Many large listed companies in Switzerland have made significant progress on sustainability measurements and disclosures. 

 

What’s often missing is a clear path from that data to the decisions that matter for a business. Quinn Wenning, Senior Manager – Sustainability & Climate at Deloitte in Switzerland, works on creating that path, and his assessment is: the problem is not the data itself, it’s how it translates into business decisions.   

 

As one of Switzerland’s leading professional services firms, Deloitte Switzerland advises companies on complex business challenges, including sustainability, across audit and assurance, consultancy, tax, legal, and risk. According to their  State of Sustainability Reporting FY25 market study, about 96% of top companies in the Swiss index have Scope 1, 2, and at least partial Scope 3 coverage. 

 

“The question isn’t only how do we get better data, though that’s clearly part of the challenge. It’s how do we get the right data into the rooms where the decisions are being made,” says Quinn.

 

This framing defines Deloitte’s approach to sustainability consulting. It points to a problem that is fundamentally about language. 

The Challenge: Data that Doesn’t Speak the Language of the Room

When Quinn walks into a new client engagement, the conversation often starts from the same place. Companies have data, but it isn’t making the impact they want it to make.  

 

The complexity, he argues, goes deeper. Product teams need product-level granularity but are working with sector averages. Sustainability data sits in systems that don’t communicate with each other. Sometimes, the sustainability team is siloed, doing important work that never reaches the people authorized to act on it.  

 

Even where data does reach the right rooms, it often arrives in the wrong language. Sustainability professionals think in tons of CO2, greenhouse gas emissions, and life cycle assessment outputs, whereas CEOs and CFOs think in euros, dollars, and francs, and procurement managers think in cost per unit. The translation between those vocabularies is not automatic, and without it, sustainability reporting produces “nodding in boardrooms” rather than decisions.   

 

It’s our job to translate sustainability information to a financial value at risk, or carbon intensity into a procurement decision,” says Quinn. “And I think that translation, not only the measurement, is how embedding sustainability truly starts to click at companies.”

 

Deloitte has recently developed the Sustainability Fusion framework to help effectively communicate the business case.  

 

According to Quinn, only a quarter to half of companies in Switzerland are financially quantifying their climate-related financial risks (see page 24). This figure highlights how many sustainability teams are still having a different conversation from the one happening in the boardroom. 

The Solution: What Changes when Sustainability Speaks the Right Language 

Deloitte’s Sustainability Fusion framework does exactly that: it bridges those language gaps and turns sustainability data into business decisions. Deloitte’s practice is built around a straightforward mechanism: take sustainability data and translate it into the financial and operational terms that trigger decisions in their respective audiences.  

 

For boards and executives, that means crossing carbon emissions with carbon price projections and embedding the result in a CapEx (Capital Expenditure) or OpEx (Operating Expenditure) plan. When that happens, something shifts.   

 

“It becomes a line in a spreadsheet that’s comparable to everything else in that decision-making. And then the reaction that we see is, ‘Oh, this is a business problem.'” Quinn explains.

 

For Quinn, the moment a CEO or CFO recognizes sustainability as a business problem rather than a reporting obligation is a win. These are people who are motivated by business problems. Framing sustainability in those terms gives them a reason to engage rather than defer.  

 

The distinction matters at the organizational level, too. Quinn uses an example of a company whose head of sustainability, when asked how his sustainability strategy was going, replied simply: “We don’t have a sustainability strategy. We have a sustainable business strategy.”   

 

“That difference,” Quinn argues, “matters tremendously. Because a sustainability strategy lives within a function, but a sustainable business strategy, that’s something that moves the company. It’s a lens with which procurement can make decisions. It’s something that the product teams can use. It’s something that finance can use.” 

 

At a company level, this kind of integration is still rare. But Quinn often sees it emerging in individual groups and functions and expects it to accelerate as organizations begin to tackle Scope 3 in earnest, because this ultimately is impacting everyone in the organization and in the supply chain. 

Translation to Action in Practice: The Hotspot Example

Once the translation is in place—once sustainability data is speaking the language of the room—the decisions that follow are often faster and more commercially grounded than the sustainability team expected.  

 

Quinn describes working with one company that shipped significant volumes of heavy equipment by air freight. The team knew it was a major source of emissions. The translation work revealed that it was also extremely expensive, roughly ten times the cost of sea shipping for the same volume. The sustainability problem and the cost problem were the same problem.   

 

“This company set up a few internal incentives to get the product managers willing to spend that extra time to ship it by sea,” Quinn explains. “By doing so, they’re saving about ten times on the shipping costs, and the emissions associated with sea shipping versus air shipping are also a ten times improvement a lot of the time. So that’s a great win for the internal logistics team, and it’s a great win for the sustainability team.”

