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🧪 Sustainability Lab Experiment #005

Scope 3 Challenge

Run a full corporate Scope 3 reporting year across three simulated years: map your value chain, spend a data budget on supplier engagement, choose calculation methods, defend your inventory to an AI auditor, then allocate capital across decarbonization levers toward SBTi-aligned targets.

Duration

25–40 min

Difficulty

Advanced

Category

Climate & Carbon Accounting

Learning objectives

  • Identify which GHG Protocol Scope 3 categories (1–15) are material for a given industry
  • Trade off cost, effort and data quality across spend-based, average-data and supplier-specific methods
  • Budget supplier engagement where primary data changes the inventory most
  • Defend inclusion and exclusion decisions under external assurance questioning
  • Allocate CapEx/OpEx across abatement levers and read the resulting decarbonization pathway

Learning outcomes

  • A completed three-year Scope 3 inventory and reduction strategy with a scorecard
  • Practical judgement on data-quality trade-offs under real budget constraints
  • Experience answering auditor challenges on boundary and method choices
  • A trajectory read against SBTi 1.5°C (−42% by 2030) and Net-Zero (−90% by 2040)

Related sustainability concepts

The bigger picture

Scope 3 Categories 1–15Materiality screeningSpend-based vs. supplier-specific methodsData quality scoringExternal assuranceSBTi near-term and net-zero targets

Related research

  • · Framing double materiality for practitioners
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Related Knowledge Studio

  • · Visual explainer: what is a carbon footprint?
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Related Academy module

  • · Foundations of carbon accounting (coming soon)
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Coming next

Related future experiments

  • Supplier engagement deep-dive
  • Sector-specific scenario packs