How to Answer a Customer's Cloud Emissions Questionnaire

It usually arrives as a spreadsheet attached to an email from a customer you cannot afford to annoy: a supplier emissions questionnaire asking for your cloud carbon numbers. There is no sustainability team, no budget line, and the account manager wants an answer before the renewal. This is now a routine part of selling to large enterprises, and it catches mid-sized companies flat-footed.

Why you are getting this even though you are not regulated

California SB 253 requires companies with over $1B in revenue to report their greenhouse gas emissions, including Scope 3 (their value chain) starting with 2027 data. You may be nowhere near that threshold — but your large customers are, and your cloud usage is part of their Scope 3 Category 1 (purchased goods and services). To close their own books, their compliance team has to collect emissions data from suppliers like you. The pressure is contractual and commercial, not a law aimed at you, and it flows downhill regardless of your size.

There is no federal US mandate forcing you to report, and there is unlikely to be one soon. That does not make the questionnaire optional — it is a condition of keeping the account.

What the questionnaire is actually asking for

• Your cloud emissions for a period (usually the last 12 months or a calendar year), in kg or metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
• The methodology behind the number — what data and emission factors you used, not just the total.
• Whether it is location-based or market-based (the GHG Protocol asks for both where possible).
• The boundary and coverage — which accounts, which providers, which period.

Most teams see the word "emissions" and panic. But the ask is narrower than it looks: a defensible cloud number with the method attached. You are not being asked to audit your entire company.

What "good enough" actually looks like

Enterprises collecting supplier data are not expecting a certified, third-party-assured figure from a 40-person SaaS company. They are expecting a transparent, methodology-backed estimate they can roll up into their own inventory. Transparency beats false precision every time — a number with a clear method is far more useful to their auditor than a rounder number with no explanation.

The number

For cloud specifically, a credible answer covers operational emissions (the electricity to run your compute and storage, reported both location-based and market-based) plus embodied emissions (the amortised manufacturing footprint of the underlying hardware). Operational-only figures are common but incomplete; including embodied is what makes the number map cleanly onto your customer Scope 3 Category 1.

The methodology note

Attach a short statement of how you got there: the standard used (GHG Protocol Scope 3, Category 1), the emission factors and their source, the PUE and grid-intensity assumptions, the coverage period, and the known limitations. This one paragraph is what turns a spreadsheet cell into an auditable answer.

The trap: a one-off consultant number

The tempting shortcut is to pay a consultant for a single number. It goes stale the day it is delivered, it costs more than a year of tooling, and when the next customer asks — or the same customer asks again next year — you are back to square one. Cloud usage changes every month; the answer has to be repeatable, not a one-time artifact.

How CloudRift produces the answer

CloudRift connects to your AWS, Azure, and GCP accounts with read-only access and turns usage into a GHG Protocol Scope 3 Category 1 report: operational emissions dual-reported (location- and market-based) plus embodied, with a one-click export that carries the full methodology note — the exact artifact you forward to a customer compliance team. Pricing is on the website, and you can connect and export in an afternoon instead of scoping a consulting engagement.

The bonus: emissions and waste are the same underlying resources. The same scan that produces your carbon number flags the idle VMs, orphaned disks, and oversized instances quietly inflating your bill — so answering the questionnaire also hands you a list of cloud spend to cut.

The bottom line

The questionnaire is not going away, and it is not a one-time event — it is the new cost of selling to the enterprise. Produce a transparent, methodology-backed cloud emissions number you can regenerate every month, attach the method, and answer the same week instead of the same quarter.