Measuring and reducing scope 3 emissions should be a priority for organizations that want to genuinely operate sustainably, according to Gartner.

"There's not only one element, but there are five big pillars that need to be addressed. And we need to move all together and in with with collaboration efforts towards this goal," Gartner analyst Annette Zimmermann told SDxCentral. Those five pillars, according to the report, are energy, climate, sustainable business, circularity, and biodiversity, food, and agriculture.

Gartner suggests that technology providers integrate sustainability by design into their products. "Think about your product design from cradle to grave, and think about sustainability really as the fundamental founding elements for any of your product management activities," Zimmermann said.

That involves looking at scope 3 emissions, which are all upstream and downstream activities in the value chain required for sourcing a product's materials, its production in a factory, and includes considerations of that factory's suppliers and how sustainably they do or don't operate.

"Those are my scope 3 emissions, right, my indirect emissions that I'm causing with my product. So all of that needs to be thought about as well," she explained.

Measuring scope 3 emissions is a fundamental challenge Zimmermann says providers face.

Rather than shy away, the challenge should be embraced, she argued. "This is one of the biggest paradigm shifts that all the organizations need to go through."

Providers should consider circularity and the product's entire lifecycle from the beginning "versus ostensibly only being an afterthought most of the time," Zimmermann said. "That's going to be one of the biggest changes for technology providers."

When it comes to sustainability and the circular economy, a variety of different themes arise in the market overall. One thing Zimmermann commonly hears from CIOs is their concerns over how much sustainability will hurt their pocketbooks.

"So they see the benefit, of course, but they think it will be outweighed a lot by the cost. And I think that kind of mindset needs to be shifted as well," she explained.

Many organizations are just beginning to implement sustainability programs, however, and they're asking questions about how to get started.

"So it's quite a diverse set of market scenarios that we're currently looking at, and that makes it, of course, also quite complex and confusing for many organizations," she said. "They don't know where the rest of the world is, basically." Geographic differences in regulation and sophistication of renewable energy markets, for example, create a lot of these discrepancies.