Worldly and Change Climate Project : User Guidance

Worldly and The Change Climate Project (Change Climate) each offer tools to help consumer goods brands measure and manage their carbon emissions. Wherever you are on your carbon measurement journey, Worldly and Change Climate’s tools support best practices for carbon measurement and management and may be used together in a complementary manner.

This document formalizes guidance on how brands may best use the Business Emissions Evaluator (BEE) tool and the Worldly platform together to support a carbon measurement and management program, including:

• What is Change Climate, and how does the BEE support carbon measurement and management?
• What is Worldly, and how does the platform’s suite of tools support carbon measurement and management?
• Using the BEE and Worldly together to power corporate carbon measurement and management
• Step-by-step joint user guidance on how to transfer data between platforms

What is Change Climate?

Change Climate, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, leads a global movement of individuals and

companies to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by sparking high impact climate initiatives within companies. Change Climate offers accessible, action-focused tools and resources, along with the world's most recognized and trusted consumer-facing climate label, Climate Neutral Certified. The label empowers consumers to find brands that are leading on immediate climate action. All companies that get certified must reduce and compensate for all of their emissions from making and delivering products and services. Change Climate works with over 400 companies and the Climate Neutral Certified label can be found on millions of products worldwide.

How Change Climate supports carbon measurement and management

Change Climate focuses on helping brands measure and understand their cradle-to-customer emissions and build an actionable climate transition plan through its Business Emissions Evaluator (BEE) tool.

Business Emissions Evaluator (BEE): Change Climate’s BEE tool helps brands measure their cradle-to-customer emissions: Scope 1 and 2, Scope 3 Category 1–7, and 9. The BEE is best leveraged by brands seeking category-specific carbon footprint estimates, and by brands leveraging the BEE within a complementary ecosystem of tools that go deeper on Scope 3 impact modeling and management.

• Rapid estimate of corporate carbon footprint. For brands starting their sustainability journey, the BEE can quickly estimate Scope 1–3 emissions based on financial data – free of cost.
• Rigorous cradle-to-customer carbon inventory. For brands seeking to enhance the accuracy of their initial Scope 1, 2, and 3 estimate, the BEE enables users to add primary data from their own operations and value chain to correct and “refine” the estimation model. A library of monetary- and activity-based emissions factors are provided in the BEE. Brands seeking a more value-chain-specific measurement can supplement these data with primary data and complementary product impact modeling tools. This process of refinement in the BEE is continuous and iterative as brands deepen the quality of their data over time.
• Swift, actionable visualization: The data users input into the BEE is translated into visualizations that help brands understand their largest emissions drivers, year-over-year trends, and the biggest opportunities for reduction.

What is Worldly?

Worldly is the planet’s most comprehensive impact intelligence platform, trusted by 40,000+ major brands, retailers, and manufacturers in fashion, outdoor, home goods, toys, and more. Worldly collects high-resolution primary data specific to companies’ value chains, operations, and products, providing insight into impacts across carbon, water, chemistry, and labor. The Worldly platform is the home of several leading sustainability measurement tools, including the Higg Index suite of tools developed by Cascale. The Higg Index is the most widely-used standardized measurement framework within the apparel, footwear, and textile industry, among others. In addition, Worldly has developed a set of proprietary tools and platform features including an under-development Scope 3 carbon accounting capability that will empower brands and retailers to easily refine carbon emissions estimates and use primary data to identify opportunities for impact reduction.

How Worldly supports carbon measurement and management

Worldly offers impact intelligence and insights solutions for a range of ESG impacts, but is particularly well-equipped to support Scope 3 carbon accounting and management efforts.

Higg Product Tools – Higg Material Sustainability Index (MSI) and Higg Product Module (PM): The Higg Product Tools are the industry’s most in-depth, expert-informed toolset for modeling the environmental impact of products. Higg MSI enables brands to quantify the cradle-to-gate (Tier 2–4) carbon emissions of their materials. These materials may be built from a library of 99 example materials and more than 200 raw materials, and are customizable down to the process-level (e.g., specifying the dyeing or spinning process). Higg PM is the cradle-to-grave complement of the MSI, modeling product impacts from finished goods and processes (Tier 1) all the way through end-of-use (Scope 3 Category 1, 4, 9, 11, 12).

