Reporting carbon emissions for businesses and governments is no longer viewed as an optional activity. With ever-increasing products and services, tracking greenhouse gases is quickly becoming status quo for businesses, if not a business unto itself.

The number of companies disclosing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will triple in the next two years and the number of firms using commercial GHG software will quadruple, according to a new study released by Groom Energy and Pure Strategies.

The process of measuring a company’s sustainability performance is called Enterprise Carbon Accounting, and can be quite comprehensive. While the tracking process often begins with simple spreadsheets, it quickly escalates and becomes more complex, requiring specifically-designed  software from vendors well-versed in carbon footprints. So Groom Energy has created a guide for companies considering calculating or tracking their GHG emissions that details important factors to consider before purchasing the software or hiring one of the nearly 40 vendors that offer such services.

Measuring greenhouse gases created by individual businesses is a necessary step to cleaning up business, but it’s minimal compared to the greenhouse gases emitted from cities. “Over 70 percent of total global emissions are generated from cities and if you don’t measure these emissions, you cannot manage them,” said Carbon Disclosure Project Chief Executive Paul Dickinson, in a statement.

In 2008, 21 cities agreed to measure and report their carbon emission data in cooperation with the Carbon Disclosure Project. The Project is an independent not-for-profit organization that acts as an intermediary between shareholders and corporations on climate change related issues. IT collects data from more than 3,000 major corporations globally and has assembled the largest corporate greenhouse gas emissions database in the world.

Last March, Merrill Lynch also teamed up with the Carbon Disclosure Project to better organize its already existing operations in the United States and the United Kingdom, and to expand into other locations, such as China and Korea. "This global partnership will help CDP to build on its current success in creating a unified business response to climate change,” said Dickson of CDP. “As regulations on greenhouse gas emissions tighten, CDP data will become increasingly useful to help guide investment models.”

With these trends and a new administration that intends to hold organizations accountable for their carbon, Enterprise Carbon Accounting is one industry that is actually predicting success, which is good for the economy and for the environment.