ENGIE Impact’s Chief Operating Officer, Paige Janson, joins Katie Ryan, GreenBiz's Director of Sustainability to define the relationship between decarbonization measurement and implementation for businesses and underscore the importance of utilizing clean, accurate, and reliable data.
Transcript snippet, edited for clarity.
Katie: ENGIE Impact has been doing data measurement and management for a long time. I am so interested in what you're working on now, specifically related to helping organizations go from strategy setting to actual implementation. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Paige: Yes, absolutely. We know that data is absolutely critical for building a strategy. You can't determine where to start when it comes to building a strategy without having accurate and reliable data. Many companies that we work with come to us and say, "I have stakeholder pressure and I've seen my peers in the market setting goals and making movements when it comes to ESG reporting and targets, and I don't know where to start." Having reliable data and understanding the envelope and perimeter of data helps to set a strategy and also think about how you move that strategy into actionable projects and initiatives.
We see clients build a strategy then come back with a beautiful PowerPoint deck and then say, where do I start next? And data has the ability to be very broad, and very inclusive. But it also has the ability to be very narrow and very tactical when it comes to setting baseline targets and understanding where you want to go. The next step is looking at the different measurements and initiatives that you want to put in place to begin implementing that decarbonization strategy. The role of data is not just a thing that's at the beginning. And it's not just a thing at the end. It's something that you have wrapped through and woven into your implementation efforts to move forward.