• Empower transition from spend-based carbon accounting to activity-based carbon accounting methodology. Activity-based methods are inherently more accurate and allow you to measure impact reductions based on changes to your supply chain, not your cost per unit.
• Develop more accurate and representative product-level emissions factors. Full product-specific LCAs are expensive, slow, and unscalable, but generic material/product emissions factors miss the nuance of your specific value chain. The Product Tools offer a practical middle ground for brands and retailers seeking more accurate product-level impacts.
• Identify product, material, and process-level emissions hotspots to inform and prioritize action. Powered by LCA data down to the process-level, the Higg Product Tools can help brands pinpoint the largest levers to drive carbon reduction.
• Incorporate climate data into the product design process. In our industries, approximately 80% of product impacts are locked-in at the product design stage, so it’s critical that product designers have the tools to incorporate sustainability into their decisions. Integrated with several leading PLM systems, the Higg Product Tools were built to help product designers evaluate the sustainability implications of functionally-equivalent materials in the early stages of product design and development.

Higg Facility Environmental Module (Higg FEM): The Higg FEM collects quantitative and qualitative primary data on facility-level environmental performance. The Worldly platform supports the sharing of FEM data between value chain partners, surfacing insights on critical climate metrics such as production volume, normalized greenhouse gas emissions, coal use, renewable energy deployment, and energy target-setting.

• Implement a GHG Protocol ‘hybrid’ approach for Scope 3 Category 1.¹ Replace process impact estimates in your activity-based emissions factors with primary data collected directly from your value chain. Aside from its higher accuracy, the hybrid method enables brands to get “credit” in their overall carbon footprint when their value chain partners reduce emissions.
• Identify hotspots, act, and monitor progress. Higg FEM can be used to identify facilities not reducing their normalized emissions year over year. Because of the volume the tool collects, it can also illuminate actionable steps to reduce emissions at those facilities, such as setting baselines and targets for certain energy sources.

Using the BEE and Worldly Together to Power Corporate Carbon Measurement and Management

1. Start with BEE Rapid Estimation: The BEE offers an excellent starting point for brands early in their climate measurement journeys, providing a total corporate carbon emissions estimate free of charge. Brands only need to supply operating costs, a list of facilities, and some high level product information, and the BEE applies a spend-based methodology to estimate a cradle-to-customer carbon footprint. This initial rapid estimation helps brands quickly understand the areas where their emissions are likely to be the highest, typically highlighting the need for higher granularity Scope 3 data as it often represents over 80% of value chain emissions. Brands can then leverage these initial insights and collect more granular primary data on these areas to enable more precise accounting and tracking over time.
2. Refine Your Emission Inventory in the BEE: After it provides an initial spend-based estimate, the BEE prompts users to refine their estimate by adding more granular, brand-specific data across every scope and category. It is most important for brands to focus on the data quality of the areas where the impact is the largest, which is typically Scope 3 Category 1 Purchased goods and services. Brands are expected to add more activity-based and primary data into the BEE continuously over time as they seek to increase the accuracy of their footprint estimate and account for emissions reductions towards climate targets. The Worldly platform is the best source for gathering these more granular Scope 3 Category 1 data points to be used in the BEE refinement process.
3. Add Worldly Data into the BEE: Users of the Worldly platform can collect and calculate detailed Scope 3 emissions data from the Higg FEM and Higg Product Tools, and then add data to the BEE workbook during refinement to enhance the accuracy of the BEE’s estimate and enable the accounting of emissions reductions. There are several specific data points from these Worldly tools that may be added; this is described in depth in the Appendix.
4. Track and Measure Emissions Reductions: One of the key strengths of the Worldly platform is that it enables users to account for the impact of emission reduction efforts.
   1. The Higg Product Tools, which may be used to calculate product carbon emissions, empower users to customize calculation inputs at a high level of granularity. For example, users may customize bill of material fibers down to the process-level or specify product care instructions. These robust modeling capabilities don’t just enhance accuracy – they also effectively increase the number of levers brands have to measurably reduce emissions.
   2. Higg FEM captures the primary data necessary to calculate facility-level emissions for a brand’s Scope 3 impact. This primary data allows brands to account for improvements in facility-level energy mix (i.e. phasing out coal or deploying on-site renewable energy) or reductions in energy consumption. Because more than 80% of consumer good brand emissions often come from Scope 3 Purchased goods and services, being able to measure emissions reductions from the upstream value chain is critical for brands with decarbonization targets.
   3. Worldly is currently developing a new Scope 3 measurement tool, set to release in 2024. Aligned with the GHG Protocol, the tool will enable users to build Scope 3 inventories from built-in product and materials libraries as well as user-specific data from the Higg MSI, PM, and FEM. This approach is designed to support brands at all stages of sustainability journey, offering ease, speed, and flexibility without sacrificing quality and accuracy. The new Worldly tool will be compatible with the BEE Tool and will streamline the refinement process with high-resolution data from Worldly.
   4. Reporting emissions measured in Worldly tools via the BEE allows joint users to track their total emissions all in one place and incorporate the most precise and accurate measurement data for their products. The BEE offers helpful data visualizations and emissions tracking tools which provide joint users with a holistic view of their annual carbon inventory and help to identify emissions hotspots. This data enables informed emissions reduction planning, and year-over-year emissions comparisons in the BEE help users track progress on their reduction goals.

