Entity, Procurement Category, GHG Protocol Category and Suppliers and with the help of Equipoise’s Hotspot Analysis Clarion can prioritise decarbonisation actions like engaging construction suppliers on the use of Mass Timber building methods to reduce the amount of concrete in homes while simultaneously working with suppliers to get more granular emissions data:
Source: Buro Happold
Using procurement forecast data the dashboards also show forecasted emissions to model the financial impact of any potential future carbon taxes and show what reductions need to be made to align Clarion with Science Based decarbonisation targets
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