Sustainability management is the work a company does to measure the greenhouse gases it releases, report them, and find where its plants waste energy, water and material. Burning coal, oil and gas releases carbon dioxide, which warms the planet. Methane is another such gas. Together they are called greenhouse gases, and what a company releases is called its emissions. Emissions are counted in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, which means a tonne of methane is converted into the amount of carbon dioxide that would warm the planet as much.
Four groups ask companies to do this work. In India, the stock-market regulator (SEBI) requires the largest listed companies to publish a sustainability report every year, called the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report. Investors want to know the risks a company carries. Large customers ask their suppliers for emissions figures, because those figures count towards the customer's own. And exporters need the figures for foreign buyers: the European Union has charged for the carbon in imported steel, cement, aluminium and fertiliser since January 2026. So an Indian exporter of these goods has to prove how much carbon went into each tonne.
Without proper measurement, a company can only guess, and an auditor cannot check a guess. That is why this work has become a software job, with a separate tool for each step.
Say a sustainability manager at a cement plant in Chandrapur has to prepare this year's report. First, she needs the numbers. Methane and greenhouse gas monitoring instruments measure gases in the air directly. The plant's EHS software (environment, health and safety) already records its emissions, waste and accidents. Then carbon accounting software collects the fuel, power and supplier data and produces the report, split into the three groups of Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.
A report only measures. Cutting the figure is a second job. Industrial energy management shows where the plant wastes power and water. EPR compliance helps a brand collect and recycle as much plastic packaging as the rules require. And a company can buy soil carbon credits, certificates from farms that keep carbon in their soil, to make up for emissions it cannot yet remove.
Much of the data comes from machines on the factory floor, through industrial IoT. Packaging and waste are followed with track and trace. The buyers are mostly a company's sustainability and finance teams. The market is young and crowded, and many of its start-ups are Indian.