A Sustainability Manager, Head of Sustainability, or Chief Sustainability Officer has many challenges ahead of them. One of them is finding a solution which can help them manage all the data, reporting, and workflows around the sustainability activities of the business, and of capturing the carbon emissions and intensity of the business's activities and that of their supply chain.

Where does one start with procurement of such a system?

To answer this, we undertook a global search and review of ESG and carbon accounting vendors, and estimated the number of employees of each. We are using employee count as a rough proxy of scale and success in the marketplace. Note of course that it shouldn't be the only criteria with which to select a suitable vendor.

After reviewing over 400 vendors, we narrowed the list to almost 200 that we present in the following infographic where each cell is scaled by employee count, and coloured by geographic region.

Vendors with five or less employees were not included. In our experience, a vendor of this scale typically would not have the resources sufficient to adequately support a large enterprise's needs in either product maturity, or support capacity. Neither would they have sufficient credibility built up to satisfy the risk and governance needs in a range of measures. That said, we have seen a number of businesses having the appetite to work closely with small startups.

Some vendors are large multinationals with tremendous employee counts and have added some form of ESG reporting or carbon accounting functionality or product to their offerings. It was not always possible to estimate the number of employees dedicated to the ESG or carbon product. For simplicity, we have capped the larger vendors to a scale of 500 employees. This helps make the infographic more digestible given that many vendors have much less than 500 employees.

Industry consolidation has and continues to occur with larger vendors acquiring smaller ones. Startups appear, businesses fail. We will continue monitoring the market and periodically updating the vendor landscape infographic.

TUTXI Consulting can help businesses navigate this complex market, support procurement, implementation, and data governance related to ESG reporting, climate reporting, and carbon accounting.

If you have additional information to add, or have questions, contact us.