SA gov targets innovation units to join carbon accounting 'lab'

The South Australia Department for Trade and Investment is hoping the 'innovation units' of private sector companies in key verticals such as wine, mining and energy will contribute to a "conceptual" carbon accounting lab that also counts Salesforce and S&P Global among its founding members.

Officials from the department were at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week to drum up support for, and participation in, the 'Indo-Pacific carbon accounting lab'.

The 'lab' is an early output from a partnership between SA government and Salesforce announced earlier this year, under which Salesforce will also develop a 'net zero cloud' service in the state that it can then market worldwide.

The 'lab' itself has no physical presence, but has so far convened a series of workshops, with a view to running a one-day industry forum at the end of the year.

DTI's hi-tech and green economy director Gavin Artz told iTnews the aim currently is to "get companies together, use the great [emissions] data that S&P Global has, and really help as many companies as possible get up to speed" with carbon accounting and the pursuit of a 'net zero emissions' goal.

Countries and companies alike are committing to 'net zero' - becoming carbon-neutral.

Artz said it's a challenging problem to solve, requiring carbon accounting software but also considerable data measurement and sharing, particularly for tracking scope three emissions, those in every organisation's broader supply chain.

"Nobody's actually moved through this problem," Artz said.

The lab is "about bringing all the smartest people that you can around that table, setting the problem in the middle and making sure that [everyone] can partner ... to start working on this right now."

Artz hopes in the first instance that the lab can facilitate conversations that lead to better data and understanding of carbon emissions across supply chains in key industries for South Australia, such as wine production, energy and mining.

In a separate panel discussion at the same conference, DTI's chief executive David Reynolds said the department is "working with industry and businesses to do a whole lot of pilot programs to say, how do we count what your actual carbon emissions look like?"

Artz noted that building that understanding would require a range of "IoT devices, 5G, satellite communication" and other infrastructure to be put in place. He said the lab would contribute to transparency in environment, social and corporate governance (ESG) reporting.

“The data that's coming in at the moment, just globally, isn't that great because we're not set up for collecting that data,” Artz said.

“Part of the lab is also the whole data infrastructure; you need to collect actual carbon data from [across your extended] supply chain.

“You need to be able to get insights from those businesses so you can get the number that you're properly accounting for - all these systems don't exist and need to be built.”

The lab is also anticipated to help the South Australia’s government achieve its own carbon emissions reduction targets.

Part of that means understanding emissions from businesses that operate in the state's jurisdiction, and the emissions from those businesses' extended supply chains.

DTI officials said the SA government already benefitted in international financial markets by having a strong track record on investing in renewables and in measuring its own carbon emissions.

"What we've been doing in South Australia, looking at our carbon emissions, we use that as a state for when we're going to bond markets to raise money to spend things that governments do," Reynolds said.

"We say to the markets, 'We're greater than everyone else. We've got these green credentials', and it actually gets us cheaper prices in international financial markets as it does in international reinsurance markets.

"So we measure these things locally. We talk about our story, and then we take that to markets, and we're proving that there are economic advantages from taking this approach."

The state's ability to continue to use environmental credentials when approaching finance markets would likely depend on evolving its approach in line with more demanding, broader emissions reduction targets.

Though Artz is officially responsible for keeping the lab initiative moving, he noted it is intended to be a wholly collaborative effort. He said it was important that the initiative ran in a "decentralised" manner.

"You've got to be able to get a consensus on coming together," he said.

Kate Weber attended Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.