With sustainability practitioners strained to deploy limited resources internally to navigate the myriad of standards and frameworks to meet the growing appetite for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information, we continue to ask, “Isn’t there an easier way to do this?” Navigating ESG Anyone who has worked to align standards and frameworks, corral internal champions around disclosure requirements, and marry quantitative performance data with narratives on management approach, knows that this is no easy feat.

The uphill battle to integrate data and other systems is often complicated by trying to pull others along in the organization—regardless of where their hearts lie.

So how is it that we can focus in on what’s relevant and minimize the reporting burden on others?

At the risk of seeming to oversimplify the process, I’ll attempt to breakdown some of the concepts mentioned here as a means for peering through the gray. The following five points have been central to my years of guiding organizations through this process. Navigating ESG

1: Navigating the myriad of standards and frameworks:

Not only are there the long-time warriors (the Global Reporting Initiative, CDP, and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board now merged with the International Integrated Reporting Counsel labeled as the Value Reporting Foundation), there are also larger north star initiatives, like the United Nation’s Global Compact or Sustainable Development Goals, and even those that are industry specific, like the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark. There are also the investor-driven ratings and rankings, supply chain initiatives, and mandates disclosure requirements that organizations must contend with. Not everyone is blessed with sustainability departments powered by specialists of all types. In fact, most are managed by 1-3 individuals who often juggle multiple roles until they can prove the importance of an integrated strategy and leverage additional support. In the end, standards alignment comes down to one person dropping all disclosure requirements into an excel spreadsheet to make sense of all that is needed. There is no harm in this. It is a recommended first step in trying to better understand the nuances between all that is asked and whether it is possible to pull data to meet various requirements. The goal eventually, of course, is to automate reporting against all applicable requirements. Usually companies start by developing a comprehensive list of all that they can disclose, either initially or in the future.  The key is not to exclude areas that the company is unable to immediately disclose on, but to press the “pause” button and keep those items in the horizon as areas that should be revisited in the future. Instead, stating where one is in the journey to retrieve information and manage inherent risks, while providing data for what is possible, is recommended. In that, clear “omissions” or “exclusions to the boundary” should be noted.

ESG | Qualitative vs Quantitative Data

2: Determining the qualitative vs. quantitative:

Be it labor standards, human rights, training and education, resource consumption or greenhouse gases, there are both qualitative and quantitative features to grasp and disclose an organizations’ impacts. Granularity is based on what the organization is trying to achieve by pursuing efforts in a certain area. Will the level of detail provide a sharper view of potential risks? Will the data enable decision-making? Will it demonstrate the level of transparency the organization is willing to provide to match disclosure among its peer group? Will it result in greater recognition or even, leadership status? By asking these questions, organizations can determine their priorities and narrow in on data tracking mechanisms to pull, house, and analyze detail. Keep in mind, however, taking inventory always presents surprises. Try not to go down a rabbit hole searching for data that doesn’t exist or isn’t relevant considering the larger footprint. Report on what is available and explain what is being accounted for, what is missing, and why. Navigating ESG

3: Pull others along:

Frameworks, data, and the endless requests for disclosure are enough to make anyone question their sanity—let alone the ongoing education that is needed to bring others along the path towards greater sustainability. Up until about five years ago, the role of the sustainability champion was often a lone wolf in the organization who felt committed to the charge. Boards were not involved, and it was because few companies saw sustainability as a strategic imperative. Today, it’s no longer effective to go at this alone. Markets have begun to regulate this space: the fear of shareholder resolutions, and the inability to access capital due to a lack of demonstrated ESG commitments, risk management, and performance disclosure has catapulted the need to activate players across functions. Regardless of standard, framework, or reporting platform, governance is critical to ensuring that sustainability sticks. It’s not enough to simply describe the organizational and leadership structure, but to describe how and where sustainability or ESG risk management sits within and what the role of the Board is. The sustainability coordinator, or Chief Sustainability Officer’s structure the group to facilitate action. Constant education and hand holding is necessary to inform the working group on the rapidly changing landscape and what is needed to maintain a license to operate from the stakeholder perspective. ESG Report

4: Minimize the reporting burden:

