A Conversation with Amy Brachio, CEO of Carbon Measures
Unlocking Climate Solutions Through Market Demand
I first met Amy the old-fashioned way—on LinkedIn! I first heard her name when she was announced as the CEO of the new organization Carbon Measures which is focused on developing carbon accounting at the product level. I have some familiarity with this concept and before Carbon Measures was announced I’d written a little piece about the potential for those focused on the product level to collaborate with those focused on the company level. After Amy and I had connected on LinkedIn we agreed it would be useful to compare notes. We set up a call for early December. On the call we discovered that we were both in New York. I asked Amy if she had some time to meet that afternoon to continue our conversation and to my good fortune we did. We met at one of the many Gregory’s Coffees. I ordered a Cortado and Amy went above and beyond the call of duty to get me one after mine was stolen by another customer. (I owe her big time, so coffee is my treat next time!)
We kept in touch and noticed how an either/or narrative between product and company level accounting was being formed. Some of this due to vocal proponents of each. Some of this due to how the press was writing about it. Both of us don’t think this is constructive so we decided I would do an interview with Amy to make clear her views and that of Carbon Measures. Individuals and organizations who support it may have different views and that’s perfectly fine. It’s simply important to distinguish those views from Amy’s and Carbon Measures’.
The Woman Behind the Work: Growing up in Minnesota
Bob: Amy, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. I know from our coffee you have an interesting background. Please tell me more about it.
Amy: Happy to, Bob. I grew up in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, which is just outside of St. Paul. Today, I live 30 minutes from where I grew up, and I’m still good friends with my high school girlfriends. Both my parents worked in the community college system, and as a result, I spent a lot of my childhood at the local community college taking part in many of the programs that my dad created for our community.
Bob: Wow, what a small world! My best friend in college was from White Bear Lake. and I visited there several times! What did your mom do?
Amy: My mom worked right up until the day I was born, which tells you something about her determination. She worked as a career counselor, oftentimes working with people who hadn’t gone to college and wanted to go back to school later in life. This meant she helped a lot of women looking to further their education as their children got older. When I was seven and my sister was five, she was diagnosed with ALS. At the time, she was working on her doctorate in counseling to go into private practice. Typically, when you get that diagnosis, you only have three to five years to live. My mom ultimately lived for 30 more years. To make things even more complicated, when I was in fifth grade, my father had a serious heart attack, and the doctors didn’t think he would live a long life, either.
Bob: That must have been incredibly difficult.
Amy: It was. But you know, my parents dealt with their health challenges by raising my sister and me to be wildly independent. They had to. Even though they both long outlived their prognoses, neither could ever be certain that would be the case. Through this, we learned lots of lessons about how to live. For example, my mom was always happy. She had this amazing smile. My sister once asked her, “How are you always so happy? Your career got taken away from you, your physical capabilities got taken away from you.” And my mom said that after she was diagnosed, she realized that happiness was a choice, and she chose to be happy. She instilled a very significant sense of resilience in both my sister and me.
Bob: Your mother was clearly a remarkable woman and that is a powerful lesson.
Amy: It really was. Even as the disease progressed, she wrote a book about her experience, an “insider’s perspective” on living in three different nursing homes. She worked with a friend who was at the University of South Carolina at the time. She couldn’t move her hands, so she dictated the book to my grandma, who would write up the pages, and my husband and I would type them up and send them back. My grandma would then hold the pages in front of my mom to edit. It ultimately got published just after she passed away. That whole experience gave me this mindset of “What do I have to whine about?” When you see your mom face what she faced with such incredible grace and strength of character, it changes how you see challenges.
From Hockey Games to Higher Education
Bob: What were you like as a girl in high school?
Amy: I went to public school, was in all the honors classes. I had a super nice group of friends. We played tennis and softball, though I was more social than competitive about it – nobody would accuse me of being an athlete. Our high school had one of the best hockey teams in the state, and we’d go to tons of hockey games. Even now, my husband and I go to tons of hockey games because I grew up watching hockey and he grew up playing!
Bob: Where did you go to college?
