HM gov has recently annouced an intention to become involved in what is the wild west of environmental claims and schemes.

What you measure depends upon which scheme your client/their customer wants the business to ascribe to.

If you truly thoroughly measured Carbon no business would achieve neutrality - the various schemes employ fudges and omissions when calculating their output.

Back in 2021 the Competition & Markets Authority produced a guide to tackle green washing

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/green-claims-code-making-environmental-claims

The one thing all schemes overlook is compiling data uses unbudgeted resources throughout the suppy chain.

It also hits the environment when every firm stores their green credentials in the cloud - some 1% of global electrical production divereted for servers in data centres.

OK, you will need to understand about Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions (both of which it is both important and straightforward to measure) and Scope 3 emissions (of which it is best to pick a subset which is both relevant to your particular client organisation, and for which you can easily retrieve data to be able to measure). 

I won't define here what these "Scopes" are but just give you links to the authoritative guidance.

It would be foolhardy to attempt to measure the entire carbon footprint without lots of resources to gather some pretty hard to get data, some of which would have to come from the suppliers and customers.  Instead it's best to stick to what you can measure and control, at least to begin with.

The most authoritative place to learn about this topic is here:

https://ghgprotocol.org/

The calculations you will need to do are of the form

mass of CO2e = extent of activity x emission factor for the activity

So for example,

kg of CO2e from driving a car = number of miles driven x emission factor in kg CO2e / mile for the type of car

You can see examples of how this is done as well as a list of emission factors for the UK in spreadsheets here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-conversion-factors-for-company-reporting

There are various reporting and auditing schemes out there that your client might choose to sign up to (or that their customers might demand they sign up to) , but you can also just do this for internal use, in the way that suits the organisation, to see and track elements of their carbon footprint (I agree you are unlikely to truly measure all of it!)

Edited by user 26 May 2023 17:33:40(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified