Emetrix is PACT Conformant: what PACT is and why carbon transparency matters

PACT is an initiative of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), launched in 2021, that brings together companies, software providers and standard setters around one concrete question: how to calculate a product's carbon footprint in a comparable way and pass it from one company to another without losing information along the way.

It works on three pieces:

Methodology

How to calculate a product carbon footprint, aligned with the GHG Protocol and ISO 14067. Version 3, from April 2025, added guidance on land sector emissions and removals, electricity, carbon capture and verification pathways.

Technical Specifications

A shared data model and API, so that two different systems read the same footprint the same way.

Network

The solutions that passed the conformance tests and can exchange footprints with each other.

According to CDP, a company's supply chain emissions are on average 11.4 times higher than those of its own operations. For almost any company, the large part of the footprint lies in what it buys.

Today that part is almost always estimated with averages: sector factors or spend-based models. The result has a basic flaw. If a supplier cuts its emissions — switches energy source, improves a process, manages its soil better — its customer does not see it: the sector average stays the same. And the supplier who made the effort has no way to prove it.

PACT is neither a platform nor a database. Footprints are not uploaded anywhere: they go straight from the supplier's system to the customer's, in the format and through the API defined by the Technical Specifications. Each company keeps using its own software and decides who it shares with.

For this to work, every solution has to implement the specification exactly as written. That is why PACT runs a battery of automated tests and only adds to the network the solutions that pass 100% of them.