A few years ago, the story in corporate sustainability was a shift in how companies set their goals. The old sustainability measurement model of buying carbon offsets to balance out emissions was fading, and setting science-based targets was taking its place. That shift has now largely happened, and the conversation has moved on to something more demanding. The question is no longer whether a company will set a credible target. It is whether the company can actually measure and reduce the emissions that sit inside its supply chain, because that is where the overwhelming majority of the footprint lives and where the hardest measurement problems are. For anyone who runs warehousing, distribution, or a distribution network, this is no longer a corporate-responsibility topic happening somewhere else in the building. It is an operations problem to solve.
From Offsets to Targets & Now to Implementation
The move away from offsets and toward science-based targets is no longer a trend to watch. It is the established norm, and the scale of adoption has grown far beyond what it was a few years ago. The Science Based Targets initiative, the body that validates these targets against climate science, validated its first company in 2015 and its thousandth in 2021. By the start of 2026 it had passed ten thousand companies with validated targets, after validating more than twenty-eight hundred new companies in a single year. Companies with validated targets now represent more than forty percent of global market capitalization, a jump from the roughly thirty-five percent that had merely announced intentions a few years earlier.
What is more telling than the raw count is where the initiative itself has turned its attention. Having spent a decade establishing target-setting as standard practice, the organization has shifted its focus toward implementation, meaning the actual work of reducing emissions rather than the act of committing to reduce them. That pivot mirrors what is happening inside companies. Setting a target is now the easy part. Delivering against it is the hard part, and delivery happens in operations.
Why the Real Work Is in Scope 3
Emissions are commonly divided into three scopes. Scope 1 covers emissions from sources a company owns or directly controls, such as fuel burned in its own vehicles. Scope 2 covers the emissions from the electricity a company purchases, including the power that lights and runs a warehouse. Scope 3 covers everything else in the value chain, from purchased goods and services, to transportation and distribution, to the fuels consumed getting products where they need to go.
The critical fact for anyone in this industry is that scope 3 is where nearly all of the footprint sits. Value chain emissions typically account for seventy to ninety percent of a company’s total carbon footprint, and for many companies the supply chain portion dwarfs their direct operational emissions many times over. That is why sustainability has quietly become a supply chain discipline rather than a standalone reporting exercise. The emissions that matter most are generated by suppliers, carriers, and facilities, and the data needed to measure them lives outside the four walls of the company doing the reporting.
For logistics and distribution specifically, the material categories are concrete. They include the upstream production of the diesel and electricity consumed, the emissions from subcontracted and purchased transportation, and the capital goods of the operation itself, meaning the trucks, the forklifts, the racking, and the warehouse buildings. Packaging, waste, and even the noise and pollution around a distribution center enter the picture. These are not abstractions. They are line items an operations leader recognizes immediately, which is exactly why measurement now depends on operational data that only the operation can provide.
Regulation Made Measurement a Mandate
What was largely voluntary a few years ago is increasingly mandatory. In the European Union, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires companies within its scope to disclose their emissions, and where value chain emissions are material, that includes scope 3. The requirement reaches non-EU companies with significant European revenue, so its effect is not confined to Europe. In the United States, state-level rules such as California’s climate disclosure legislation have pushed scope 3 from a future concern toward a near-term expectation for large companies doing business there.
Even where the rules have been simplified or their timelines phased in more gradually, the core scope 3 disclosure expectation has generally been preserved for the companies that remain in scope. The practical consequence is a shift in who owns emissions data inside a company. Responsibility is moving out of a sustainability office and into procurement, logistics, finance, and operations, because those are the teams that actually touch the activities being measured. Many of those teams are now accountable for emissions data they were never set up to manage at scale, which is a design and process gap as much as a reporting one.
The Honest Complication
It would be inaccurate to describe this as a smooth, uncontested march forward, and a credible discussion of the topic has to acknowledge the friction. Alongside strong global growth in target-setting, the movement faces real political headwinds, particularly in the United States, where the organizations behind these standards have drawn regulatory scrutiny and where some jurisdictions and companies have pulled back from prior commitments. Reporting requirements have in some cases been softened or delayed. The direction of travel over the past several years has been toward more measurement, not less, but the path is genuinely contested rather than settled, and companies are navigating an environment where the rules differ by region and continue to move.
For an operator, the reasonable posture is neither to treat mandatory reporting as universal nor to assume the pressure will disappear. The larger customers and investors driving much of this demand have not reversed course, and the measurement capability a company builds is useful regardless of how any single regulation lands. The work of knowing your own energy use, your transportation emissions, and your facility footprint has operational value in its own right, because it is the same data that drives cost and efficiency decisions.
What This Means for How You Design and Run Operations
The reason this belongs in a conversation about warehouse and network design is that the biggest lever a company has over its footprint is often the design of its operations. The single most effective moves remain sourcing cleaner energy and reducing waste, and both are shaped at the design stage. A facility’s energy profile is set by decisions about lighting, climate control, equipment, and building systems. A network’s transportation emissions are set by how many facilities there are, where they sit relative to customers, and how far product has to travel. A well-designed network that reduces total miles traveled reduces both cost and emissions at the same time, which is the rare case where the efficient answer and the sustainable answer are the same answer.
This is also why measurement and design cannot be separated. You cannot reduce what you have not measured, and you cannot measure credibly without the operational data that a well-run facility and a well-modeled network produce. The companies that will handle the coming decade well are the ones that treat emissions data as operational data, build it into how they evaluate facilities and networks, and design for efficiency knowing that efficiency and emissions reduction increasingly point in the same direction.
About OPSdesign Consulting
OPSdesign Consulting is an independent supply chain and warehouse design firm. We do not sell equipment or software and accept no vendor commissions, so our recommendations answer to your operation and nothing else. Because a large share of a company’s carbon footprint is set by the design of its facilities and network, the same work that makes an operation more efficient often makes it measurably cleaner. To discuss designing operations that reduce both cost and emissions, reach out to our team.
