The email usually lands on a Friday. A customer you cannot afford to lose is asking for your Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions data. Sometimes it is one line inside a bigger supplier ESG questionnaire, sometimes it is a full data request with a template attached, and there is nobody in your company whose job this is. This page covers what to do in the first week, what it costs in Singapore, and what you can safely ignore for now.
One scoping note before anything else. If what landed in your inbox is a broad ESG questionnaire, with governance, policy and social questions as well as environmental ones, start with our guide to answering a supplier ESG questionnaire, then come back here for the emissions section. This page covers the part of the request that costs real money: the carbon numbers.
Most companies lose their first fortnight calculating the wrong thing. These requests arrive in three shapes and each one needs a different answer.
The email points you to EcoVadis, CDP or a similar system, usually with a registration link. You are not being asked for a number. You are being asked to complete an assessment on someone else's system, in their format and on their calendar.
EcoVadis, as an example, runs in four stages: you register, you complete a questionnaire customised to your industry, size and location, their analysts review it against your supporting documents, and you receive a scorecard valid for twelve months. EcoVadis states that results typically take six to eight weeks to publish after submission. That window sits after your work, not instead of it. If your customer's deadline is eight weeks away, you do not have eight weeks.
A supplier ESG questionnaire arrives as a document or spreadsheet with your customer's logo on it. This is the most common request a smaller supplier gets and the one most often misread. That template describes their reporting boundary, not yours. Fill it in before you have decided your own boundary and you will produce numbers you cannot defend, cannot repeat next year, and cannot reuse for the next customer who asks.
"Can you share your carbon footprint and your net zero plans." No format, no scope, no deadline. Do not guess and do not start work. One email back will save you thousands.
"Thanks for this. So we can scope it properly, could you confirm: which emission scopes you need, which reporting year, what format you want it in, whether third-party verification is required, and your deadline?"
Almost no supplier sends this. The answers usually make the job smaller than you feared, and occasionally they reveal that your customer has not decided either.
These terms come from the GHG Protocol, the greenhouse gas accounting standard that nearly every corporate request is built on. In plain terms:
Scope 1 is what you burn. Fuel in vehicles you own or lease, gas in a kitchen, refrigerant that leaks out of your air conditioning.
Scope 2 is the electricity you buy. For most Singapore service businesses in a leased office this is the largest number and the easiest to produce, because it is sitting on your utility bills.
Scope 3 is everything else in your value chain. Goods and services you purchase, business travel, staff commuting, waste, freight, and more. There are fifteen defined categories. This is where the work is and where the cost is.
If your business is an office, a handful of vehicles and a supply chain, expect Scope 1 and 2 to be about a week of chasing records, and Scope 3 to be the actual project.
This is the part nobody explains to suppliers, and knowing it is worth real money.
Large-buyer supplier programmes almost always separate what you must do now from what they would like from you eventually. The must tier is usually: comply with the law where you operate, disclose your emissions using a recognised standard, and demonstrate that you understand your own numbers. The eventually tier is: independent third-party verification, emissions allocated specifically to that customer, and formally validated reduction targets.
Suppliers routinely read the entire list as mandatory, panic, and then either overspend or freeze completely. Go back to the request and separate the two tiers on paper. A first submission almost never requires verification or a validated target. What it requires is a defensible number with your assumptions written down next to it.
Nobody publishes this, which is why you are still reading. Here are realistic Singapore ranges for a first baseline.
These are typical ranges, not quotes. Every engagement gets a fixed price after scoping, and the fixed price is the price. No hourly billing, no overruns.
What moves the price: how many sites you run, whether you can produce twelve months of utility bills and fuel records, how many of the fifteen Scope 3 categories your customer actually wants, and whether any of your data sits in a country with its own data handling rules.
What does not move it: how urgent your deadline is. Compressing a baseline does not make it cheaper. It makes it weaker, and you will pay for that the following year.
For the full picture behind these ranges, see our guide to ESG consulting costs for SMEs in Singapore.
Rushing to a number before agreeing the boundary. You will redo the work. Decide first which entities, which sites and which reporting year you are counting.
Not writing down your assumptions. In twelve months you will not remember which emission factor you used or why, and neither will whoever replaces the person who did it.
Saying "verified" when nothing was verified. Verification is a specific service carried out by an independent party. Claiming it when you do not have it is the one mistake on this list that can turn a commercial problem into a legal one.
Committing to a reduction target in the questionnaire to look cooperative. That target follows you into every future submission, and into your customer's own reporting.
Letting your customer's template define your boundary. Their form serves their reporting. You need numbers you can reuse for the next customer who asks, and there will be a next customer.
You do not need a sustainability report. You do not need a validated science-based target. You do not need independent assurance. You do not need to buy software.
You also have no direct legal obligation to report climate information as a Singapore SME today. Singapore's mandatory reporting timeline starts with listed companies and reaches large non-listed companies later, and we have set out who has to report and when separately. What you are dealing with here is commercial pressure from a customer. That is more urgent than regulation, not less, but it is a different problem with a different answer.
If a bank has sent you a questionnaire as well, treat it as a separate track. It runs on different logic and asks for different things, which we cover in our guide to bank ESG questionnaires in Singapore.
Three situations, three different answers.
We read the actual request, tell you what you can already answer, what is missing, what it will take to close the gap, and what you can push back on. Board-ready, in writing, fixed fee.
See what is includedSend us the request your customer sent you. We scope it, quote a fixed fee, and deliver a baseline you can defend and reuse. No hourly billing, ever.
Send us the requestThat is a reasonable choice for a first Scope 1 and 2 questionnaire if you have the time. Do not start from a blank page. The ESG Template Pack is S$200, instant download, and includes a 29-question supplier ESG questionnaire of the kind large buyers send, so you can see what is coming before it arrives, plus a materiality scoring spreadsheet and a board memo template for reporting what you found upwards. If you get halfway and decide you want it done properly, none of that work is wasted.