SINGAPORE – Olam International, a leading global agri-business, is set to launch a new venture, GreenPass ¹ to enable companies to better measure and manage their carbon emissions across their operations and their supply chains including Scope 3 emissions. The digital platform has been developed internally by Olam leveraging its deep expertise and capabilities in sustainability, digitalization and incubation of businesses built over many years.
Born out of the Singapore Emerging Stronger Taskforce’s (EST) Alliance for Action on Sustainability, the platform aligns with the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Greenprint to enable a more open, trusted and efficient ecosystem to support the financial sector’s green and sustainability agenda.
Despite many companies making carbon-reduction declarations and net-zero commitments, few have been able to develop a credible climate action playbook on how to get there. The challenges include:
- the fact that current process for carbon measurement is slow, not so accurate, expensive and hard to scale as it is conducted manually.
- the current approach to carbon measurement is also not comprehensive enough² – it is especially challenging for companies to measure external emissions produced along their supply chains (Scope 3), which typically – and crucially – make up the bulk of their carbon footprint.
As a leader in carbon measurement and climate mitigation strategies, Olam has deep, first-hand experience of the challenges faced by companies in their de-carbonisation journey. The digital platform provisionally named GreenPass will be based off Olam ’s own platform that has already been successfully implemented, which has achieved data measurements, that were more comprehensive, accurate and less time consuming than previous results. The platform lets users complete the entire GHG ‘footprinting’ process within an average of six weeks, five times faster than a typical exercise.
GreenPass1 leverages Olam’s existing carbon accounting expertise and both internal and external databases to empower companies to better measure, manage/abate, verify and collaborate on carbon emissions by:
- Providing an easy-to-use, end-to-end emissions measurement tool that can apply across industries to help establish clear baselines and identify potential hotspots
- Offering guided digital workflows building on the measurement tool to provide granular emissions management, including modelling a carbon reduction roadmap, simulating scenarios and tracking progress to net-zero
- Providing verifiable reporting back to the specific data source, allowing the information to be customised for various use cases and stakeholder needs
Olam’s solution will be able to work with other Project Greenprint platforms to provide a wide-ranging suite of solutions. As a next step, Olam is exploring opportunities to pilot this approach across different sectors.
Suresh Sundararajan, Olam’s Managing Director and Global Head of Corporate Services said, “Olam is delighted to partner with MAS’ on Greenprint to pioneer a greener business and financial ecosystem. We have learnt a lot on our own sustainability journey and in building our systems to measure and track our own emissions. Based on this experience, we believe we can now help others do the same. This will create greater transparency and help companies and their stakeholders be sure that they are making verifiable real impact, and not just “greenwashing”. We believe that this collaboration will accelerate more comprehensive ESG data and mobilisation of Green Finance, helping to establish Singapore as the Green Finance Hub in Asia and the world.”
Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief FinTech Officer, MAS said, “MAS is happy to partner with Olam in the development of their smart carbon measurement, management and reporting platform. This will interoperate with Project Greenprint platforms to provide trusted, timely, and relevant data required to empower corporate climate action and unlock green finance flows to fund the sustainable transformation of the economy in Singapore, our region and across the globe.”
¹ GreenPass is the working project name of Olam ‘s project
² Using the recognised Greenhouse Gas Protocol as the benchmark