If it’s not clear by this point, all that matters when it comes to reporting is 1) performance data, 2) an explanation of management approach, and 3) a description of your processes undertaken to identify material matters and manage risks. Stories and imagery provide color but not an overview of what the organization is doing to manage impacts. Begin by structuring your website to highlight data. Embedd data from  GRI, the SDGs, and/or SASB indexes as companies such as Ball Corporation, BlackRock, and Coca-Cola. All have focused more efforts on tangible reduction and reuse, rather than creating beautiful communication pieces. This allows them to focus time and resources on doing the work that matters. ESG Data Collection

5: Data collection:

As the saying goes, “what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed.” Pulling data from the ESG pillars and across functions often means that the data collection process tends to take shape like a patch work quilt. Utilizing an integrated, configurable system that can extract and consolidate data into a single source of truth allows companies to focus on results, rather than begging for data from sources internal and external to their organization. Where possible, automate the data collection process, and provide decision-making analytics that can be transferred to various disclosure platforms to streamline the process and further minimize the reporting burden.


Hopefully, these points will help reassure you that you’re on the right path. The reality is, there is no easy way. Many of the front movers know this all too well. Their approach has taken years to solidify. In addition to the 5 points listed above, try to remember that it is important to just get started. Improvements can be made over time and lessons aren’t typically learned through perfection.


[sc_image width=”150″ height=”150″ src=”23979″ style=”11″ position=”centered” disable_lightbox=”1″ alt=”Nancy Mancilla, ISOS Group”]

About the Author—Nancy Mancilla, ISOS Group

Ms. Mancilla is the CEO and Co-Founder of ISOS Group, a full services sustainability consultancy firm also recognized for its leadership as a GRI and CDP Certified Training Partner in the U.S. Since establishing the company, Nancy has orchestrated 300+ Certified Trainings, co-taught MBA programs, regularly serves as a conference guest speaker and thought leader on the non-financial reporting process. In addition to educational services, ISOS Group provides organizations of all types with sustainability assessments, reporting guidance and external assurance.


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Locus Founder and CEO, Neno Duplan recently sat down with Grant Ferrier of Environmental Business International to discuss a myriad of topics relating to technology in the environmental industry such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Multi-tenancy, IoT, and much more.

[icoLocus name=”list”]  Use the video chapters to navigate to areas of interest.

Neno Duplan is founder and CEO of Locus Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based environmental software company founded in 1997. Locus evolved from his work as a research associate at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s, where he developed the first prototype system for environmental information management. This early work led to the development of numerous databases at some of the nation’s largest environmental sites, and ultimately, to the formation of Locus in 1997.

Click here to learn more and purchase the full EBJ Vol XXXIII No 5&6: Environmental Industry Outlook 2020-2021

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The Locus ESG reporting application provides a comprehensive, integrated system for managing companies’ energy, water, and other sustainability metrics throughout their facilities worldwide.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 20 April 2021 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the leader in multi-tenant SaaS EHS compliance and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting software, introduces the new ESG reporting application on its award-winning Locus Platform. The new ESG reporting application is integrated with other Locus SaaS applications and calculation engine. It is built to redefine how companies organize, manage, and calculate their key performance indicators (KPIs), greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories, water, energy, and waste management.

Today, organizations must measure and report their ESG performance for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and other initiatives. The transition from sustainability to ESG performance indicates a maturation of business practices and better definitions of KPIs. Most ESG metrics originate from EHS regulatory and voluntary reporting programs, but now include more precise measurements of a company’s performance, its impact on the environment, and the risk it carries for investors. As a result, companies need to improve the way they collect, track, and verify metrics for ESG reporting. The information feeding into the ESG reports must be accurately quantified, calculated, and supported. To address this industry challenge, Locus developed the new ESG reporting application on the versatile Locus Platform to unify EHS compliance and ESG reporting from a single set of data.

The Locus ESG application was designed with input from auditors who understand the need for full transparency and documentation for this type of reporting. This resulted in an unparalleled set of software tools that enable rapid visualization of ESG trends, as well as the analytics and supporting data needed to improve organizational performance.

The ESG application includes built-in support for many voluntary programs, including GRI, CDP, DJSI, SASB, GRESB, and DNSH. Within the greenhouse gas emissions segment, ESG reporting also includes more than 50 US EPA Mandatory Reporting Rule (MRR) subparts, state-specific reporting, eGRID, and other calculation protocols such as The Climate Registry and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Similarly, multiple reporting and calculation protocols exist for water, waste, social, and governance metrics. Locus can handle all related calculations and reporting requirements in one application, with all the required documentation.

