30 questions, answered plainly — what the frameworks are, how emissions are actually calculated, what Singapore and Malaysia require, and exactly how EsgaSIS arrives at a figure. Written for someone who has just been asked for a number and has never done this before.
What ESG actually means, why your customer is asking, and what a small business is realistically expected to do.
ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance — three groups of things about a company that are not in its financial accounts but still affect whether it is a good business to buy from, lend to or work for. In practice, "doing ESG" for a small business usually means measuring a few of those things and being able to show the figures.
Because your emissions count as part of theirs. In greenhouse gas accounting, everything a company buys carries the emissions of the supplier who produced it, and the buyer has to report them. If your customer has been asked for that figure by a regulator, an investor or their own biggest customer, the only way they can get it is to ask you.
Legally, in most cases, nothing. Neither Singapore’s nor Malaysia’s mandatory climate reporting rules reach a typical small or medium enterprise — both start with listed companies and work down to very large private ones. What you are likely to face instead is a customer, a bank or a tender asking for figures.
A carbon footprint is one number — the greenhouse gases associated with your business over a period. A sustainability report is a document that covers environmental, social and governance topics together, explains which of them matter to your business and why, and usually contains a carbon footprint as one part.
GRI, IFRS S1 and S2, the UN Global Compact, the GHG Protocol — who publishes them, what each one is for, and which applies to you.
GRI — the Global Reporting Initiative — publishes the most widely used sustainability reporting standards in the world. GRI tells you what to disclose and how to word the claim, covering environmental, social and governance topics. It does not tell you how to calculate emissions; for that it defers to the GHG Protocol.
"In accordance with" is the full claim and requires you to satisfy all nine requirements in GRI 1. "With reference to" is the lighter claim: you use some GRI disclosures, say which, and make no assertion of completeness. Both are legitimate published positions — claiming the first without meeting all nine is not.
A material topic is a subject where your business has a significant impact on people or the environment — significant enough that leaving it out would mislead a reader. Under GRI 3 you determine your own material topics through a documented process, and that process, not just the conclusion, is part of what you report.
The ISSB — International Sustainability Standards Board — is the sustainability counterpart to the body that sets international accounting standards. It publishes IFRS S1 (general sustainability disclosures) and IFRS S2 (climate). Unlike GRI, these are being written into law: Singapore’s and Malaysia’s mandatory climate reporting rules are both built on them.
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is the measurement standard underneath almost everything else. It defines Scope 1, 2 and 3, sets the rules for what counts as yours, and specifies how to turn an activity into a tonne of CO2e. GRI 305 and IFRS S2 both tell you to disclose emissions; the GHG Protocol is how you calculate them.
The UN Global Compact is a voluntary commitment, not a reporting standard. You sign up to ten principles covering human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption, and in return you take on one obligation: an annual Communication on Progress. It is a statement of intent that you then have to keep evidencing.
For most small businesses in Singapore and Malaysia: none of them are mandatory, and the right first move is a GHG Protocol carbon figure, because every framework wants that same number. Choose a disclosure framework only once you know who is asking and what they will do with it.
Scopes, emission factors, and why the same activity produces a different number in a different country.
Scope 1 is what you burn yourself — fuel in your vehicles, gas in your kitchen. Scope 2 is the electricity you buy, burned at someone else’s power station. Scope 3 is everything else that happens because of your business, upstream and downstream: what you buy, how staff commute, how customers use what you sell.
An emission factor is the conversion rate between something you did and the greenhouse gas it caused — for example 0.412 kg of CO2e per kilowatt-hour of Singapore grid electricity in 2023. You multiply your activity by the factor to get emissions. Almost all the judgement in carbon accounting is in choosing the right factor.
CO2e — carbon dioxide equivalent — is a common unit that lets different greenhouse gases be added together. Each gas is converted using its Global Warming Potential, or GWP: the number of times more warming it causes than the same mass of CO2 over 100 years.
Location-based Scope 2 uses the average emissions of the grid you are physically plugged into. Market-based uses what you contractually bought — a green tariff, a power purchase agreement, or renewable energy certificates. A company with any operations in a market where such contracts are sold must report both figures and label each one. The GHG Protocol calls this dual reporting.
Because the data belongs to other people. Scope 1 and 2 come from your own meters and bills; Scope 3 spans fifteen categories covering everything you buy and everything that happens to what you sell, and almost none of it is measured by you. Most Scope 3 figures are estimates, and the honest ones say so.
