Beyond Carbon: A Broader Perspective on Sustainability Indicators
Understanding the full spectrum of climate health -- not just carbon -- is crucial in tackling climate change.
As the climate crisis worsens, tracking its many drivers and effects becomes even more crucial to safeguarding our future. Just like a doctor monitors vital signs, monitoring key environmental indicators helps us identify risks and plan for a sustainable world.
Carbon dioxide and related GHGs are central to climate discourse because of their major role in global warming. However, carbon emissions are only one part of the picture, and focusing on them alone is not enough to prevent climate disaster. This essay highlights other climate indicators, such as air quality and ocean acidification, that are essential for fully addressing climate change.
The Importance of Climate Indicators
Climate indicators help us track environmental changes across different variables over time. This has many uses, of which we think the two most important are:
Monitoring climate patterns: Indicators like global temperature and sea level rise reveal long-term and regional trends in climate. For example, monitoring precipitation patterns helps us understand drought frequency and severity changes, while shifts in plant and animal behavior can signal abnormal ecosystem changes.
Evaluating policy effectiveness: Tracking key indicators helps identify whether changes are natural or human-made. This data allows us to assess the impact of policies, such as linking carbon reduction to specific regulations.
Looking beyond carbon
Focusing only on carbon emissions can create carbon tunnel vision, ignoring other crucial issues like pollution, biodiversity loss, and waste management. Climate change is multifaceted, and addressing it requires considering factors beyond carbon — failing to do so can obscure significant environmental harms.
We love this image below, which makes the point better than any words:
Fig. 1: Carbon tunnel vision overlooks a multitude of environmental and social factors. Source: Stockholm Environment Institute
For example, electric vehicles (EVs) are championed as the future of sustainable transportation due to their potential to reduce carbon emissions, but the mining of materials like lithium and cobalt for EV batteries comes at an environmental cost. Here are a couple of examples:
Water-intensive mining: In Chile, 65% of the region’s water is used for mining activities, forcing communities to source alternative water supplies. Additionally, toxic leaks from mining activities cause significant pollution in surrounding areas, causing severe ecosystem degradation that has cascading effects on human and environmental health.
High emissions from mining: EVs generally produce fewer emissions than gasoline-powered cars over their lifecycle, but only if they are driven enough to offset their production emissions (or “embodied carbon,” which tends to be higher than that of gas-powered cars).
The danger of overemphasizing carbon goes beyond mere oversight—it can distort our understanding of and response to climate change. To tackle the climate crisis effectively, we need a broader approach that includes non-carbon climate indicators.
How Non-Carbon Climate Indicators (NCCIs) can fill the gap
NCCIs measure climate-related factors beyond carbon emissions, such as air pollution, ocean pH levels, biodiversity, and the severity of extreme weather. They help decision-makers prioritize various climate actions, including conservation efforts, and study long-term trends in vulnerable ecosystems, which have implications for issues like food security.
Fig. 2: The UN Biodiversity Lab provides decision-makers with high-quality spatial data to track global biodiversity and ecosystem restoration efforts, among others. Source: UN Biodiversity Lab
It’s essential to recognize that NCCIs don’t exclude emissions data but complement it, as all environmental factors are interconnected. Emissions can directly influence specific non-carbon indicators, such as ocean acidification and the concentration of airborne allergens. Together, these indicators offer a more complete view of environmental impact and provide insights into human and ecological health, infrastructure resilience, and secondary climate effects
This broader approach is already helping companies assess their environmental footprint. For instance, Kering Group found through an Environmental Profit and loss (EP&L) assessment that emissions accounted for only 36.6% of their environmental impact. Land use and water pollution, on the other hand, accounted for 33.6% and 14.5%, respectively. This data enabled Kering Group to make more sustainable choices, demonstrating how NCCIs can guide better decision-making.
Fig. 3: Breakdown of Kering Group’s 2023 EP&L results: impact across indicators and lifecycles. Source: Kering Group
NCCI data challenges
Measuring NCCIs is not without its challenges. Although technological advancements and sophisticated modeling techniques have dramatically enhanced the volume and quality of climate data available, obstacles remain:
Inconsistent data quality: Data accuracy and reliability vary widely across regions, making it difficult to compare areas with rich data to those with limited resources.
Lack of granular data: While global trends are well-documented, there is a pressing need for more detailed, real-time data at the local level, particularly for weather patterns. This level of detail is crucial for predicting localized weather events and crafting targeted policies.
Lack of data availability: Collecting ecological data often requires extensive fieldwork and long-term monitoring, which can be resource-intensive and challenging.
Tracking environmental impact can be especially challenging for early-stage companies due to the cost and complexity of Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) processes. Even with access to extensive quantitative data, decision-making can be difficult due to potential misinterpretation.
Amasia and climate data
Amasia’s investment thesis includes a strong focus on climate data through the R1: Review pillar, which helps organizations make data-driven, climate-smart decisions. Thematically, this also fits within our broader focus on the energy transition.
Tackling these data challenges is critical to building a comprehensive repository of NCCI data for better decision-making and impact tracking. Our R1 portfolio companies provide better access to climate data, giving businesses and consumers a deeper understanding of environmental impact beyond carbon.
We also use non-carbon data to help our portfolio companies develop customized “north-star” impact metrics. For example, Topanga tracks reusable assets, and the company includes in its impact measurement the amount of single-use plastic diverted from landfills each quarter.
Conclusion
Having clear insights into our impact on climate change is transformative. Every decision we make has a more significant environmental impact than we might realize, and the only way to truly understand and manage it is through data.
Bottom line: the view here is that we must incorporate non-carbon climate indicators to address climate change's complexity fully.