Who are we and why are we doing this?
Who we are
Who we are
Murmurate brings together three people who each arrived at the same conclusion from different directions: Pat Stirling, who has spent years building free carbon tools for the SME Climate Hub (now used by over 12,000 businesses); Tom Carpenter, whose “Carbon Accounting 2.0” research with the University of Sheffield led to Mycelium, an open database of corporate emissions; and Stefan Gazzana, creator of the Roundarc emissions dataset, who’d always wanted to open it up.
Murmurate is a not for profit, founded by three carbon accounting professionals, focused on solving some of the industry’s most pressing issues.
Why we exist
Why we exist
Carbon accounting is broken in a way that money can’t fix. So we built something that isn’t about the money.
What we’ve built
What we’ve built
- A free, enterprise-level carbon calculator for companies with 500 or fewer employees
- An open-access emissions database covering thousands of companies
- OpenCCF, an open data standard so carbon footprints can move cleanly between systems, whoever built them. It’s in the public domain, endorsed by the SME Climate Hub and the Carbon Accounting Alliance, and already being picked up by developers worldwide
When a company works out its footprint with our tools, it can add the result straight to the shared database, ready for the next person who needs it.
Calculate once, report in one place, and the whole network benefits.
The problem with carbon data
The problem with carbon data
For most businesses, up to 90% of their emissions sit in their supply chain. But try to find out what those emissions are, and you’ll hit a wall.
It’s like walking into a shop where nothing has a price. At the till you ask what you’ve spent, and the shopkeeper shrugs: “Not sure mate, you’ll have to estimate it, or ring the people who made it and ask them.” And if you do ring them, chances are they won’t know either. Most smaller companies can’t afford carbon consultants or the time to do it themselves.
Why the market hasn’t solved it
Why the market hasn’t solved it
There’s no shortage of carbon accounting software. The trouble is how it’s built. Venture-backed platforms need a return, and carbon data is a revenue stream worth protecting, so it gets locked away.
Nobody set out to be the villain here. Most people building those tools genuinely want emissions to come down. But the result is madness: every platform knocks on the same suppliers’ doors asking for the same numbers. Suppliers fill in the same spreadsheet five times over, and each platform keeps the answer to itself. The data exists. It’s just stuck in a dozen places that won’t talk to each other.
Why we’re a not-for-profit
Why we’re a not-for-profit
If carbon accounting is going to work, there needs to be one place where everyone can get the data they need, and people have to trust it.
That’s why Murmurate is a not-for-profit. Not because it sounds nice, but because it’s the only way we could see to earn that trust and get the incentives pointing the right way. We have no investors waiting on a return and no reason to lock anything away.
Why we are called Murmurate
Why “Murmurate”?
Why “Murmurate”?
If you’ve ever watched a murmuration of starlings, thousands of birds moving as one with nobody in charge, you’ll know it’s pretty exceptional.
None of them could pull it off alone, and none of them owns it.