“For over 20 years, Locus has led the industry with applications to simplify data management and reporting for water, air, energy, waste, and health and safety, with tools capable of handling these entire processes from start to finish,” said Wes Hawthorne, President of Locus.

“The ESG application builds on this functionality and provides full transparency for these metrics, which ultimately become part of an organization’s ESG reporting. As the importance of ESG reporting continues to rise, Locus customers benefit from having all their supporting documentation and calculations assembled and audit-ready.”

Last week Locus attended the first training session offered by California Air Resources Board (CARB) for verifiers under the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program. The California LCFS program has been ramping up over the past several years, and is now ready to start certifying third-party verifiers to review both applications and routine reporting.

The LCFS program is part of California’s initiative to meet the AB32 requirements of reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and 40% lower than that level by 2030. LCFS is specifically intended to address emissions from transportation fuels in California, which are approximately half of the overall emissions statewide. Like the Greenhouse Gas Mandatory Reporting Rule and Cap-and-Trade programs that preceded it, the California LCFS program uses a market-based approach to incentivize innovation and new approaches to reduce emissions.

LCFS Expert Seth Lalonde at the California Air Resources Board Training

Seth Lalonde, Locus Environmental Scientist, at the California Air Resources Board Training

The program covers a wide variety of projects, including production of alternative fuels (e.g. renewable diesel and biogenic compressed natural gas), innovative approaches to fossil fuel production and refining, and direct carbon capture and sequestration. Fuels are assigned a carbon intensity based on overall carbon dioxide emissions over the entire life cycle, from production to processing to shipping to consumption. The carbon intensity is essentially a measure of the emissions from the fuel per unit of energy. The lower the carbon intensity value, the less impact the fuel has in terms of carbon emissions. Certain fuels can even have a negative carbon intensity, which essentially means the fuel production process is absorbing more carbon than is eventually emitted to the atmosphere (such is the case for compressed or liquefied natural gas produced using biomethane from manure collection). The program also has impacts well outside the California border. After all, fuel that is eventually used in California can originate anywhere in the world, and the LCFS program allows for these projects to obtain credits regardless of their location.

Unsurprisingly, California was the first state to adopt and implement a LCFS program, and the first to establish a third-party verification program specific for LCFS. Although it was clearly the first presentation of this training material, staff from CARB as well as the Climate Action Reserve and The Climate Registry were on hand to assist in addressing questions and topics that weren’t covered in the prepared materials. And considering the wide variety of LCFS project types and the disparate backgrounds of attendees for the verification training, they did a great job of getting everyone all the information they needed to understand and verify these projects.

For those participating in the LCFS program or considering projects under the program, there are a few key things to keep in mind.

First and foremost, like any market-based emission program that includes a verification or auditing requirement, transparency is critical. The verifiers are trained to dig deep into your data, and not to take ‘no’ for an answer. Be prepared to have your metadata and documentation assembled and easily made available to the verifier. (For more on Transparency in Reporting, view this webinar)

Second, the LCFS program includes requirements for continuous or near-continuous monitoring for many parameters, and instrumentation capable of electronic data archival. Manual data records and transcription are still acceptable under other carbon offset programs, but under LCFS these options are no longer allowed. Be sure that your instrumentation is consistent with the specific LCFS requirements, or you’ll be seeing a non-conformance from your verifier.

There were many other tips and common pitfalls highlighted during the training for specific LCFS project types. Overall, I’m very excited to see how the LCFS program evolves in California, and how the energy industry takes advantage of these incentives to provide new options for transportation fuels that will reduce carbon emissions.

Update: Locus is now an approved verification body for the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Learn more here.

