What does doing nothing about Scope 3 cost?

Every build vs buy analysis has a quiet third column that nobody writes down: do nothing. It deserves a proper look rather than a scare story, because doing nothing is a real decision with a real ledger. This post sets out what is on it, and is honest about which lines can be priced and which cannot.

The shared scenario for this series, ours by assumption: a UK organisation with 10,000 suppliers, no Scope 3 programme, no supplier emissions data. As throughout the series, 10,000 is the purchase ledger rather than an engagement list: Scope 3 Category 1 means whoever measures you, or whoever you eventually measure, has to account for the whole file. This post is the one where the reader may be on either side of the request, as a buyer, a supplier, or a portfolio company, so both sides are covered.

What happens to the requests if you do nothing?

They arrive anyway. Customers with climate targets ask their suppliers for emissions data, and investors ask their portfolio companies, because Scope 3 Category 1 and Category 15 make your emissions part of their inventory. Doing nothing does not remove your organisation from those programmes; it just means the team asking you for data gets no answer, and asks again. There is no published figure for what an unanswered request costs in commercial terms, and we are not going to invent one. What can be said factually is that the requests are recurring, they come from the organisations you sell to and raise from, and silence is itself an answer they record.

What number exists about you anyway?

This is the part of the do-nothing ledger most organisations have not seen. If you disclose nothing, the organisations measuring you do not leave a blank. They apply a sector average: a generic factor that gives every company in your category the same emissions per pound of spend or unit of revenue. A figure with your name on it already sits in other organisations' inventories, and doing nothing means that figure is the sector's, not yours. The scale of this is published: the Science Based Targets initiative's survey with BCG, February 2023, from 230 responding organisations, found only 6% of emission factors in use were supplier-specific and 94% of respondents relied on secondary data. The default state of the world is that you are being modelled.

What does the published record show about the obligations?

Stated as facts of the job, because that is what they are. CSRD and ESRS E1 bring value chain emissions into scope for companies reporting under them, CDP requests arrive annually where customers or investors ask for them, and the ISSB published amendments to its greenhouse gas emissions disclosure requirements in December 2025, effective for annual reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2027. Which of these applies to you, and when, depends on your size, listing and jurisdiction, and this post is not going to dramatise a deadline. The relevant point for the do-nothing option is narrower: where one of them does apply, the data work lands in that reporting cycle whether or not it was budgeted, at the manual or consultant costs set out earlier in this series.

When is doing nothing genuinely defensible?

When nobody upstream, downstream or on the register is measuring you, and you are not measuring anyone. A small private company with no customers holding climate targets, no institutional investors and no reporting obligation can rationally wait. The published direction of travel says that position narrows rather than widens, but while it holds, it holds, and pretending otherwise would be the fear framing this series has avoided.

What is the cheapest move that is not nothing?

Answering once, properly, on your own profile. If the requests are already arriving, claiming your DitchCarbon profile is free and self-serve: you review what has already been found about your organisation, correct it, answer once, and every customer or investor looking you up reads the same answer instead of sending you the same survey in a different order. That replaces the sector average carrying your name with a figure you control, which is the do-nothing ledger's biggest line settled for an afternoon's work.

And if you are the one who will eventually have to ask: DitchCarbon provides verified emissions data for over 2 million organisations, so procurement, sustainability and finance teams can measure and act on supply chain and portfolio emissions from one source. The disclosed part of a supplier list or portfolio is already matched and scored before anyone sends a request, which means the day you stop doing nothing, a recent deployment reached about 60% of a large supplier base within 2 weeks. Doing nothing is a decision you can reverse quickly; claim your profile, or see how teams use DitchCarbon when the first request lands.

This post is part of a series pricing the alternatives to buying supplier emissions data, all on one shared scenario: collecting it manually, consultants every cycle, the spend-based minimum, and building the platform in house.

Last reviewed August 2026.