 

This example illustrates a pattern Quinn sees repeatedly: when emissions data is embedded in operational workflows and expressed in operational terms, hotspots become visible that were previously invisible. Not because the data wasn’t there, but because no one had built the connection between the sustainability system and the system where the commercial decision was being made. This is where the need for Deloitte’s sustainability translation comes in. 

The Structural Barriers that Remain  

The translation problem is not just methodological; it is also structural and personal. 

 

Inside organizations, the incentive structures may not reward the people doing the translation work. Sustainability practitioners are taking on career risk when they push for decisions that have not yet been recognized internally.  

 

“Within organizations, a lot of times what’s missing is the internal incentivization, the remuneration.” Quinn points out. “This is key because there’s a career risk. People are putting themselves on the line, and we can’t forget that.”

 

A second barrier is framework-level. Companies have held back on certain sustainability topics because they haven’t been able to make credible claims on the actions they’ve taken. Emerging frameworks are beginning to address this, creating clearer standards for what counts, what can be claimed, and how to report it in ways that hold up externally.  

 

Quinn’s recommendation for getting through these barriers is focus. Not narrowing sustainability ambition, but disciplined prioritization of where translation work will have the most immediate impact. That means converting existing data into risk, cost, and value terms, and then carrying those translated insights in three directions: up to boards and executives, out to customers, and back through the supply chain to suppliers. The full impact of sustainability, Quinn argues, only materializes when all three conversations are happening at once. 

The Bigger Shift: The Data Behind the Translation

The work to better position sustainability internally that Quinn describes is only credible if the data being translated is accurate. When a CFO sees carbon emissions expressed as a line in a CapEx plan, the credibility of that number, and the subsequent decision, depends entirely on the quality of the emission factors used to calculate it. 

 

Deloitte’s sustainability consultants are equipped with ecoinvent data, and ecoinvent data powers an internal Deloitte platform; supporting services across sustainability strategy and transformation, decarbonization, regulatory compliance, and supply chain management. That data foundation gives Deloitte’s translation its credibility, ensuring that when sustainability data enters a boardroom conversation, the numbers behind it hold up.   

See Quinn Wenning and other sustainability leaders discuss their work in our panel recording: Beyond the Pledge: Embedding Sustainability into Business DNA. 

 

To explore working with ecoinvent, contact our team. 

Watch the panel recording

As a non-profit association, all of our license revenue is reinvested into the quality and completeness of our data, and into the innovation needed to keep meeting user needs. Our database curation process is already best in class, but we want to raise the bar further.

 

We know that to keep meeting user needs, we need to truly understand what those needs are, not run on assumptions. That’s why we’re pleased to share that we recently completed beta testing key components of the next generation of the ecoinvent database.

 

Throughout 2025 and 2026, we invited a diverse group of participants selected to represent the breadth of the ecoinvent user community. They spanned academic researchers, software developers, and enterprise sustainability teams. Together, they tested our methodology, challenged our assumptions, and told us what they needed.

 

Participants overwhelmingly confirmed our strategic direction, which includes:

 

1. Greater geographic precision: We will expand trade data integration and advance geographic modeling, enabling more accurate country-level supply chains. This means capturing not only where activities occur, but how local environmental conditions shape their real-world impacts.

 

2. Significantly increased scale: Our vision is to use advanced technology and AI to accelerate dataset creation across more sectors and regions without compromising the scientific rigor and transparency our users depend on.

 

3. Greater flexibility and adaptability: A restructured database architecture, standardized formats, and enhanced API access will make ecoinvent data easier to integrate, adapt, and apply—whether for compliance reporting, procurement decisions, or custom analytical workflows.

 

Our hypotheses were met with enthusiasm across the board.

 

Beta testers were particularly enthusiastic about increased regionalization and supply chain transparency. Users across all segments said the same thing: global averages are no longer sufficient. Their sustainability decisions, product carbon footprints, CSRD filings, and procurement optimization all depend on knowing where things are actually made, how they actually move, and what local conditions apply.

 

Being able to make things more closely represent the specific value chains that you want — that seems like a step forward in this version.

— James Joyce, Watershed

 

A second signal was about the process itself. Participants noted that being involved, having their feedback taken seriously, and seeing the changes they’d suggested appear in the next iteration was itself meaningful.

 

I really like that you opened this discussion to explore and collect suggestions about the new methods. I feel part of this because I’m going to use this data.