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We all know the struggle of getting things done with shortened staff without compromising the quality of our work, especially in EHS. Locus Technologies’ Locus Platform (LP) offers multiple options to ease your complexity by providing a truly SaaS platform packed with some nifty apps. Here are some tools in LP that can help you utilize your workforce much more efficiently:

 

1) Dashboards tailored to your needs

Every software has built-in report and dashboards, but they may not meet all your needs when purchased off the shelf. If you need a new report, chart, or other visualization of your data, it usually incurs a custom software development charge, but not with Locus Platform (LP). LP allows you to assemble the information you want in your chosen format (bar or line charts, maps, tables, treemaps, diagrams, etc.) and share your custom dashboards and real-time information/data with your team.  In addition, the views and dashboards export to Excel, so you can easily integrate with commonly used tools and further mine the data. At the enterprise level, powerful dashboards will help you understand the status of each facility based on a matrix  you design. With the LPs flexibility, facility information can be automatically populated based on the user credentials, saving your team time and frustration.

Screenshot of Sustainability reporting dashboard on Locus Platform

 

2) Simplified Sustainability Reporting

Locus Platform’s Sustainability application and calculation engine support simultaneous calculations using multiple methods for various reporting programs including EPA, California ARB, CDP, TCR, DJSI, and others. This allows users to input data only once and utilize it to report to multiple federal, state, and voluntary reporting programs, according to their required format. The application will also support direct electronic reporting formats for many reporting programs, so that additional manual transcription and submittal of data are no longer necessary. This is a very powerful tool and a huge advantage to customers in terms of improving efficiency, while reducing costs.

Locus Platform Sustainability

 

3) Integration

Integration, if done correctly, can save you a great deal of time and headache during some of the most tedious and cumbersome tasks in EHS data management. Locus Platform (LP) has built in a unique point and click integration application to enable connection with major databases or third-party systems that have open API (Access privileges). Some integration, database, and communication standards and methods that are supported include OLE compliance, SOAP, COM, Java, XML, web services, ODBC/ODMA/SQL/Oracle, VIM, and MAPI. LP also works well with MS Excel and provides a powerful two-way synchronization allowing users to download parts of the database to Excel, then work, edit, and verify or append data on their local copy of Excel where they have no internet connection. Any revisions they perform to the downloaded data in Excel can be automatically synchronized back to the Locus Platform application. During the process, a complete audit trail will be preserved. This can be a great time saver especially when you are sending large volumes of valid values in a database or if you are migrating any historical data.

Locus Technologies Integration

 

4) Mobile

Locus’ Mobile application allows you to sync with your server to create data collection profiles on a mobile device, whether it’s your phone or a tablet. It will allow you to click through and enter data on the device even when you are offline. Data validation is performed in real time and is stored locally on the device, once the phone reaches an internet signal, it will sync with your server, and the data will automatically be updated in Locus’ cloud-hosted solution. What’s more, Locus Mobile works seamlessly with both EIM and Locus Platform.

Using Mobile you receive the benefits of data entry directly on the mobile device, with immediate data availability on the cloud when you reach an internet signal. Other advantages of using Mobile include location metadata and mapping integration, bar-code/OR code scanning, voice recognition, and form customization. If you’d like to know more about the Locus Mobile application, check out the Top 10 cool features in Locus Mobile.

Locus Mobile integrates with Locus Platform

 

5) XML Exports

Locus has prioritized enhancing its GHG application in Locus Platform to make it easy to manage GHG emission inventory tracking and reporting requirements. Locus Technologies is the only software vendor that is a certified GHG verifier under the State of California’s AB32, and has performed the most GHG verifications in California since 2015. The State and Federal eGGRT web portals are notoriously cumbersome and require a significant amount of your time to input all the required data and generate your report. But with XML support, you can bypass almost the entire data entry process, and complete your submittal within a few minutes.  XML reports support many greenhouse gas subparts, including EPA GHG Subparts C, D, W, and NN.  And because data entry for EPA and CARB is consolidated in the XML GHG application, it eliminates the need to maintain separate agency spreadsheets and software. Additional reporting programs are also adding support for XML submittals, such as EPA’s eManifest.  This functionality can be a huge time saver for anyone working with these online regulatory reporting tools.

Locus Platform XML export

 

 

A coalition of the world’s oil companies agreed to reduce methane emissions from natural gas extraction—part of an effort to shore up the climate credentials of the hydrocarbon.

The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative said it would target reducing methane emissions to less than 0.25% of the total natural gas the group of 13 member companies produces by 2025.

Methane is the main component of natural gas. During extraction, transport, and processing, it often leaks into the environment. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. In the short term, it traps more heat although it stays shorter in the atmosphere. According to the International Energy Agency, one ton of methane is equivalent to as much as 87 tons of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame.

