Perspectives · Standards & MethodS

Sustainability Isn't Easy. That Was Never the Point.

A few weeks back I was on an online summit, and one of the presenters displayed a tool they had developed for a competitor. They made mention that P5 was too complicated and that project managers needed something easier to use. "We can't make it too hard."

Later in the day, after my closing keynote, someone popped a question into the Q&A session: "A professional earlier in the day stated that their tool was easy to use and that this should be easier. What do you say to that?"

My response was very to the point. "If a CFO or a CSO has to sign their name to a disclosure whose data comes from a project that you provided data from, do you want a tool that simply changes colors from good to bad with little else, or do you want the confidence that complete mappings to CDP, ESRS, and GRI have been built in so that it is accurate?"

Ease of use is a real virtue, and nobody builds software hoping practitioners will struggle with it. But ease describes the interface. The method underneath it determines whether the number is right. A tool can have both. What a tool cannot do is remove the complexity of the subject itself and still produce data that survives scrutiny. Sustainability disclosure now carries legal weight in much of the world. Under the CSRD, sustainability statements are subject to assurance. Executives certify them. When an auditor asks where a number came from, a dashboard that turned green is not an answer anyone can give.

The pattern with simplified tools is consistent. They narrow the boundary. Scope 3 gets dropped because supply-chain data is hard to collect. Social impacts get dropped because they resist a single score. Allocation gets dropped because deciding a project's fair share of a carbon budget requires judgment, and judgment does not fit in a stoplight. Each omission makes the tool easier to demo. Each omission also moves the data further from anything a disclosure can rely on. The work did not disappear. It moved downstream, to whoever has to reconcile the project figures with the organizational report, usually late in the reporting cycle and without visibility into how those figures were produced.

Yesterday I gave a talk in Ann Arbor to a group brought together by Ann Arbor SPARK. We had project professionals, entrepreneurs, government officials, and some delicious scones (if someone was in attendance and knows the bakery, send me a DM :)

In the talk I gave the origins of the work, the projects that I vetted P5 on, the results we realized, how far we have come since that time, and what is available now as a result. There was a participant in the back who was part of a start-up working on construction projects with a carbon emissions tech solution, and he wanted to know if P5 mapped to CDP. He had been having trouble with some in the firm. When they describe it, it sounds too good to be true, and he needs to be able to provide the project data. What he needed was something he could put in front of a skeptical colleague and have it hold up.

I pointed him to the reporting guide. The Project Sustainability Reporting Guide accounts for Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions at the project level, including upstream and downstream value-chain impacts, and structures that data for integration into organizational disclosures such as CDP.

The Guide goes beyond merely mentioning them. It calculates the carbon Sustainability Quotient using S_carbon = actual Scope 1 + Scope 2 + Scope 3 emissions ÷ fair carbon allocation. It also states that, for Level 2 and above, projects must measure and report all three scopes. Scope 3 is treated as essential because excluding supply-chain, transportation, product-use, and disposal emissions can make a project appear sustainable simply by pushing its carbon footprint elsewhere. The Guide calls that "carbon accounting theater," which is blunt, but accurate.

None of this is complicated for the sake of being complicated. Fair carbon allocation exists because a project that consumes half of a portfolio's carbon budget while delivering a tenth of its value is a problem the organization needs to see. The three-scope requirement exists because boundary games are the oldest trick in emissions accounting. The mappings to CDP, ESRS, and GRI exist because project data that cannot flow into a disclosure is a report nobody can use. Every piece of the method answers a question that someone will eventually ask in an audit. Take the piece out and the question does not go away. It just arrives without an answer.

There is a fair criticism buried in the easy-tool argument, and it deserves a straight answer. Rigor that nobody applies accomplishes nothing. If a method is so demanding that practitioners abandon it, the easy tool wins by default, bad data and all. The answer to that is training and tooling that carry the practitioner through the method, and that is exactly where our effort has gone. The guide exists. The competence standard exists. The mappings are done. The difficulty that remains is the difficulty of the subject, and no interface removes it.

This is the messy middle that the simple guides and the "me too, we are also leaders" set tend to gloss over. The middle is where the supplier will not share emissions data, where an allocation method has to be defended to a finance team, and where a Scope 3 figure carries an uncertainty range instead of a clean number. The standard was built for that middle. Simply saying sustainable over and over again doesn't make it so. The accounting has to hold, and holding takes work. The standard exists for the work.