Catherine Atkin, co-founder and director of Carbon Accountable, was one of the architects behind SB 253 — California's landmark climate disclosure law. In this episode, Catherine takes us back to the drafting table: why mandatory disclosure was necessary, why California was the right venue, and how SB 253 was built to work alongside (not against) the GHG Protocol, CSRD, and IFRS S2.

We dig into where CARB's current rulemaking stands on phasing in Scope 3 categories, how the GHG Protocol's move toward primary-data requirements might interact with SB 253, and why Catherine sees disclosure as a necessary (if insufficient) precondition for real decarbonization. Catherine also shares her work with the Task Force for Corporate Action Transparency (TCAT), helping companies get credit for climate action beyond their own scopes 1, 2, and 3 — and closes with her five-year vision for what "routine" climate reporting could look like in California.

Sponsored by North Star Carbon & Impact.

Stephanie Jones, Senior Attorney for Climate Risk at Environmental Defense Fund, helps unpack California's SB 253, one of the country's leading corporate climate disclosure laws, and where CARB's rulemaking stands heading into its final stretch this year.

We cover:

• What SB 253 actually requires and who it covers
• Why emission factor quality and transparency matter so much for useful scope 3 reporting
• The importance of Scope 3 reporting across all categories
• How CARB can adapt standards in response to future protocol changes
• How companies and practitioners can still weigh in before CARB presents its regulation to the board this December

Stephanie also points listeners to EDF's Net Zero Action Accelerator at netzeroaction.org for practical resources on measuring, disclosing, and reducing value chain greenhouse gas emissions.

This episode is brought to you by North Star Carbon & Impact, the carbon and sustainability management platform built by sustainability professionals for sustainability professionals.

"If we're just addressing greenhouse gas emissions, it's like playing defense and expecting to win the game. You also have to play offense."

Dr. Cheryl Baldwin, Vice President of Sustainability Consulting at Pure Strategies, argues that companies hesitate on nature because they expect the same multi-year climb carbon accounting was. She thinks that expectation is wrong, and that it's what keeps most companies stuck. In her experience, Pure Strategies has yet to work with a company that couldn't connect something already underway to nature.

Cheryl has built nature and climate strategies for companies across food, retail, and consumer goods. She helped build Toyota Motor North America's biodiversity and land strategy, developed sustainability goals for TAZO, built a sustainable packaging strategy for Walmart, and authored The 10 Principles of Food Industry Sustainability.

In this episode we cover:

• The most common buckets where nature work already exists: philanthropy and purpose, operations, products and sourcing, and climate
• Why the Global Biodiversity Framework is the nature equivalent of the Paris Agreement
• Translating nature targets into three business-actionable areas: protect, restore, sustainably manage
• Why a climate strategy isn't a complete strategy without a nature strategy alongside it

Find Cheryl at purestrategies.com and on LinkedIn. The Nature Navigator report, Planet-Forward Strategies, and the Nature Action Forum for Business are all available on the Pure Strategies site.

This podcast is brought to you by North Star Carbon & Impact, the carbon and sustainability management platform built by sustainability professionals, for sustainability professionals. North Star helps companies simplify GHG accounting, improve data quality, and stay audit ready across Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Visit northstarcarbon.com to learn more or request a demo.

Brian Schoening has spent the last four years as an independent sustainability consultant and GHG accounting specialist, working with mid-market companies to build credible, audit-ready inventories. Before that, he spent nearly 20 years at Northrop Grumman — one of the world's largest aerospace and defense companies — building and running their GHG accounting and corporate sustainability programs.

In this episode, Brian pulls from both sides of that experience to walk through what actually goes wrong in GHG inventories, how to prevent it, and how to build the minimum viable inventory that's still defensible.

