Your assessment of ambition will be done based on the most recent inventory against target year – essentially, the base year is not as relevant?
The most recent inventory is the latest year for which the FI realistically has data and calculated emissions? For targets submitted in 2023, depending on internal reporting timelines and data availability, the most recent inventory could be 2020.
A base year of 2019 for targets submitted in 2023 is acceptable, as long as the most recent inventory (2020 or 2021) reflects the required ambition? This would enable FIs to retain targets they have already published, as long as these meet the required level of ambition.
In general, when you’re setting a targets you should as far as possible use the latest available emissions data as your base year, unless there are specific reasons when this may not reflect the true nature of your business.
On this issue, is it possible for a FI (a bank) to have different base years for different scope of emissions targets? Example: Scope 1+2 (base year = 2019); Scope 3 - Corporate Loans (base year = 2020); Scope 3 - Electricity Project Finance (base year = 2021)
Hello,
thank you so much for creating this community.
I have been working on the development of targets for our credit portfolio. In this sense, I would like to check with you if we do need a minimum coverage of real emissions data of the companies that make up the baseline. On the contrary, I don’t know if a baseline can be calculated from 100% estimated data.
Hiya, my experience with validating through SBTi is that there has to be a consistent base year - you can use a multi year average if the COVID lockdown has distorted business as usual, but you can’t pick one year for this part and another year for that part, so I’ve been told during validation with my clients.
Hope that’s helpful!
Hello!
thanks for your comments. Currently, we are developing targets based on SBTi criteria and we are thinking in the possibility of validate these targets with sbti but we have a main question: for the baseline, is it possible to use estimated data of our counterparties? or we only can use real data?
Regarding base years, it is recommended that financial institutions use the same base and target years for all targets within the midterm time frame and all targets within the long-term time frame.
Regarding data, I would recommend taking a look at the SBTi Training Modules for FIs, particularly Modules 6 and 7.