Physical commodities trading company Trafigura and data and analytics-focused software developer Palantir Technologies announced today the launch of a new collaboration aimed at developing a technology services platform to calculate and report carbon emissions across commodity supply chains.

The collaboration comes as corporate sustainability efforts increasingly turn to focus on companies’ supply chains, which often represent their primary source of impact and ESG risk. In many sectors, for example, value chain emissions outside of companies’ direct control, or “Scope 3” emissions, typically account for the vast majority of their climate impact, and companies are increasing pressure on suppliers for transparency into the carbon footprint of their products and activities in order to meet their own sustainability goals.

Jeremy Weir, Trafigura’s Executive Chairman, and CEO said:

“Our customers are increasingly asking us for visibility into the lifecycle emissions of the commodities we move as they prepare for regulated Scope 3 emissions reporting and more generally for Net Zero. The complexity involved in commodity supply chains requires robust cooperation across the industry and a technological solution that can enable meaningful decisions and change.”

The new platform aims to increase the transparency of emissions coming from the production, transformation, and transportation of commodities across the supply chain, enabling participants to grasp the lifecycle emissions related to their indirect operations better, benchmark against other participants, and to highlight opportunities for lower-carbon pathways.

The collaboration builds on work done by the companies over the past year, including the development of an initial pilot modeling scenarios across millions of carbon pathways using actualized commodity shipments. The project will begin with the calculation of carbon intensity across supply chains starting with crude oil and refined products and concentrates and refined metals.

Alexander C. Karp, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Palantir Technologies Inc said:

“The collective action required to address many of our most pressing global challenges requires more than resolve or a shift in political priorities. It requires a shared understanding of the facts based on data. We have built software platforms that deliver that shared understanding by enabling institutions across entire industries and sectors to collaborate and model the world in which they operate.”