Amy: For the first year I went to the University of Minnesota, and it was so cold. I’m used to the cold, but you would have to walk across a frozen river to get to class. I figured that if I didn’t leave Minnesota for college, I’d never leave. I’m super family oriented, so I told my grandma. She told me that if she hadn’t met my grandfather, she would have gone to the University of Alabama. I went to visit, and it was so beautiful, and much less cold. I thought, ‘I’ll give it a try!’ I got my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting from the University of Alabama. I actually interned at EY during my undergrad and got the EY scholarship for my master’s, then I went straight to EY after graduating.
Bob: So why accounting?
Amy: I actually wanted to be a math teacher because both my parents were in education, and I loved math. I worked as a waitress to put myself through college, and I realized I was making more waiting tables than I would as a math teacher. I was raised to be independent, and because of my parents’ illnesses, I had to be financially independent.
I took an accounting class to fulfill a requirement – it was a huge class, 400 or 500 students. I got the highest score in the class, and the head of the accounting program wrote me a letter inviting me to major in accounting. I decided to do it. Why not?
Building a Career: 30 Years at EY
Bob: Wow, that’s quite an endorsement! So you went to EY right after college and stayed until you left? Did you stay in Alabama?
Amy: I stayed in Alabama for two years. It was an amazing experience, but then I had an opportunity to move to D.C. with EY. That sounded like a fun adventure and helped me to take on new challenges working with EY’s Quantitative Economics and Statistics practice focused on consumer protection in banking. At that point, the group was heavily quantitative, and they needed someone who could understand the math and the models, as well as the business side. I’ve always thought of my role as being a liaison between the deeply technical and the business.
Bob: Were you married then? Tell me about your husband.
Amy: We got married early in my career. My husband’s name is Ben. He was my college boyfriend when I interned. He has always been wildly supportive of me, our three girls and achieving all we want to achieve.
Bob: And you made partner in that role? How long does that typically take in an accounting firm?
Amy: It typically takes around 15 years. I made partner in 11 and a half, and four of those years I worked part-time when my kids were little. I was the first non-Ph.D. to make partner in that group.
Bob: Once you became partner, did you stay in that group?
Amy: I stayed but had physically moved away from the rest of the team prior to being promoted to partner. I was actually across the street when the plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11. My mom was in a nursing home in D.C. at the time. My first daughter was born in 2001, so we wanted to be closer to family and friends with the baby. When I first told the partner that I worked for that I was going to move back to Minnesota, he was concerned because he saw me as a partner one day and thought being 1,000 miles away would get in the way of my career. It ended up working out – my second daughter was born in 2003, and I made partner faster than most people. I stayed doing similar work until 2014, when I was asked to lead the risk management practice for the Americas. I went from leading a group of 60 people to 6,400, overseeing the professionals that supported EY clients with technology risk, cybersecurity, enterprise risk, internal auditing, and compliance.
Bob: That’s a big jump.
Amy: It was. I was only a sixth-year partner at the time. Then in 2016, I was asked to lead EY’s global Risk practice, including finance, supply chain, and business transformation. This ultimately led to my move into the role as the firm’s Global Vice Chair for Sustainability. At the time, I reported directly to the CEO.
Bob: You went up the ladder very quickly at EY. Why didn’t you stay and become CEO?
Amy: I could have stayed for eight more years and who knows where that would have taken me, but my younger daughter just graduated from undergrad, I had hit 30 years at EY since I interned, and I was ready to do something truly impact oriented.
Bob: So you retired?
Amy: I retired on September 12, 2025, at 52. I had always said I was going to retire between 52 and 58, but no one believed me up until the day I left!
The Search for What’s Next
Bob: Good for you! And as I recall in our discussion over coffee (and thanks again for that Cortado 🐥) you had no idea what you were going to do after you retired and never heard of Carbon Measures.
