Dive Brief:
- Ernst & Young and sustainability platform Watershed are teaming up to help organizations increase the readiness of their sustainability data for regulatory scrutiny, the companies announced Monday.
- The accounting firm and the artificial intelligence-powered sustainability platform said the partnership will focus on increasing the “confidence, efficiency and transparency” with which companies measure and report their sustainability data.
- The alliance will help organizations measure their scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions and product-level carbon footprint, while also giving clients access to sustainability advisory services through EY’s US sustainability team, according to an Oct. 12 release.
Dive Insight:
The sustainability data alliance comes as companies are facing a complex and increasingly fragmented regulatory environment. Despite some federal rollbacks in the U.S., companies that fall within the scope of California’s Senate Bill 253 have to report their scope 1 and scope 2 emissions to the state by Nov. 10, while an increasing number of global jurisdictions have adopted climate risk disclosure laws, notwithstanding other stakeholder demands.
The pairing of EY and Watershed’s capabilities will help “strengthen emissions measurement, automate reporting and build scalable sustainability solutions that support their decarbonization initiatives and regulatory readiness,” Derek Przybylo, principal of EY’s climate change and sustainability services, said in the release.
The alliance comes a few weeks after Watershed announced an expansion of its agentic AI abilities. The company said last month that its platform’s agents are now able to build out company dashboards, use repeatable custom skills and remember company knowledge, in addition to using an expanded data foundation. Watershed also said it is preparing to release a unified AI platform for energy management and emissions.
“Over the next few years, sustainability work is going to evolve,” Watershed CEO Christian Anderson said in Monday’s release. “It will become more automated and action-oriented. Sustainability insights will fuel operational efficiency and resilience in addition to meeting reporting demands.”
For EY, Watershed joins the Big Four accounting and advisory firm’s expansive partnership ecosystem that includes Adobe, Dell, Microsoft, Moody’s, OpenAI and cybersecurity company Zscaler, among others.
Watershed’s clients include BlackRock, Walmart, FedEx, CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), Dell, Bain Capital and Yeti, among others. The company closed a $100 million funding round in early 2024 that valued the company at $1.8 billion. Last year, the platform launched a free version of its global emissions database.