We cover:

• The missing-locations inventory: a real case study of a multi-year inventory that required a complete re-baseline

• Why completeness failures are more common than clients expect — and how to catch them early

• The three audiences every inventory management plan must serve: your internal team, future consultants, and auditors

• Why precision is the enemy of efficiency in Scope 3 — and what a screening approach actually looks like

• The fractional sustainability leader model: what it is, why mid-market companies need it, and the Fractional Sustainability Leaders Collective (fslcollective.com)

• How Brian structures a portfolio of consulting services — fractional, carbon accounting, and project work — to manage the variability of independent practice

Brian is founder of One Small Step Sustainability Consulting (onesmallstepsustainability.com) and The GHG Shop (ghgshop.com), and co-founder of the Fractional Sustainability Leaders Collective (fslcollective.com).

Connect with Brian on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brianschoening

This episode is brought to you by North Star Carbon & Impact — the carbon and sustainability management platform built by sustainability professionals, for sustainability professionals. Visit northstarcarbon.com to learn more or request a demo.

What if the hardest part of carbon accounting isn't the methodology — it's getting the right people to own the data?

Fran Estartus, Operations Manager at the International Wineries for Climate Action (IWCA), has spent nearly a decade building expertise in wine industry carbon accounting. Before joining IWCA, she built the carbon program at VSPT Wine Group in Chile. Now she works with winery members representing 3.5% of global wine production across every continent.

In this episode, Fran and Aaron cover:

• Why carbon inventory failures are usually accountability problems, not methodology problems
• The most overlooked Scope 3 risk for wine producers: purchased grapes and bulk wine
• IWCA's new soil organic carbon sequestration standardization initiative
• What separates wineries with robust, audit-ready inventories from those that struggle
• Why "perfect can be the enemy of good" — and how to build a system designed to improve over time
• How IWCA members share emissions data and best practices openly, despite being marketplace competitors

Fran's implementation minute: spend 30 minutes mapping who owns the data for each major emission source. Carbon accounting becomes dramatically easier when data ownership is clear — and the 80/20 rule gets you most of the way there.

Connect with Fran: LinkedIn — Fran Estartus Learn more about IWCA: iwcawine.org (free GHG calculator available for download)

Brought to you by North Star Carbon & Impact — the carbon and sustainability management platform for sustainability professionals. Visit northstarcarbon.com.

What do you do when you're not going to hit your 2030 sustainability goals?

You could bury it in your sustainability report. Or you could call up your biggest critic and have an honest conversation. Mike Hower says PepsiCo chose the second option — and that's exactly why they're one of his best examples of sustainability communication done right.

Mike Hower is the founder of Hower Impact, author of Sustainability Storytelling (Kogan Page, 2025), and host of the Sustainability Communicator podcast. He spent more than a decade as a journalist covering sustainability for GreenBiz, Sustainable Brands, and Triple Pundit before moving into communications strategy at Edelman and beyond. His clients include Mars, HP, and Berry Global.

In this episode, Mike and Aaron cover:

• The Four C's of effective sustainability storytelling: Context, Compelling, Credible, and Compliance

• Why the best sustainability communicators don't have to say "sustainability" — the Fight Club rule

• How to use layers of communication to make GHG data accessible without losing credibility

• The approaching 2030 net zero reckoning and how to talk about missed goals without a credibility crisis

• Why CEOs say they understand sustainability and still treat it as a cost center — and what to do about it

• The one cross-functional action you can take this week to improve your sustainability communication

Find Mike at Hower Impact, listen to the Sustainability Communicator podcast, and order Sustainability Storytelling wherever books are sold.

This episode is brought to you by North Star Carbon & Impact — the carbon and sustainability management platform built by sustainability professionals, for sustainability professionals. Visit northstarcarbon.com to learn more.

Molly Sheppard is VP of Winery Strategies at Spottswoode Estate Vineyard & Winery in Napa Valley — a 37-acre, 20-person estate with one of the most rigorous sustainability programs in American wine. In her role, Molly oversees everything from winemaking to hospitality, direct sales, and sustainability — including six years of IWCA-verified Scopes 1–3 greenhouse gas inventories.

In this episode, Molly takes us inside what carbon accounting looks like at a small but serious operation: how a first inventory can reveal a Scope 3 hotspot you can actually do something about, why "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" is the most important advice for practitioners struggling with Scope 3 data, and what it really takes to run a credible GHG program without a dedicated sustainability team.