Amy: That’s right, I had no idea what I was going to do when I let EY’s CEO know that I planned to retire. I sat down with my financial advisor to create a plan that had me without income while I figured everything out. My first thought was going on boards, maybe teaching. One of my friends who’s a provost at a university talked to the Dean and said, “Whenever you’re ready, we’re ready to have you.” But when I talked to mentors about what I was interested in, they said, “You’re not ready for that yet – you have too much energy. Do something else full time, then do that.” And then, as it happened, I learned through colleagues that there was this business association being formed that was looking to drive impact where I knew I could leverage my skills and capabilities.
Bob: That makes perfect sense for the arc of your career. But to be honest, given your background and interests and the perceptions some people have about Carbon Measures it isn’t intuitively obvious why you’d want the job you have now.
Amy: That’s probably true so let me explain! I learned about Carbon Measures through a former colleague of mine who shared the job description with me and asked if I would pass it along to anyone in my network who might be interested. I was more than happy to because my reaction was, “This isn’t for me.” Another colleague, who knew I was retiring, asked me why I wasn’t going for the job. I told him that I was unsure about the sectors. And he said to me, “Amy, you’re thinking about this all wrong. They’re looking at unlocking demand. If that works, it will change the game.”
He had spent his whole career dedicated to sustainability, and I have huge respect for his opinion so that got my attention and I decided to explore it. I realized that at the point I was in my career, I could thoroughly do my due diligence and decide whether I wanted to be a part of this effort or not. The luxury of looking without time or financial pressure is that you get to decide, as opposed to taking something out of need.
Bob: It’s clear this decision to work with Carbon Measures took a lot of thinking.
Amy: It sure did. It was also a family decision.
Bob: There has been a lot of comments about the Origin’s Story of Carbon Measures so I’m really curious and I hope you don’t mind me asking but who hired you?
Amy: Carbon Measures’ four founding members hired me, but the entire process was iterative. I was giving feedback on the vision, and the companies were responding to it. I felt I really had a voice in the process. That meant a lot to me.
From Accounting to Action: Unlocking Market Demand
Bob: Sounds like exactly the right kind of process for taking a job. But what specifically about it made it so attractive?
Amy: Carbon Measures is all about demand generation. We are a business coalition that is driving demand for the products and services required to bring emissions down at the pace and scale that’s needed to make a meaningful impact. We’re focused on carbon accounting first because it’s needed to underpin regulation. I think back to my time in consulting and accounting – I had worked with all sorts of companies that had invested heavily in green products but couldn’t keep investing because they didn’t have customers on the other side to buy.
Just a few weeks ago at a roundtable, we were discussing the demand generation aspect of Carbon Measures’ framework. Someone from a non-profit asked why companies that have made climate commitments aren’t investing in green products like green steel. A representative from a utilities company responded, “I would love to buy green steel, but I’m a regulated utility, and I have to go with the cheapest price. If the green steel costs more, I can’t buy it.” But that’s the key. If there was a carbon intensity standard associated with that steel, their company would have no choice but to buy compliant steel. If product-level intensity standards were in place and aligned with regulation, this demand could be unlocked, enabling faster decarbonization.
Bob: Looking at the carbon accounting framework, you get these inputs for carbon intensity standards. Accounting is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. If we get the accounting figured out, what’s the storyline to get the demand generation?
Amy: It’s product intensity standards. We advocate for governments to regulate using these standards. Businesses need a target to hit, and we have seen from experience that once a target is set, businesses respond.
Bob: How do you see carbon pricing fitting into this?
Amy: We approach the challenge from a different angle. While carbon pricing aims to reduce emissions by assigning a financial cost to carbon, our focus is on stimulating demand and unlocking market-based incentives that accelerate change across value chains. In my view, achieving emissions reductions at the speed and scale required will depend on multiple, complementary, and interoperable solutions — not just one lever.
Bob: Who would set carbon intensity standards?
Amy: Let’s take it up a level. Carbon Measures is focused on the 10 products that drive 70% of global energy-related emissions. Each country would need to figure out its own curve to drive down emissions based on its industries and their ability to compete in the marketplace. Governments would look at their national climate commitments, their industries, the ability to compete, what they can afford. Let’s say steel, cement, and ammonia are a country’s primary products – regulators would put the intensity standards on those products.
