Australian organisations were urged to consider how they will harness data to account for carbon emissions, at the 2024 IoT Impact conference in Sydney last week.

The IoT Impact conference, which brought together multiple industries and is spearheaded by IoT Alliance Australia, had a heavy focus on the data needed to track and report on environmental sustainability targets.

“Achieving our net zero targets, competing locally and globally for finance and investment in a greenhouse gas sensitive market and setting up a low carbon economy will need data,” said IoT Alliance Australia CEO, Frank Zeichner. “That data will need to be trusted and timely and shared safely.”

“On top of that, mandatory climate related financial disclosure will likely begin from the first of January next year. It will progressively include large businesses, then smaller businesses, then the emissions data from the supply chain, also known as scope three emissions,” he added.

“Gearing up our data collecting, processing and sharing capacity and capability to meet these needs and more is utterly critical for Australia if we want to meet our targets let alone be a clean tech and energy leader, which is our aspiration.”

Zeichner predicted that the data needed would create massive opportunities and responsibilities “for the IoT and data smart community to help and enable and accelerate our net zero transition and to compete in a global market.”

Calculating climate scores

Attendees at the IoT Impact event yesterday heard from people at the forefront of harnessing data from the Internet of Things (IoT) and other sources to address these challenges.

They included John Mottram, cofounder of WollemAI, which uses a variety of data and machine learning to calculate climate scores for large agricultural portfolios on demand.

“We're effectively quantifying climate and nature values in agricultural enterprises,” Mottram said.

“The reporting provides a comprehensive set of measurements for portfolios of 10,000 plus assets down to each individual at the farm level, a comprehensive set of measurements of the positive emissions, … the negative side of emissions (carbon removals from the atmosphere), …a measurement of the land use change [and] a measurement of the carbon stock of the land, the trees, the pasture, etc.”

Mottram was joined on stage by Carl Prins, co-founder and CEO of Pathzero, which is helping to connect institutional asset owners with fund managers who manage their capital and having those fund managers disclose those emissions to the fund manager.

“That's quite important in today's world, where greenwashing and litigation risk becomes a real issue for institutional asset owners, because essentially, it places the responsibility for disclosure to the fund manager” Prins said.

“That disclosure of responsibility then drives the fund manager to want to create better data and manage the risk of making an incorrect disclosure.”

Pathzero is marketed as the largest private markets carbon emissions data network globally, with more than 250 fund managers reporting data to it.

“If you are an institutional asset owner, like a superannuation fund or a pension fund endowment funds sovereign wealth fund, and you need access to data in your asset classes of commercial real estate private equity, infrastructure, and private debt, we provide a solution,” Prins said.

Prins described Pathzero as “a technology solution that uniquely enables us to share the right information.”

“Let's say a fund manager engages with an asset, identifies that electricity is a huge source of emissions in this asset, does an analysis on renewable energy targets, does an analysis on the use of renewable energy behind the meter at the particular asset. That information can be produced once and shared multiple times to numerous stakeholders on a network.”

A language that resonates with financiers

In addition to discussion about tracking and accounting of greenhouse gas emissions, yesterday’s IoT Impact conference also examined environmental accounting, or ‘natural capital accounting’.

Rayne van den Berg, principal of NatCap+, was formerly CFO of Tasmanian forestry company Forico. Introducing her at yesterday’s event, BWD Strategic Executive Chair Derryn Heilbuth said Van den Berg had “positioned the company [NatCap+], and in fact Tasmania, as world leaders in natural capital accounting.”

Van den Berg described natural capital accounting as “collecting all these amazing metrics across our business, and then converting them into a language that would actually resonate with the finance community.”

She said Forico had been spending money maintaining and preserving and restoring areas of native forest.

“The challenge put to me and our team was: it might not be on a traditional balance sheet but how do we actually show value to our investors? … It's collecting all these amazing metrics across our business and then converting them into a language that would really resonate with the finance community.”

She said the process had gained importance. “There's people sitting around corporate boardrooms, and governments, trying to work out how they're actually going to make better decisions…We've had a disconnect between what's happening on the ground, and policy and where financial capital is going. So the data is really important to be able to make those decisions.”

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