Taylor Francis on How Watershed Is Solving the Climate Crisis

Watershed Turns Corporate Climate Reporting Into Action

Watershed is betting that corporate climate work is becoming an operating problem rather than a reporting one. Its software plugs into a company's systems of record and turns utility bills and bills of materials into data that CFOs and procurement teams use to disclose and to decide. Francis argues the tools to cut emissions already exist and keep getting cheaper, so the constraint now is speed rather than technology.

Takeaways

• Watershed targets 500m tons of CO2 a year. The goal is to help customers reduce or remove 500m tons of CO2 a year by 2030, about 1% of global emissions. Customers include FedEx, Walmart, Airbnb and Spotify, together responsible for 5% of the world's carbon emissions.
• Climate reporting is becoming mandatory. Two thirds of Fortune 500 companies have climate commitments and dozens of jurisdictions require disclosure. Francis says climate's role moved from brand and reputation to policy and compliance, and is now entering a phase where it drives revenue.
• Supplier surveys produced no emissions cuts. Sending surveys to suppliers was the traditional way to measure scope 3 emissions, and Francis says nothing happened as a result over ten years. Product Footprints, launched in September 2025, builds a product's supply chain and emissions in an afternoon rather than six months.
• Demand signals reach every supplier tier. Watershed's theory of change is that demand signals from customers and regulators travel up every stage of a supply chain. A food business cuts deforestation in its supply chain. A consumer electronics maker needs clean power at its semiconductor suppliers.
• Clean energy is cheap but decarbonization lags. Solar and wind got cheap decades faster than the forecasts in An Inconvenient Truth, and the clean energy index rose 30% last year while oil was flat. Five or six degrees of warming is now extremely unlikely, and the likely range is two to four degrees.
• AI should be aimed at climate. Francis says the AI and climate intersection will dominate the next decade, and that if the world builds an AI superpower it had better aim it at the climate problem. He cites BCG research valuing the green products market at $5tn.

Taylor Francis's route from policy to Watershed

1. He saw An Inconvenient Truth with his mother at 12 or 13 and spent high school giving Al Gore's climate slideshow at other schools.
2. At Princeton he studied public and international affairs and expected to work in policy until the failure of cap and trade pushed him toward technology.
3. He joined Stripe and helped start its climate program, where Patrick and John Collison showed him that a bigger mission makes a hard problem easier to solve.