Topics include:

• The glass lightweighting journey that took Spottswoode's estate Cabernet bottle from ~790g to 495g — driven directly by what the numbers revealed
• Managing the cultural challenge of lightweighting in a luxury wine market where bottle weight equals perceived quality
• Tools, timing, and practical strategies for running a Scope 3 inventory at a small business
• Engaging your supply chain: why Scope 3 is hard now and what the future could look like when "your Scope 3 is somebody's Scope 1"
• Regenerative organic farming, soil carbon sequestration, and what carbon neutrality could eventually mean for an estate like Spottswoode
• The business case for environmental leadership — from operational cost savings to next-generation consumer loyalty

Resources mentioned:

• International Wineries for Climate Action (IWCA): iwcawine.org
• The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann
• North Star Carbon & Impact: northstarcarbon.com

Connect with Molly Sheppard:

• Instagram: @mkshep | @spottswoode
• Website: spottswoode.com

This podcast is brought to you by North Star Carbon & Impact, the carbon and sustainability management platform built by sustainability professionals, for sustainability professionals. North Star helps companies simplify GHG accounting, improve data quality, and stay audit ready across Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions so teams can spend less time reporting and more time driving real impact.

Jaclyn Sherman's path into carbon accounting started in the field, monitoring water quality on the Yuba River, tracking aquatic invasive species, and working on meadow restoration and carbon sequestration projects in the Sierra foothills. That hands-on background now shapes how she approaches one of the most technical corners of sustainability work: GHG inventory assurance.

Today Jaclyn is a Sustainability Analyst at Sensiba LLP, a top-100 U.S. accounting firm and the first California-based firm to earn B Corp certification. She leads GHG assurance engagements for food and beverage clients and has built her expertise through a combination of the GHGMI diploma program, deep on-the-job learning, and the kind of stay-curious adaptability that this rapidly evolving field demands.

In this episode, Aaron and Jaclyn work through the distinction between verification, assurance, and validation; what data quality frameworks actually look like in an assurance engagement; and how readiness assessments help companies scope out where they stand before committing to a full inventory. They also build out a practical 90-day roadmap for a mid-sized food and beverage company trying to tackle Scope 3 Category 1 purchased goods, where 70% of purchases are agricultural commodities starting from scratch.

The conversation also covers inventory management plans and the practical steps practitioners can take to future-proof their inventories through methodology changes, staff turnover, and evolving emission factors. And Jaclyn shares a candid take on how AI is showing up in GHG accounting work and what that means for assurance providers trying to evaluate data they can't fully trace.

In This Episode:

• The difference between verification, assurance, and validation in GHG work
• How assurance providers evaluate data sources, data management frameworks, and methodology choices
• What readiness assessments reveal and when they add the most value
• A 90-day roadmap for Scope 3 Category 1 in agricultural supply chains
• Inventory management plans and how to future-proof a GHG inventory
• AI in GHG accounting: where it helps and where it complicates assurance
• What doing sustainability work inside a B Corp accounting firm actually looks like
• Career advice for practitioners at any stage: resources, the GHGMI diploma program, and learning on the job

Resources Mentioned:

• GHG Management Institute (GHGMI) Diploma Program: ghginstitute.org
• Sustainability Simplified newsletter by Tim Mowin
• Sensiba sustainability services: sensiba.com
• North Star Carbon & Impact: northstarcarbon.com

Connect with Jaclyn Sherman: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jaclyn-sherman

About the Podcast: The Carbon Management and Accounting Podcast is hosted by Aaron Stainthorp and sponsored by North Star Carbon & Impact, the carbon and sustainability management platform built by sustainability professionals, for sustainability professionals.

This episode is brought to you by North Star Carbon & Impact. If you're looking for an easier, more transparent way to manage carbon and ESG data and prepare for audits, reporting, and decarbonization planning, visit northstarcarbon.com to learn more or request a demo.