Hello together,
i`m currently working on a Corporate Carbon Footprint of a consulting and software programming company. While the basics are clear for me i struggle with Donwstream Scope 3 emissions. My last jobs were at companies with physical products so this is completely new for me.
The company does not sell a single product. Most of the revenue comes from individual programming tasks where the employees code as a part of a bigger team to solve the customers problems. There are various challenges i encountered while trying to understand what they do and how i could account that in the CCF:
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No general product like licensed software, or similar.
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Very often not even an individual software product but only a part of a bigger project/software solution. They work for a given time to support an existing team with their knowledge or they code some specific parts for the team.
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when they do a holistic software project there is zero information about the energy consumption or the intensity of usage because everything is in the customers hand. It could range from “in the end it was never used” to " everyone in this 10.000 employee company uses it three times a day". And even then i would need the information of the regions where its used to determine the emissions from energy consumption, which i cannot collect.
Can you give me a hint how to approach the Downstream Emissions in this case? I guess leaving this outside the boundaries is not an option.
With kind regards Kai