Natural gas production is growing. Many big oil companies are increasing production of natural gas to offset higher emissions from other hydrocarbon and coal sources. The switch makes the oil-and-gas industry look better when demonstrating emission reduction to limit climate change.

For that reason, some oil companies, Shell, in particular, has tilted its production mix toward more gas output.

According to 2018 report by the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, as much as $34 billion of global gas supply is lost each year through leaks and venting. That is another valid reason to limit those methane escapes and park the proceeds to the bottom line. That in itself could fund part of the effort to stop or reduce the leaks.

International shipping produces about 1,000 million tons of CO2 annually – that’s more than the entire German economy.

A meeting of the International Maritime Organisation in London that starts tomorrow will discuss how shipping industry can radically reduce its CO2 emissions. The shipping industry, if it does not change the way it operates, will contribute almost a fifth of the global total of CO2 by 2050. A group of nations led by Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India, Panama, and Argentina is resisting CO2 targets for shipping. Their submission to the meeting says capping ships’ overall emissions would restrict world trade. It might also force goods on to less efficient forms of transport. This argument is dismissed by other countries which believe shipping could benefit from a shift towards cleaner technology. European nations are proposing to shrink shipping emissions by 70-100 percent of their 2008 levels by 2050.

The problem has developed over many years. As the shipping industry is international, it evades the carbon-cutting influence of the annual UN talks on climate change, which are conducted on a national basis. Instead, the decisions have been left to the IMO; a body recently criticized for its lack of accountability and transparency. The IMO did agree on a design standard in 2011 ensuring that new ships should be 30 percent more efficient by 2025. But there is no rule to reduce emissions from the existing fleet.

The Clean Shipping Coalition, a green group focusing on ships, said shipping should conform to the agreement made in Paris to stabilize the global temperature increase as close as possible to 1.5C. The pressure is on the IMO to produce an ambitious policy. The EU has threatened that if the IMO doesn’t move far enough, the EU will take over regulating European shipping. That would see the IMO stripped of some of its authority.

Some say huge improvements in CO2 emissions from existing ships can be easily be made by obliging them to travel more slowly. They say a carbon pricing system is needed.

Blockchain is a highly disruptive technology that promises to change the world as we know it, much like the World Wide Web’s impact after its introduction in 1991. As companies look to the blockchain model to perform financial transactions, trade stocks, and create open market spaces, many other industries are looking at utilizing blockchain technology to eliminate the middleman. One sector well-positioned to benefit from blockchain technology is the data-intensive Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability (EHS&S) space.

In particular, I see three major ways that the EHS industry can utilize blockchain technology to change how they manage information: 1) Blockchain-based IoT monitoring, 2) emissions management, and 3) emissions trading.

My belief is that blockchain technology will help to quantify the impact of man-made emissions on global warming trends and provide tools to manage it. One cannot manage what one cannot measure!

Imagine this: every emissions source in your company, whether to water, air, or soil, is connected wirelessly via a sensor or another device (thing) to a blockchain ledger that stores a description of the source, its location, emission factors, etc. Every time that the source generates emissions (that is, it is on), all necessary parameters are recorded in real time. If air emissions are involved, equivalent tons of carbon are calculated and recorded in a blockchain ledger and made available to reporting and trading entities in real time.

Blockchain ledgers may exist at many levels. Some may record emissions at a given site. Others at higher levels (company, state or province, country, continent, etc.) may roll up information from lower level ledgers.

Suppose that emissions are traded so that they are not yours anymore. In that case, someone else owns them, and you do not need to report them again, but everyone knows that you were the generating source. The same logic can be applied to tier 1, 2, and 3 level emissions. Attached to the emissions ledger are all other necessary information about the asset generating those emissions, financial information, depreciation schedule, time in service, operating time, fuel consumption, operators’ names, an estimate of future emissions—the list goes on.

To learn more how blockchain technology will impact emissions monitoring, management, reporting, and trading click here.

One notable difference among attendees of the World Economic Forum’s annual event in Davos, Switzerland last month was the presence of Chief Sustainability Officers in much larger number than ever before.

This makes sense given the themes of many of the discussions. None more than a panel that focused on integrating sustainability risk into enterprise risk management.

This is an important evolution for the sustainability community—one that we welcome at Locus and are working with our clients to achieve using our fully-integrated, multi-tenant software platform.

