The scope
Full ESG is not carbon with extras.
Most platforms that call themselves ESG are carbon platforms with a survey attached. Carbonex is being built so that a social metric and a governance control are handled with the same care as an emissions figure — the same evidence behind them, the same distinctions, the same approvals, the same trail.
One model, or three products in a trench coat.
The reason most ESG platforms are really carbon platforms is that carbon has units. It measures, it sums, it reconciles. Social and governance data mostly does not: it is a policy that exists or does not, an incident count someone assembled by hand, a board composition that changed in March.
That difference tempts a vendor into building three systems and putting one logo on them — and it is exactly where an ESG report stops being defensible, because the qualitative half never inherits the discipline the quantitative half was given.
Carbonex is being built the other way. One shared way of organising topics, metrics, disclosures, risks, policies, controls, targets, actions, evidence, owners and approvals — and one shared structure for the organisation, its business units, facilities, assets, workforce, suppliers, products and reporting periods. A written disclosure carries its evidence for the same reason a tonne of CO₂e does: because someone will eventually ask where it came from.
Full ESG is not carbon with extras.
Carbonex is in development and has not launched. It is deepest today where it started — carbon, energy and the evidence underneath them. The topics below describe the scope the platform is being built to cover, not a set of finished capabilities, and the roadmap says in what order they arrive. Nothing on this page is a compliance claim.
Environmental
The pillar with units, and the one Carbonex started from. Every domain here resolves to values with a factor, a method and an uncertainty — which is what makes them auditable and what makes the evidence model worth building.
- Carbon and greenhouse gases
- Scope 1, 2 and 3 activity, the emission factors behind each figure, and periods that stay fixed once closed. The deepest area of the platform today.
- Energy
- Consumption, generation, procurement and intensity, tied to the same hierarchy as everything else rather than to a separate spreadsheet.
- Water
- Withdrawal, discharge, recycling and local context — designed to keep place attached to the figure, because a group total hides what matters.
- Waste
- Streams, treatment routes, diversion and disposal, held to the same evidence requirements as an emissions line.
- Air and pollution
- Pollutant releases and incidents, recorded against the facility and period they belong to.
- Biodiversity
- Site-level impacts and dependencies — a domain where “not applicable” and “unavailable” are very different answers and must not collapse into each other.
- Circularity
- Material flows, reuse, recovery and recycling, tracked as inputs and outputs rather than as a headline ratio.
- Climate risk
- Physical and transition risks, held in the same risk register as governance risk rather than in a parallel one.
- Products and life-cycle assessment
- Product-level footprints built from the same activity data, so a product figure and a corporate figure cannot silently disagree.
- AI emissions
- A source in its own right, with its own method and evidence — provider, account, workload, model, region — rather than a line someone added to a spreadsheet.
Social
The pillar most often reduced to a survey. In Carbonex a social metric is a metric: it has a definition, an owner, a period, a source and a state, and it is approved and locked by the same chain as an emissions figure.
- Workforce
- Headcount, composition, turnover and contract types, defined once and reported consistently across periods.
- Health and safety
- Incidents, rates and lost time, where a definition change between periods is a documented event rather than an unexplained jump.
- Learning and development
- Training delivered, coverage and completion, attributable to the part of the organisation it happened in.
- Diversity and inclusion
- Composition and pay-gap metrics, designed to respect the fact that some of this data legitimately cannot be collected in some jurisdictions — which is “not applicable”, not nought.
- Human rights
- Assessments, findings and remediation, linked to the operations and suppliers they concern.
- Community and social impact
- Programmes, contributions and local engagement, recorded with the evidence behind the claim.
- Supply-chain social
- Labour and working conditions gathered directly from suppliers, with the response and the evidence behind it kept together.
- Customer and product responsibility
- Product safety, quality and customer outcomes, held to the same disclosure discipline as the rest.
Governance
The pillar that is mostly evidence about evidence — policies, controls, approvals and who was allowed to do what. It is the closest thing on this list to what the platform itself is made of.
- Board and leadership
- Composition, independence, tenure and oversight of sustainability matters, held as dated records.
- Ethics and compliance
- Codes, training coverage and reported concerns, with the evidence attached rather than asserted in a narrative.
- Risk
- One risk register across climate, operational and governance risk, with owners, controls and review dates.
- Policies and controls
- Policy versions, approval chains and control effectiveness — kept with the same history the numbers get.
- Audit and assurance
- An assurance workspace built on locked evidence, so an assurer reads the exact closed period a figure was calculated from, not data that is still moving.
- Cybersecurity and privacy
- Programme, incidents and data-protection posture, disclosed against the same period boundaries.
- Tax and economic contribution
- Country-level contribution, reported from the same organisational hierarchy as everything else.
- Responsible AI
- Model and provider registry, prompt and version traceability, evaluations, guardrails and human approval — governance of the AI the platform itself uses, not only of the customer’s.
Double materiality decides what any of this is for.
A full ESG scope is not a mandate to collect everything. Carbonex is being built around double materiality: the topics that affect the organisation, and the topics the organisation affects — assessed separately, because they are separate questions with different evidence.
A stakeholder registry records who was consulted and when. Each material topic links to the metrics and disclosures that serve it, so a reader can trace a reported figure back to the reason it is being reported at all — and a topic assessed as not material carries the reasoning that made it so.
A target is a claim about the future, so it carries its baseline.
Targets in Carbonex are being built as trajectories rather than numbers: a baseline, the actuals against it, a forecast, the variance between them, and a confidence attached to that forecast. A target whose baseline has been restated shows the restatement rather than absorbing it.
Initiatives and actions are linked to the targets they are supposed to move, so the gap between a commitment and the work funded to meet it is visible in the same place.
Most of the scope you cannot measure directly, you have to ask for.
A large share of environmental and social data sits with suppliers. Carbonex is being built with a supplier master, segmentation, structured requests, scoring and corrective-action tracking — so a supplier response arrives as evidence with a sender and a date rather than as a figure someone typed in.
Where a supplier does not respond, the resulting gap stays a gap. It is recorded as unavailable, it affects the completeness of anything built on it, and it does not become a nought because a report needed a number.