A boundary is the statement of what a figure covers: which parts of the business, which activities, which period, and on what basis. Without it a carbon number cannot be compared to anything or checked by anyone — two businesses can report wildly different figures for identical operations purely by drawing the boundary differently.
The rules as they actually stand in Singapore and Malaysia, and why the two are not interchangeable.
All SGX-listed issuers must report Scope 1 and 2 emissions for financial years starting on or after 1 January 2025. Straits Times Index constituents add Scope 3 from FY2026. Large non-listed companies were originally due from FY2027, but ACRA and SGX RegCo extended that to FY2030 in August 2025. Everyone else has no mandatory requirement.
The NSRF, issued by the Securities Commission Malaysia in September 2024, adopts IFRS S1 and S2 as Malaysia’s baseline sustainability disclosure standards. It phases in over three groups: the largest Main Market companies from FY2025, the rest of the Main Market from FY2026, and ACE Market plus large non-listed companies from FY2027.
Because the underlying infrastructure is different, not just the number. Singapore runs a gas-dominated grid and incinerates its waste; Peninsular Malaysia is coal-heavy and landfills. Applying one country’s factor to the other is not a rounding error — for waste it is the wrong model entirely, since landfill produces methane and incineration does not.
Almost certainly not. Singapore’s carbon tax applies only to facilities emitting at least 25,000 tonnes of CO2e a year directly — refineries, power stations, large petrochemical plants. The rate is S$45 per tonne for 2026 and 2027, with a stated intention to reach S$50–80 by 2030. There are no exemptions below the threshold because there is no tax below it.
Yes. Enterprise Singapore’s SME Sustainability Reporting Programme supports up to 70% of the reporting package fee for applications made between 1 November 2024 and 31 October 2027. Three conditions apply: the business is registered and operating in Singapore, at least 30% of its equity is held by Singaporeans or permanent residents, and it has group annual turnover of S$100 million or less OR 200 employees or fewer — that last one is either test, not both.
Where every figure comes from, what the software refuses to do, and what it does not do yet.
From published national and regional sources, recorded individually with a publisher, a citation, a vintage year and a tier. Singapore factors come from EMA, NEA and PUB; Malaysian grid factors from the Energy Commission and Sarawak Energy; fuels, refrigerants and flights from global references. Every factor names its source in the report.
Activity quantity × resolved emission factor = kg CO2e, and then the factor used is snapshotted onto the entry. The snapshot is the part that matters: a published figure stays reproducible even after the registry is updated, because the entry records the value, tier and resolution that produced it rather than pointing at whatever the registry says today.
One claim, always: the report is prepared with reference to the GRI Standards. There is no setting that changes it and no second level to reach. Accordance is not offered, because this service asks for eleven of the thirty GRI 2 general disclosures and collects no omissions, so an accordance claim would be one GRI does not recognise.
It is a real calculation and a deliberately narrow one. It uses the same factor registry and the same engine as the full inventory, so the arithmetic is identical — but it asks about every Scope 1 and Scope 2 source the registry holds and nothing beyond them, so its boundary is narrow and it says so on the face of the PDF. It is a screening estimate, not an inventory.
We cannot answer that, and you should be wary of any software that says it can — acceptance is the decision of whoever asked you, against criteria they set. What we can tell you is exactly what the report contains and what it leaves out, so you can put that in front of them before you do the work. For a mandatory filing the answer is clearer: those carry assurance requirements this product does not meet.
It does not assure your figures, does not report market-based Scope 2, does not compare against a base year, does not notify GRI on your behalf, and does not apply GRI Sector Standards. It also cannot check whether the numbers you entered are true. Each of these is a real limitation with a real consequence, listed here rather than left to be found.
Because nobody in a small business knows what "Scope 3 Category 5" means, but the kitchen supervisor does know the gas bill. Collection is split into eight clusters named after who holds the data — power, transport, cooling, cooking, waste, people, digital, procurement — and each can be sent to that person by a link.
Most carbon platforms are built for a company with a sustainability team, and priced for one. EsgaSIS is built for a business where the person doing this also does three other jobs, and it is opinionated about refusing to produce numbers it cannot stand behind.
Every emission factor, the calculation and snapshot rules, what the GRI claim on your report commits you to, and a plain list of what EsgaSIS does not do — assurance, market-based Scope 2 and base-year comparison among them.
Read the methodology →