Just in time for the World Economic Forum, an annual assessment of the world’s most sustainable companies emerges, highlighting large firms from around the world whose sustainability in various categories puts them in a league of their own.

The report, now in its fourteenth year of publication, is compiled by Corporate Knights, a Canada-based financial information company and magazine with a focus on how business and societal and ecological benefits can go hand in hand.

In compiling its report, Corporate Knights looked to publicly-disclosed data—financial filings, sustainability reports, etc.—from some 6,000 financially healthy companies across the globe, in all industries, with minimum annual revenue of $1 billion. Key factors Corporate Knight included in its analysis included energy use, carbon, waste, and clean air production.  Top 900 companies were contacted for data verification before the results were boiled down to a final 100.

Topping the list this year was Dassault Systemes, a French firm that designs engineering software to assist organizations in waste reduction.

Behind Dassault is Neste, a Finnish company that deals in renewable diesel and other petroleum products. Within the next five years, according to Corporate Knights, more than half of its revenue will come from renewable fuel and bio-material.

Overall, the U.S.-based companies held 18 spots in the ranking.

The new Sustainability application is fully integrated with the dynamic Locus Platform and GHG calculation engine and will automate emissions calculations for large enterprises.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 17 October 2017 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the leader in multi-tenant SaaS EHS compliance and sustainability management software, introduces the new Sustainability application on its award-winning Locus Platform. The new Sustainability application is fully integrated with other Locus Platform SaaS applications and Locus’ calculation engine, and it is intended to redefine how companies organize, manage, and calculate their greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories and other Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

Today, environmental, sustainability, and energy managers for organizations of all sizes face myriad options from software suppliers offering various single-domain applications. To address this industry challenge, Locus designed the new Sustainability application on the versatile Locus Platform to provide rich functionality, simply, to make it easier for customers to make the most of their data management, compliance, and reporting requirements.

The Sustainability application will provide Locus’ customers a comprehensive, integrated system for monitoring and managing their energy use, water, and other sustainability efforts throughout their facilities. Users will have full control over the setup of the source of emissions, emissions factors as well the equations used in generating calculations. The reports and calculations are also fully transparent and auditable, so that report outputs can be traced back to input data.

GHG inventories may be the result of mandatory state, regional, or national reporting programs, such as California Air Resource Board (AB 32), US EPA Mandatory Reporting Rule, or European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). Organizations need sustainability software and a GHG calculation engine that can calculate GHGs automatically and accurately from all emission-producing activities, at all their facilities, anywhere in the world. Some companies may choose to report their sustainability metrics via voluntary programs, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or the CDP, or some other voluntary reporting standard. Locus can handle all related calculations and reporting requirements via a single app. No competing software available in the market today can do this.

The new Locus Platform Sustainability application and calculation engine support simultaneous calculations using multiple methods, so that users can input data once and report to federal, state, and voluntary reporting programs, according to each proper protocol. The application can also support direct electronic reporting formats for many reporting programs, so that manual transcription and submittal of data are no longer necessary. This is a very powerful capability and a huge advantage to customers in terms of efficiency and cost savings.

“We’ve updated Locus’ sustainability module based on industry demands,” said Wes Hawthorne, President of Locus. “The requirements and procedures for GHG reporting are varied, complex, and rapidly evolving. To ensure compliance, companies need a calculation engine that can handle complex equations using appropriate emission factors, conversion factors, and calculation methodologies for each reporting program. The right calculation engine can reduce the stress, time, and potential inaccuracies found in homegrown accounting methods. This isn’t a product of different solutions pieced together to look like one; it is the ‘whole solution.’ Our approach means a dramatically lower cost than what customers have seen in the past with the ERP providers or with single-point solutions from different single-tenant vendors,” Hawthorne explained.

As a leading accredited GHG verification company in California, Locus directly observed challenges that many companies experience with GHG inventory calculation, coupled with the gross inadequacy of tools currently available in the market. Informed by their experience verifying hundreds of GHG inventories, Locus developed the new Sustainability application and calculation engine with a deep, unique insight into the customer’s needs.

Locus will have leading industry experts available to discuss the features of the Sustainability application at the National Association for Environmental Management (NAEM) 2017 EHS Management Forum, October 25–27, 2017, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.