It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. You are what you measure. What I mean is we need to know a baseline of where things are at before we can see if changes are making a difference. This is especially true when it comes to emissions and trying to lower them and in the creation of clean energy. In her 2021 talk from TED at BCG,

green technologist Charlotte DeG

recommends ways to reduce emissions with better metrics.

For decades now, we've been saying we should reduce our emissions.

But they've kept increasing.

One of the key reasons is we don't measure accurately the climate impact of our actions. Imagine trying to save money,

but when you go shopping there is no price tag on any item or trying to lose weight, but you cannot measure the portion sizes

and the calories. You would be bound to fail. This level of blindness is close to the one we have

when it comes to our climate impact. Measuring greenhouse gas emissions is hard.

It has no color, it has no smell, it's invisible.

We cannot put sensors everywhere on every building, every truck, every field, every cow.

So most of the time we give up and we don't measure.

And when we do measure, we are reduced to relying on estimations and conversion factors.

The consequence is we end up working with highly incomplete and inaccurate estimations of our emissions.

Often with a margin of error of 30 to 60%. This means targets and action plans are set based on inaccurate

data. If we look at the corporations that report their progress

on climate to the CDP, which is a non-profit organization that runs a global disclosure system

for environmental impacts, what we see is tracking.

More than two-thirds of the companies are not accurately measuring their emissions.

And only 7% of those companies are ultimately reducing their impact in some way.

You cannot reduce what you cannot measure.

It is key for corporations to be able to measure across all activities, all sources that drive

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