— Massimo Collotta, Henkel

ecoinvent’s Vision

We are building the fourth generation of the ecoinvent database to support evolving user needs and rapidly expanding use cases, and to lay the foundation for how sustainability data will be created and used for the next decade.

 

Features available on the release of 4.0 will include deeper regional granularity, more complete supply chains, and greater coverage across industries and geographies. It will include 100,000 datasets—four times what exists today. This increase is largely driven by granular trade modeling that was not possible in v3. This means we will know, for example, not just that a product was manufactured somewhere in Europe, but the specific country where it was produced, as well as the trade relationships that connect it to global supply chains.

 

Looking further ahead, v4 lays the foundation for a fundamental shift in how sustainability data is created and used. Data and calculations will be structured as models rather than static snapshots. This means it will appear less like an annual printed report and more like a live spreadsheet, where the underlying data can be updated, recalculated, and tailored to reflect real-world conditions as they change.

 

Version four moves the industry closer to dynamic, decision-ready insights that reflect each organization’s specific situation.

Why This Matters

Your sustainability reporting is under more scrutiny than ever. That’s where the quality of your underlying data becomes critical. As free alternatives multiply and AI-generated emissions factors enter workflows, the question is no longer whether you have data—it is whether the people reviewing your reports will trust it.

 

The beta testing process was an expression of something we believe: that the best way to build data infrastructure people can trust is to build it with the people who depend on it.

 

The strategy is clear, and I think it’s the right strategy for the future given the new expectations of the sector.

— Didier Beloin-Saint-Pierre, Empa

For product updates, including news about the progression of the next generation of ecoinvent data:

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The API allows users to pull from over 26,000 ecoinvent datasets and more than 600 impact indicators on demand, embed them wherever they work, and stay continuously connected to the most current version of the database. 

Why We Built It 

“Until now, working with ecoinvent has typically meant downloading database files, managing versions locally, and integrating them into your tools through custom processes,” says ecoinvent Chief Product and Technology Officer Nick Van Berckelaer. “That works well for many of our users, and it will continue to do so. But there is a whole value chain built upon our data—enterprises, software players, developers—and they have a lot of friction in common, particularly around integrating every new release year after year. The API is the first small step towards removing that friction: a data platform that makes it easier to access ecoinvent, easier to use it, and easier to build on top of it.”  

 

The ecoinvent API is designed to enable life cycle data to behave like any other data layer in a stack: available on demand, easy to integrate, and always up to date.

 

Over 50 users took part in API beta testing designed to validate real-world demand and gather feedback ahead of commercial release. This is what they had to say about the API:

Quotes from beta testers

““The ecoinvent API has made it much easier for us to work with ecoinvent data in a reliable and structured way. One of the biggest advantages is not having to manually manage different database versions, as the API supports access across versions. Our experience so far has been very positive. The API has been stable, we have not encountered any bugs or downtime, and it has helped reduce complexity in our LCA data workflows.””

Jaspinder Kaur, AI/ML Engineer at Nirantara Solutions

““The API enabled us to integrate ecoinvent factors directly into our LCA workflows instead of relying on manual ecoQuery searches or large spreadsheets. This significantly reduced manual effort and potential errors, while improving scalability, consistency, and the overall experience for our customers.””

Dr. Theresa Harlaß, Senior Business Analyst at Verso GmbH

““ecoinvent's new API has driven a major step-change for our tool, putting the full power of their comprehensive database directly into our users' hands. The integration has been seamless, and the ecoinvent team's exceptional responsiveness made the entire process an absolute pleasure.””

Rob Field-Marsham, Manager Net Zero Planning & Execution at Evercomm

More news on the ecoinvent API

The API doesn’t replace ecoQuery or the ecoinvent XML database files; it complements them. ecoQuery remains the best place for interactive exploration and dataset review, and XML downloads continue to serve users who prefer working offline or with bulk files.

 

“ecoinvent has always been the foundational layer of the sustainability data ecosystem, the part that connects scientific rigor with real-world decision-making, whether you’re building software, running corporate reporting, or designing products,” says Van Berckelaer.

 

“The API makes that layer easier to connect to. Rather than spending precious engineering time figuring out how to integrate the database, our users can focus on their specialty: solving carbon accounting, scaling their LCA products, or making better procurement decisions. That’s the near-term value. But this is also the first step of something bigger. We are committed to keep innovating to even better enable our partners’ value propositions.” 

The ecoinvent API is available now

Last year, our organization grew by 31% to more than one hundred dedicated professionals. We delivered news about the next generation of the ecoinvent database, interviewed partners from around the world, and worked hard behind the scenes to promote and support the availability of high-quality environmental data worldwide.

