Pune Inc: Why Donald Trump doesn’t worry this carbon emission audit platform
According to report earlier this month by global datebase Carbon Majors, 36 companies worldwide are responsible for half of the carbon emissions contributing to global warming. Warning of the worst impacts of climate change, “including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall”, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 report said that CO2 emissions need to be reduced by 45 per cent by 2030, compared to 2010 levels, if countries are to stay on course with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting the rise of temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.
While it is uncertain how major fossil fuel-based companies are tackling the problem, a lot of other companies and consumers globally are taking action to reduce their carbon footprint. This is where businesses, such as Pune-based Sprih, find their purpose. Founded by Akash Keshav, Ravi Singhal, Rohit Toshniwal and Hemant Joshi in 2022, Sprih is a carbon emission audit platform. It works with more than 20 customers in India and is expanding to the United States, where it already has customers, such as an aluminium major, and expanding its European market.
“Some of the leading companies we work with are Indigo Paints, Hero Motors and Arvind SmartSpaces. Sector-wise, we are present from manufacturing and pharma to information technology (IT), and higher education,” says Keshav.
Sprih uses artificial intelligence (AI) to measure, benchmark and report carbon emissions across a company’s operations and supply chain. The company’s target is “to support our clients in achieving a significant reduction in their carbon footprint, targeting a collective decrease of over 500 megatonnes in CO2e emissions annually” by 2030.
Keshav gives a broad idea about how the platform functions by using the example of Indigo Paints. Sprih takes into account that the company operates in the chemical industry and has multiple plants across the country.
“Paint gets transported from factories to depots and then goes to dealers. At each stage, they are consuming energy. There is electricity being consumed for paint production. A lot of fossil fuel is consumed for transportation. We ask the customer to provide operational data, like how much energy and fossil fuel they consume and how many kilometers of goods they transport. Sprih translates that operational data into emission data. We also give sense to the number by comparing the data to that emitted by another company in the same sector. We also create a plan to reduce the emissions and start tracking,” says Keshav.
As a mark of how seriously India is taking the climate crisis, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has launched the regulatory Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) for the country’s top 1,000 listed companies. Sprih helps their client companies publish their BRSR report.
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“We are getting the third BRSR ready for Indigo Paints. We are working closely with the company on how they can become net zero by 2040,” says Keshav.
Significantly, the company’s genesis lies in growing trees. Most of the founders were volunteering in the plantation when they started noticing that the companies who were giving corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for the tree cover were asking questions about how they could monetise the trees or understand the impact of growing trees.
“I strongly believe that businesses don’t ask questions unless someone else is asking them the question. Suddenly, I realized that there was something happening. I started doing a lot of deep research about sustainability,” says Keshav.
The year 2022 was a positive time for the climate as a lot of framework, such as BRSR, started coming in. “Globally, there was a lot of movement and we spotted a significant gap – there was no tech to help companies in their sustainability journey. We felt that we could bring the tech to help companies plan their entire sustainability journey in a very holistic and data-driven manner and get business advantage,” says Keshav.
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One of the challenges for the company will come from Donald Trump’s policies as the American President has taken the US out of the Paris Agreement, backtracked on several climate efforts and openly encouraged the fossil fuel industry. Keshav says that they were “definitely concerned”.
“But, the interesting part is that all of our customers and prospective customers are not going to take a step back. It has taken them years to reach where they are. There are companies who started their sustainability journey in 2008-2010 and are making some progress. After four years, no one knows what will happen. If Democrats come back to power, things will look different. The S&P 500 companies are not going to slow down,” he says.
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