Scope 3 summer webinar series Part IV: Masterclass – Method upgrade for progress reporting and transition planning

Whether you’re just beginning your Scope 3 journey or already well along the path, you’re far from alone.

According to the Sphera 2025 Scope 3 report, 79% of companies now report on Scopes 1, 2 and 3, up from 52% in 2024, representing a 27-point year-over-year increase. Nearly 73% of businesses that don’t yet report on Scope 3 intend to do so soon. 

While many companies are still refining their approach, data remains a key area of focus and opportunity. In the same survey, 62% of respondents who report on Scope 3 highlighted internal data quality as a top priority for improvement and 54% are actively collaborating with suppliers to strengthen emissions insights.

To help make your journey a bit smoother, Sphera created a four-part webinar series in which Sphera experts provide a practical roadmap that takes you from preparing your first Scope 3 inventory to improving accuracy over time.

If you missed the sessions or would like a replay, you can watch them here.

The first session, “Navigate your glide path to Scope 3 spend-based reporting,” explores how to get started by calculating an initial Scope 3 emissions inventory with spend-based data.

Part two, “Utilizing mass-based data to identify hotspots and opportunities in your Scope 3 reporting,” shows how to use mass-based data to build a decarbonization plan that meets reporting requirements and measures the environmental impact of purchased goods and services.

Part three, “Leveraging supplier-specific PCF data for enhanced Scope 3 reporting,”

dives into supplier engagement, focusing on collecting primary data from suppliers and leveraging that information for Scope 3 quantification.  

Preserving consistent and credible emissions tracking

The final session, ‘Upgrading for progress reporting and transition planning,’ focuses on building from your initial carbon inventory to preserving consistency and credibility in emissions tracking over time.

You’ll learn actionable strategies for refining Scope 3 boundaries, upgrading inventories and adapting to updated scientific standards such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Assessment Report 6 (AR6) and International Energy Agency (IEA) guidelines.The webinar discusses how to manage emission factor updates, maintain consistency across reporting years, and align with cutting-edge methodologies to enhance transparency and credibility in your carbon tracking efforts.  

By the time you reach this final webinar, you should have quantified your Scope 3 emissions, established quality assurance processes and begun integrating hybrid data sources. You might have implemented mass-based emission factors and some supplier data as well.

By now, you may have also centralized your infrastructure to manage all these emissions data and developed a transition plan that will all serve as a strong foundation for reporting.

The need for comparability and consistency

One critical piece often overlooked is ensuring year-over-year comparability, a focus of this webinar. Without that, even the most sophisticated Scope 3 carbon footprint can become misleading over time. As methodologies evolve and data sets shift, you must be able to measure and report in a manner that is consistent and meaningful over multiple years.

It’s essential to close this gap because comparability isn’t just a technical detail. It’s needed to ensure your emissions data remains sound and comparable over time.

It’s not enough to plan for future reductions. You also need to ensure the past and the present reflect reality. In 2025, companies are at a strategic midpoint between 2020 and 2030, offering an opportunity to re-baseline and apply the latest scientific data and emission factor methodologies to demonstrate actual progress.

That means not only forecasting reductions through transition planning, but also back-casting, revisiting past reports to account for methodological updates and tracking passive progress.

Watch the entire summer series to learn how to manage emission factor updates, maintain year-over-year consistency and enhance transparency and credibility in your carbon tracking.

Other resources you can check out include:

• Corporate climate strategies: Why implementing transition plans is no longer optional

• Sphera 2025 Scope 3 Report