Introduction
PropertyGuru Group is Southeast Asia’s leading PropTech company, and the preferred destination for over 37 million property seekers every month to find their dream home. PropertyGuru empowers stakeholders in the property ecosystem with in-depth insights, and solutions that enable them to make confident property decisions across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. PropertyGuru has continually leveraged their tech capabilities and consumer reach to promote sustainable urban living choices and influence positive changes for the environment.
Understanding Emissions
In order to understand their emissions on a granular level to build a robust reduction plan, PropertyGuru onboarded Terrascope to leverage its end-to-end carbon measurement and reduction platform. PropertyGuru wanted to identify areas in their value chain where they could reduce emissions and implement decarbonisation initiatives. Terrascope was able to help them start this journey by calculating their Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions, after assimilating data across various sources into easily manageable segments. The platform was able to ingest data five times faster than the manual process and match relevant emissions factors to fill in any gaps in the data.
Once data across multiple offices and sources was ingested, the Terrascope platform categorised emission data for PropertyGuru as Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions, broken down by office, type of activity in each office such as business travel, event related travel, employee work commute and product usage, helping PropertyGuru prioritise the emission hotspots based on the highest impact. Terrascope’s nuanced breakdown of PropertyGuru’s emissions also helped them identify the largest emission hotspots across the three scopes, as well as their physical office locations.
Managing Emission Reductions
With a deeper understanding of their emission hotspots, PropertyGuru wanted to understand how they could impact emission reductions across some of the largest hotspots. PropertyGuru worked extensively on new features in the Terrascope’s “Reduce Module” to understand this. First, the Terrascope Platform, along with experts from Terrascope helped PropertyGuru explore all the decarbonisation levers at their disposal, ranging from increasing the share of renewable energy in their energy mix, to retrofitting buildings to reduce energy consumption, to optimising employee travel and long-haul flights.
The Terrascope platform then enabled "What-if" simulations to help PropertyGuru evaluate the impact of changes on the decarbonisation levers on emissions across their operations. For example, on the adoption of Renewable Energy in Office, the Terrascope Platform helped PropertyGuru visualise the impact of their energy mix on overall emissions if PropertyGuru stayed on course with Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) for Energy mix versus switching to more renewable energy than prescribed, and how that would impact their emissions overall. Terrascope enabled PropertyGuru to simulate multiple such scenarios across decarbonisation levers and helped PropertyGuru build towards a robust emission reduction strategy.
VALUE DRIVERS
Speed
By ingesting data five times faster than the manual process, the Terrascope platform was able to free up the team’s valuable time and resources that were previously spent on data assimilation and reporting. With a granular and accurate view of its carbon emissions and supply chain, the sustainability team was empowered to focus on key areas for improvement and make more impactful and strategic decisions towards a more sustainable future.
Data Granularity
Terrascope’s machine learning capabilities can assimilate data from a multitude of sources and fill gaps in unavailable data. The Terrascope platform was also able to quantify emissions from activities such as employee commutes to work and emissions related to technology usage, providing realistic solutions for emissions reduction and management.
Future Proofing Operations
By giving PropertyGuru a granular and comprehensive understanding of their Scope 1, 2, and especially their Scope 3 emissions, Terrascope was able to help them build towards operational resilience. PropertyGuru’s newfound understanding of their personnel specific emissions gave them an opportunity to identify emission hotspots not just by geography or office.
GLOSSARY
Net zero
Achieving a balance between an organisation's greenhouse gas emissions and greenhouse gas removal, resulting in overall net emissions of zero
Emission scopes
- Scope 1 covers emissions from sources that an organisation owns or controls directly, such as fuel in a fleet of vehicles.
- Scope 2 covers indirect emissions generated by the energy that an organisation purchases and uses.
- Scope 3 encompasses indirect emissions (not included in scope 2) that occur along the entire value chain of an organisation.
Baselining
A reference point in time against which future emission reductions are measured. Baseline emissions are calculated by looking at an "emissions period", typically the past one to five years of an organisation's activity.
Decarbonisation
Decarbonisation is the process of reducing or eliminating carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change. It involves transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources and adopting low-carbon technologies across sectors like energy, transportation, and industry.