How to Calculate and Report your Carbon Footprint?
Environmental concerns are increasingly becoming an essential part of global discussions. Countries across the world are plugging in efforts to reverse the adverse effects of climate change at the individual, organizational and state levels. On the part of companies, carbon footprint reporting has become a key compliance indicator of their obligations towards reversing climate change.
This article attempts to help you understand the concept of carbon footprint and how to calculate and report it for your corporate organization.
What is a carbon footprint?
Carbon footprint, in the simplest terms, is the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions measured in tonnes. Companies release several GHGs such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbon, and sulfur hexafluoride during manufacturing, transportation, or other commercial activities. The greater their carbon footprint, the more detrimental is their climate impact.
A company's carbon footprint includes:
● Direct GHG emissions or GHG emissions from company-owned facilities that might occur due to a company’s actions. For example, emissions that occur when a fossil fuel power plant burns coal to generate energy.
● Indirect GHG emissions include those emissions from allied businesses from which they procure intermediate or finished items for their operations. For example, emissions from their suppliers or during garbage disposal.
How to calculate your carbon footprint?
Calculating the carbon footprint for your company can be broken into a four-step procedure described below:
Step 1: Identify the commercial activities that release GHG into the atmosphere. These can be direct or indirect and may include heating, transportation, or any task associated with a business that uses power, energy, waste management, etc., measured in gallons/liters or kilowatts.
Step 2: Collect the relevant data. For accessing the data, you may refer to the different audit reports that your firm has procured.
Step 3: Ascertain the production value of GHG emissions for each kilowatt-hour of electricity used, per gallon of fuel spent, and so on to determine your exact carbon footprint. Ideally, you should try rely on credible data sources like the EPA for transportation, power, and waste emissions or the Higg Index to determine a material's GHG emissions.
It might be simpler to work with consulting companies or use cloud-based solutions to determine operationally specific emission parameters more accurately.
Step 4: Multiply the business operation unit by the operation-specific emission factor.
Reporting your carbon footprint
After calculating your carbon footprint, you also need to create an actionable report and take steps to reduce it.
A comprehensive carbon footprint report usually includes -
● GHG emission figures
● Risk Analysis
● Climate Strategy
● Well outlined targets to achieve
You can simplify your carbon footprint reporting
If you have never calculated carbon dioxide levels before, it may seem not very easy at the onset to gather all the data, analyze it and make sense of it in the form of a report.
Sophisticated capabilities of cloud-based solutions like k-Shuttle can be helpful to seek the advice of professionals to measure and control your trajectory. From calculating the carbon footprint to creating an analysis and forming an enhanced CSR strategy, you can leverage their inbuilt k-CO2 tool and easily take charge of the whole process.