Appendix: Step-By-Step Joint User Guidance

1. Set up

   1. Using the “Chat” feature within the BEE, let the Change Climate team know that you would like to enter data from the Higg Product Module.
   2. For certifying brands, the Change Climate team will request a copy of your product export Excel file from the Higg PM. This export includes all the information input into the PM and the outputs. The export button can be found as shown below.
   3. The Change Climate team will turn on a feature that allows you to input your product data into the BEE Workbook. There are two primary tabs in the BEE workbook where users may add Worldly data: Scope 3.1 BoMs and Scope 3.1 Energy. 

2. Scope 3.1 BoMs

• 1. In the BEE workbook, navigate to the Scope 3.1 BoMs tab. List the products for which you measured emissions in the Higg PM here:
  2. Ensure you have listed the quantity manufactured in the footprinting year
  3. In the Physical material match column, select “Custom CO2 Entry.”
  4. In the “Total purchased per product” column, enter the per-product CO2e emissions from Higg PM.
     • Note: Because Higg PM is a cradle-to-grave tool and this section of the BEE is only measuring Scope 3 Category 1, users should only input the emissions from Bill of Materials, Finished Goods and Processes, and Packaging. The red square below represents the data that should be summed and then inputted into the BEE as a custom entry.
     • When you finish in the BEE workbook, it should look something like this:

Required columns to complete are:

1. 1. 1. Facility
      2. Product
      3. Source Region
      4. Material Match (Physical)
      5. Total purchased per product (Physical)
      6. Unit and Total purchased across units sold columns will auto-populate
         • Return to the BEE (web app) and sync your inputs. You’ll be able to see your product-level data from the Higg PM alongside the rest of your carbon inventory.

3. Scope 3.1 Energy

1. 1. Assuming you have already listed the factories from which you source, your Scope 3.1 Energy tab in the workbook will look something like this after completing an estimate.
   2. For your Tier 1 facilities that have shared a completed Higg FEM with you on the Worldly platform, brands may input those facilities’ FEM-collected quantitative energy consumption by source as physical data in the BEE workbook.  Facility energy consumption information is captured in the energy section of the Higg FEM; an example of what this data looks like in the FEM is below. While you don't need to download a report of this data, you may want to save a screenshot for your records to show where this data originated from.
      • Note: Brands should anonymize facility names coming from the Higg FEM when adding facility energy data to the BEE Workbook.
   3. When you finish in the BEE workbook, it should look something like this:
      • For each facility, the required columns to complete are:
        1. Facility
        2. Region
        3. Either monetary or physical columns
        4. Unit and Currency columns will auto-populate
   4. Return to the BEE (web app) and sync your inputs. You’ll be able to see your facility-level data from the Higg FEM alongside the rest of your carbon inventory.

^[1] See https://ghgprotocol.org/sites/default/files/standards/Scope3_Calculation_Guidance_0.pdf for details