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.