Leveling the Global Playing Field
Bob: What about oil and gas specifically?
Amy: Work needs to be done to find the best place in the value chain to implement these standards. I like maritime shipping as an example. Let’s say that the intensity standard was on nautical miles shipped, meaning you could have no more than X amount of carbon emissions associated with every nautical mile. That would drive innovation in both vessel design and energy sources.
Carbon Measures is technology neutral. If one company figures out diesel fuel and high caliber, verifiable carbon capture, while another uses low-carbon steel and sails on their ships, and they both get to the same carbon intensity per nautical mile, that’s what matters. We aren’t judging inputs; we’re judging outputs. We’re using targets in the supply chain to drive down emissions.
The next way I think about it is, if you put an intensity level on steel, everything that happens in its production is going to have to be lower emission, or the steel producer is not going to be able to hit its target. We are using these targets throughout the supply chain to drive down emissions.
Addressing the Controversies: Scope 3, Greenhouse Gas Protocol, and the Path Forward
Bob: There’s been some early skepticism about Carbon Measures, particularly around using Carbon Measures as a delay mechanism to avoid Scope 3. Does every company in the world need to be using ledgers for this to work?
Amy: First, we want to speed up emissions reductions at scale, not the opposite. More specifically, our work is about reducing emissions through demand. As of today, Carbon Measures has 23 member companies. Across the 23 companies, there’s a wide variety of opinions on Scope 3, including many organizations who told me that they have benefited from Scope 3 disclosures and plan to continue to report.
Earlier this week, I was asked if Carbon Measures would tell our members that they have to report Scope 3. I said, “No, nor would we tell them they shouldn’t report Scope 3.” This is about providing better data that unlocks demand and can also feed into multiple uses.
Bob: Makes sense to me but the fact remains that there are some big supporters of Carbon Measures who have been very vocal that the ledger approach can and should simply replace the GHGP.
Amy: We have 23 members, along with experts in our technical working group, and they all bring different perspectives—that’s the beauty of it. Speaking for myself and Carbon Measures, our work is about generating the data required to unlock demand. We don’t have anything to do with replacing the GHGP.
The GHGP was set out to assess an organization’s risk related to greenhouse gases. It’s a disclosure tool, and their work has helped companies and regulators understand their emissions profiles. For ISSB, the scope was about getting investors the data they needed to make decisions. But global emissions aren’t falling fast enough. We need new tools to reduce emissions faster and at scale.
What I can say on behalf of our members is that we are all committed to reducing emissions at scale, Carbon Measures is focused on getting the investment-grade data that’s required to unlock market demand and for product differentiation. We aren’t the replacement for anything. We’re another tool, another puzzle piece, in driving down emissions, which is what all of us want. What’s been done to date has already changed the curve, but there’s still more work to be done.
Bob: I can’t imagine there’s a single person concerned about climate change who would disagree with this!
Amy: That’s exactly the point. How I look at this is that we need innovation to reduce carbon emissions much more rapidly. We know we’re not on the right trajectory. While there’s been significant innovation in developing technical solutions, we now need more innovation in how we enable the success of those solutions to succeed in the market and scale. That’s not happening today, and I don’t see work underway that’s focused on unlocking the right market incentives. That’s the gap we’re looking to close.
One more point here. A question you didn’t ask is around the concern about fragmentation. I strongly believe we can address this through a focus on interoperability. That said, we’re trying to help solve a global demand problem. I’m focused on bringing together as many strong thinkers as possible, bringing diverse perspective, to tackle what is arguably the most complex challenge of our generation.
Collaboration, Not Competition
Bob: Thanks for bringing up the point about fragmentation. I hear that a lot too. It’s clear you see the work of Carbon Measures and the GHGP as complementary. I think the more relevant issue regarding fragmentation is the work GHGP and ISO are doing to develop product level standards for carbon accounting. What’s your view on this?
Amy: We’ve been holding a lot of conversations about how to provide transparency across efforts. While these are still early days, I’m confident we will achieve this.
