With the Action Simulator tool, you can take your first step towards detailed decarbonization scenario creation and analysis. The Action Simulator utilizes your Log data to enable you to identify the most impactful areas to take action, and allows you to compare different “What-if” scenarios, helping you optimize your sustainability efforts and business performance. The resulting data-driven insights will support you and your organization in building effective decarbonization plans.

The Action Simulator is accessible through the Act Analytics section, specifically the Hotspot Analysis table. To start, you can select any business activity and proceed to experiment with different changes to this selection, seeing a simulation of the resulting impact on your emissions.

You can then run “What-if” scenarios by exploring how your emissions would change if you, for example, switch from one mode of transport to another (e.g. road to rail or diesel to electric vehicles) or transition from one fuel type to another (e.g. diesel to bio-diesel). You can also model the effect of simply reducing current activities or consumption and compare the forecasted emissions with your business-as-usual scenario.

The resulting impact simulation page provides detailed insights into the outcomes. If a scenario proves to be a meaningful decarbonization measure, you can turn the scenario into an actual climate action, saved to your Act account, for your company to further evaluate and implement.

To begin, navigate to “Analytics” in your Act module and locate the table named “Understand your hotspots and take action”. You will then need to expand the table using the “+” signs and choose a business activity for which you wish to simulate a change. Once you expand the table fully, a “Simulate action” button will appear on the far right column, which you can click to launch the Action Simulator.

On this first step you will see a summary of all the Log entries that make up the selected business activity. The data is grouped by input types and each group is shown as a card on the left side of the screen. This means, all Log entries within the selected business activity that use the same calculation method and input unit are aggregated into one card and can be edited together: e.g., all emissions from the business activity “HGV - Articulated (>33t) - 100% laden” logged in “distance_traveled” and the unit km.

The data is also narrowed down to the date range of the reference period selected in your Act account. This means that if your reference period covers the year 2023, any emissions from log entries that span across 2023 and 2024 are cut off and excluded if individual months do not fall into the reference period.

Start editing the data of your chosen business activity depending on what kind of scenario you want to create. Once you are happy with your changes, proceed to the next step.

On the second page, you can add a start year for this action, i.e., when you will begin to implement it. You will also add the time to impact, i.e., how long from the start year until the first decarbonization effects are expected to be felt, e.g., construction time for PV panels on company premises. Finally, you can add the action lifetime. Certain actions might have a specific (material) lifetime - e.g,. when replacing a machine with a more emissions-efficient one or building PV panels on company premises. Or when the company just wants to trial the action for a limited number of years. You can also select the The lifetime is indefinite box if you do not intend to phase out the climate action after a fixed number of years again.

This is the time for you to review your “what-if” scenario and analyze its impact. Take your time to review all the data and make a decision on whether you would like to save this simulation to your climate action portfolio or perhaps go back to experiment with other changes.

At the top of the screen, you will see a summary of what would have happened if the simulated switch had been implemented in the reference period. Next to it you will see the impact on emissions in the selected target end year, breaking it down to three levels: business activity, subcategory, and scope.

You will also see the year-on-year development of this simulated action in a graph and a table:

Lastly, for the simulated action to be turned into a real climate action, you will enter some financial data, namely the initial investment cost and annual costs of this climate action. On the right side of the screen, you will see an immediate calculation preview of the resulting effects:

Further details like name and connected business unit can also be assigned at this point. Once you are happy with all your entries, you can finally turn the simulation into a climate action. This action will appear in your Act Strategy Builder and can be viewed in all the available graphs and features. Create multiple simulated actions to be able to compare their impact on each other and begin building your decarbonization strategy.