The World Resources Institute (WRI) is a non-profit, global research organization that spans more than 50 countries, with offices in the United States, China, India, Brazil, and more. Our more than 200 experts and staff work closely with leaders to turn big ideas into action to sustain our natural resources—the foundation of economic opportunity and human well-being. Our work focuses on six critical issues at the intersection of environment and development: climate, energy, food, forests, water, and cities and transport.
WRI’s CAIT Climate Data Explorer (formally the Climate Analysis Indicators Tool) provides free access to comprehensive, reliable, and comparable greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data sets, as well as other climate-relevant indicators, to enable analysis on a wide range of climate-related data questions. Through its powerful yet simple and easy-to-use online interface, CAIT is designed to help users from government, business, academia, the media, and civil society efficiently explore, understand, and communicate climate data.
It is now clear that to constrain the impacts of climate change, global average temperatures must be stabilized to within two degrees Celsius. This will be practically impossible without sustained leadership from the private sector. While various data sources exist on companies’ efforts to reduce their GHG emissions, a lack of data transparency and accessibility presents a key barrier to monitoring and fomenting improvements in companies’ performance. CAIT Business will be built as an extension to the CAIT Climate Data Explorer to help remove this barrier. The first (beta) version, to be published in December, will track companies’ emissions, indicate whether individual companies have set GHG emissions reduction targets, and show the progress of companies toward their targets. A particular goal of the tool is to encourage the adoption of ambitious GHG targets that are in line with the emissions reductions required for a two degree future (so called ‘Science Based Targets’).
The tool will allow users to:
- Easily visualize, access and compare the emission trajectories of companies;
- Assess which companies have set GHG targets and whether these targets are science-based targets;
- Monitor the progress of individual companies against their targets.
- Primary Audience: Civil society groups advocating for more comprehensive and ambitious GHG reduction strategies in individual companies or sectors. Example use case: An employee of an NGO works to promote improved environmental performance within the apparel retail industry. He needs to know how ambitiously the largest companies in that sector are acting on climate change. Using CAIT Business, he filters companies by sector and determines that relatively few apparel retail companies have set science-based reduction targets. He downloads visualizations of reduction targets and trends of the three most relevant companies, and copies the list of all companies that have a reduction target. He then uses the results to push more companies to set science-based targets.
- Secondary Audiences
- Companies seeking to benchmark performance against that of their peers, design more ambitious reduction strategies, and position themselves for success in a carbon constrained economy;
- Policymakers, academics and environmental journalists seeking to understand current levels of corporate action;
- Generally concerned consumers seeking to incorporate GHG performance into product purchasing decisions;
- Investors seeking to build low-carbon investment portfolios.
CAIT Business will focus on a subset of companies, mostly the Global 500. For each company, CAIT Business will show (data to be compiled by WRI):
- General information about a company (name, country, industry, sector, size by revenue/emissions)
- Whether company currently publicly reports GHG emissions from internal operations
- For those companies that report GHG emissions: historical annual GHG emissions data and historical emissions intensities (total emissions and emissions per unit revenue)*
- Whether company has publicly set a GHG reduction target for its internal operations
- For those companies with targets:
- whether target is an absolute target (requiring absolute emissions reductions) and/or an intensity target (requiring reductions relative to a business metric such as revenue) 10 G Street, NE Suite 800 Washington, DC 20002 USA (PH) +1 (202) 729-7600 (FAX) +1 (202) 729-7610 www.WRI.org
- size of target (e.g., 90% reduction target)*
- target base year (e.g., 2010)*
- target year (e.g., 2050)*
- average annual reductions needed to meet target (e.g., 4%)*
- whether target is a science-based target
- For those companies with science-based targets:
- whether reduction milestones have been set for interim years
- the method used to generate the target (WRI will provide list of methods)
- whether additional target(s) exist that cover emissions from external (upstream or downstream) emissions sources. If they do, CAIT Business should also describe these targets (WRI will provide short, descriptive text)
Data elements marked with an asterisk (*) can only be shown visually and not in a table due to licensing restrictions.
Visitors should be able to:
- Dynamically visualise companies’ progress toward a target (for a purely illustrative approach, see Figure 1) and overlay visualizations with additional information
- Download static visualizations
- Filter dataset by relevant factors, including sector, size of company (by revenue/emissions), ambition of target, and progress toward target
- Discover other related datasets and content onWRI.org and partner websites
If within budget, visitors should also be able to:
- View information about company targets on a mobile device
- Share relevant visualizations over social media and embed visualization on other sites
- Access data though a basic API
At a minimum, the website must be brand-compatible with CAIT and ideally technically integrated within the CAIT framework (access to existing code and database is possible);
- Co-branded with WWF, CDP, and the United Nations Global Compact;
- As far as possible, website must use responsive design techniques to support all modern mobile devices.
Figure 1. One example of how CAIT Business could visually track a company’s progress toward its GHG reduction target