Carbon Measures as an organization intends to only be around for 5-7 years. We expect our work to be a catalyst for more accurate data to enable governments to set more effective policy, businesses to differentiate products, and markets to drive competition. We aim to collaborate broadly and prioritize interoperability, serving as a catalyst for others. But it’s important to stay true to the data we’re helping design a framework to capture. It needs to help unlock market demand, allow for product differentiation, and enable market regulation.
Bob: I know you’ve formed a Technical Expert Panel and there are many views on its purpose. Since it’s your panel the most important view is yours! So please tell me about it.
Amy: Together with the International Chamber of Commerce, we’ve launched a Technical Expert Panel to develop the guidelines and implementation steps to establish a global carbon emissions accounting system. We have 10 panelists so far and will have 20 total.
We’re bringing on people who have deep experience implementing the GHGP and those who want to bring people together. Our panelists serve in their personal capacities and come from civil society, NGOs, academia, financial accounting, and industry. We’re convening people with real-world experience to implement data collection, allowing us to move from ideas to action.
Bob: Another big criticism of the ledger approach is that every company in a supply chain has to implement it for it to work. That’s a tall order.
Amy: Dealing with issues like this is exactly the kind of work the expert panel will tackle. They’ll form working groups to find solutions for connecting companies across the supply chain. We engaged with ICC for a number of reasons, one of which is their global span and membership, spanning from small to massive businesses. We’re also working to address estimates in emissions in general, and specifically how you deal with missing data.
Building the Coalition
Bob: Where are you on membership for Carbon Measures?
Amy: We launched with 19 in late October, and we’re now at 23. We want companies from more industries, across all geographies.
Bob: What does success look like for you?
Amy: Five to seven years from now, we have a carbon accounting framework that’s adopted globally, and multiple markets have adopted product-level carbon intensity standards. That’s enough to have global trade impacted in a way that drives real emissions reductions.
Bob: I know you’re participating in all sorts of public meetings, private meetings, roundtables. When you walk out of those meetings, what do you hope is achieved?
Amy: What I hope to achieve is that those who are in the session understand our authentic commitment to driving down carbon emissions and aligning them with market incentives. This isn’t about replacing what’s been done. It’s about adding the missing piece – the demand signal that makes all the investment worthwhile.
Bob: Amy, thanks again for your time. I really appreciate the work you’re doing, and I wish you the best of luck. You know I’m not interested in the technical details but if there are any ways I can help, please just let me know.
Amy: Thank you so much, Bob. It’s always lovely to catch up and I appreciate the offer. But first things, first. You owe me a Cortado!
Technical Framework & Methodology
Carbon Accounting: Framework for a Comprehensive New Product- and Entity-Level, Ledger-Based Carbon Accounting System – EFI Foundation, June 2025
Integrated Product- and Entity-Level Carbon Accounting: Putting Concepts into Practice – EFI Foundation, October 2025
Policy & Analysis
From green goals to black ink: Reforming carbon accounting for a new era of competition Niskanen Center – October 2025
https://www.niskanencenter.org/reforming-carbon-accounting-for-a-new-era-of-competition/
Video & Events
Aviva, DNB & Carbon Measures Leaders on CLimate Progress – Bloomberg New Economy Forum, November 2025
The Benefits of Carbon Accounting and Why Current Carbon Reporting Falls Short – Bipartisan Policy Center, November 2025
Pragmatic Business Solutions for Carbon Accounting and Emissions Reductions – Carbon Measures Youtube, November 2025
Technical Expert Panel Resources
Carbon Measures global accounting group to form independent panel – Reuters, October 2025
New Technical Expert Panel on Carbon Accounting from Carbon Measures and International Chamber of Commerce – Reuters Impact Studio, October 2025
Call for Interest: Global Carbon Emissions Accounting Experts – International Chamber of Commerce, November 2025
The Launch of A Technical Expert Panel on Carbon Accounting – Reuters Events, January 2026
@Robert Eccles this is a great interview. Amy is really impressive. Do you think asset owners can advocate for Carbon Measure standards and then invest in those products/companies?