 

In November 2025, we released version 3.12 of the ecoinvent database, the world’s most transparent life cycle inventory database. This update brings a wealth of new and updated data across various sectors, ensuring our stakeholders have access to the most comprehensive and reliable data. Discover more details in the brochure below.

 

Looking forward, we will continue to invest in our database and innovative solutions to support our stakeholders in making data-driven, impactful decisions.

 

Thank you for your ongoing support and trust.

Read and download our 2025 year in review.

Interested in ecoinvent news throughout the year? Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter today.

Natcap plans to integrate ecoinvent’s industry–leading Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database into its methodology, enhancing the scalability, credibility, and coverage of its nature-related impact assessments.  

 

This will enhance Natcap’s ability to model impact intensity and magnitude scores across commodities and supply chains with greater precision. 

Quotes on the Partnership

“Partnering with Natcap is a natural fit for ecoinvent’s mission. Our LCI database is a critical layer in unlocking business decisions, and through the inclusion of our data in Natcap’s nature intelligence platform, we are enabling companies to move to actionable, board-ready insights. This is exactly the kind of application we want to see our data powering, and it couldn’t come at a better moment. The IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment, published just this month, confirmed that access to reliable data remains one of the biggest barriers stopping businesses from acting to protect nature. This partnership is a direct response to that challenge.”
– Ondrej Szabo, Chief Revenue Officer (ecoinvent) 

“Credibility and scalability are essential as nature moves to the center of corporate decision-making. Our partnership with ecoinvent ensures that the insights we provide our clients on their nature impacts are grounded in the highest-quality life cycle data available globally. This strengthens the scientific defensibility and auditability of our analysis, giving executives, investors, and regulators confidence in the decisions they make.” 
– Dr Beccy Wilebore, Chief Science Officer (Natcap)

Read Natcap’s press release to learn more about…

– Solving the Coverage and Scalability Challenge 

– The benefits of embedding ecoinvent’s LCI data into a data platform 

– How Natcap’s platform supports organizations towards sustainability 

Natcap Partners with ecoinvent 

Read more

ecoQuery now features semantic search, a smarter way to find life cycle inventory data that understands what you mean, not just what you type. Users no longer need to recall precise search terms to retrieve the information they need quickly.

 

How Semantic Search Works

Traditional keyword search matches strings. Previously, if your query did not match the exact terminology in our database, your search would return zero or inaccurate results. Our new semantic search works differently: it interprets the meaning behind your query and finds conceptually relevant results, even when the wording doesn’t match exactly, for example, due to acronyms, abbreviations, and typos.

 

One example from our database includes searches for “steel”, where semantic search will now recognize concepts like steel production, iron and steel industry, and specific manufacturing processes. With semantic search, your searches will return the closest matching data, enabling you to work faster.

Why Easier Search Matters for LCA Practitioners

Time spent hunting for the right dataset can slow down or impact the precision of your assessments. Semantic search lowers the barrier to finding exactly what you need, whether you are a seasoned ecoinvent user or exploring the database for the first time. It’s especially useful when working across sectors or in unfamiliar territory.

Try Our New ecoQuery Search Feature

Semantic search is now live. Log into ecoQuery and search for previously hard-to-locate datasets—like “aluminum recycling” or “biofuel production”—and see how semantic search surfaces relevant datasets instantly.

 

As always, we would love to hear your feedback. Let us know how semantic search works for you.

To ecoQuery
Explore the key highlights of v3.12:

We also hosted a webinar in November to provide a more detailed, technical introduction to version 3.12.

The recording is now available on our Knowledge Base.

Access the v3.12 release webinar
Graphic: Data release: ecoinvent version 3.12
Learn more

This release is the culmination of our work with our many partners from both industrial and scientific institutions. These collaborations enable us to provide high-quality, accurate data, and we are very grateful to our data providers for their efforts. You can find the full list of 3.12’s data providers here.

 

To learn more about how we collaborate with our data providers, read about our latest in-person meeting with local partners: Stronger Together: Our Partner Deep Dive.

 

Explore Version 3.12

Explore everything version 3.12 offers on our Knowledge Base, including detailed sector notes and supporting documentation, or contact us to learn how our latest updates can benefit your work.

Version 3.12 Knowledge Base

Graphic: 3.12

Contact us

Get in touch

Our team is available to answer your questions and help you use our database. Please select a topic from the drop-down menu to send us a message.

Contact us

This collaboration aims to bring more recent, complete, and transparent environmental data to users of ADEME’s Base Empreinte® (Footprint Database), as we provide access to our extensive database, which includes over 25,000 datasets for modeling various human activities and their environmental impacts.

 

Thanks to this partnership, ecoinvent data will be directly available within the national French database, enhancing its usability for applications such as GHG reporting, environmental labeling, and ecodesign initiatives within France.

 

Through this collaboration, ADEME members using Base Empreinte benefit from:

 

– Multi-criteria environmental data, including GHG indicators.

– Access to both impact assessment results and disaggregated data (under ecoinvent license terms for the latter).

– Reviewed and reliable data ensured by ecoinvent’s expert review process.

 

For French Base Empreinte users: For detailed information regarding the terms of use for ecoinvent data within Base Empreinte, please refer to the documentation available on the Base Empreinte platform through your ADEME account.

 

For discussing opportunities of working together with ecoinvent beyond the existing partnership, please contact sales@ecoinvent.org.

In 2024, we advanced our mission to support science-based environmental assessments through growth, participation, and evolution. We share our achievements with you in our latest publication.

 

Last year, our organization grew to over eighty dedicated professionals, each supporting the development of ecoinvent activities through their talents and skills. Many of these individuals attended events around the world, furthering our mission to promote and support the availability of high-quality environmental data worldwide.

 

In November 2024, we released version 3.11 of the ecoinvent database, the world’s most transparent life cycle inventory database. This update brings a wealth of new and updated data across various sectors, ensuring our stakeholders have access to the most comprehensive and reliable data. Additionally, we improved ecoQuery with an updated design and features to support our users’ needs.

 

Looking forward, we will continue to invest in our database and innovative solutions to support our stakeholders in making data-driven, impactful decisions.

 

Thank you for your ongoing support and trust.

Read and download our 2024 year in review

 

Interested in ecoinvent news throughout the year? Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter today.

This week marks the release of the all-new, overhauled ecoQuery. Alongside the many improvements to search, navigation, data display, and more that we’re launching with this update, this release also moves ecoQuery to follow our design system.

 

User interfaces, or UIs, are the parts of a product or application that users interact with. In short – it’s the visible and interactive portion of an app. Good UI is essential to building successful products.

What Is a Design System?

A design system is a toolkit for creating consistent and cohesive designs across a product or brand. It includes reusable components, guidelines, and standards that help teams build interfaces faster and more effectively.

 

Think of it as a recipe book: It defines the ingredients (like colors, typography, and icons) and the instructions (rules and patterns) for putting them together. This ensures that everything looks and works well, no matter who designs or writes the code to implement it.

 

The anatomy of a piece of UI. A design system codifies styles, color, spacing, and more to ensure a consistent user experience.

Why Is This Important?

Environmental decisions depend on reliable and understandable data.

 

Our fundamental belief is that environmental data is complex. This is an inevitable consequence of trying to model all types of commercial and industrial activity in a cohesive, structured manner. Despite this, it’s both our challenge and goal to present the ecoinvent database in a transparent yet uncomplicated way. As our portfolio of apps grows, we need a standard set of components, guidelines, and rules to do that consistently. This is what motivated us to create the ecoinvent UI design system.

Getting the Fundamentals Right

We believe good design is based on a strong foundation of good practice and thoughtful, inclusive perspectives:

  • Accessibility: Everyone should be able to use and understand environmental data. Inclusive design ensures usability for diverse audiences, including those with both permanent and temporary disabilities.

 

  • Clarity and Transparency: Simplifying complexity makes data actionable. Clean visualizations and prioritized information help users focus on what matters most. Our design system prioritizes clarity of information over aesthetics, with a robust hierarchy and opinionated layout (that’s not to say we don’t think our apps are beautiful!).

 

  • Space: Everything benefits from room to breathe. Complex concepts and data can be broken down into more understandable pieces; cognitive load can be reduced, and locating specific values or items in a list can be easier – we believe that spacing is one of the most powerful tools we have to make our data more valuable to a broader audience.

Looking Ahead

We first (quietly) introduced our design system in early 2024 with the release of our updated Accounts platform. Since then, we have rolled this out to other sites, including our Data Glossary, a comprehensive collection of the Master Data items that underpin the ecoinvent database.

 

With this overhaul of ecoQuery, our design system now powers all our user interfaces at ecoinvent and sets the standard for new apps in the future. We’ll continue to iterate on this system going forward, looking for better and better ways to provide a foundation for understanding environmental data through design.

About the Author

Tom Norton is the Front-End Engineering & Design Lead at ecoinvent. He oversees and supports the design and implementation of ecoinvent’s user experiences. He brings almost a decade of experience in Engineering and Design functions in companies large and small to his role, along with a passion for sustainability and a drive to make complex things easy to understand.

blog graphic representing Tom Norton