10 Steps to Becoming a Carbon Neutral Business

Page 12 STEP 03: CREATE YOUR BASELINE For accurate emissions reporting, you need to ensure that both the activity data as well as the emission factors are accurate or you risk miscalculating your carbon footprint. If there is no clear owner of emissions data within your organization, the logical first step is to assign responsibility for the GHG accounting process. Someone in your Environment, Health and Safety or Sustainability department could be a good bet to take this on, but the most important factor is really to find someone who has the insights and analytical skills to engage the right people and data sources across the organization. An external partner can then scrutinize your in-house emissions reporting, checking which data is currently captured, how that is being done and which emission factors were used. This review will highlight which activity data still needs to be collected, the method of collection and determine the appropriate emission factors to be used. Ensuring alignment from the start on these components minimizes the risk of problems later in the process. The level of detail needed to construct your carbon footprint can feel overwhelming. Looking at employee commuting for instance, you would need to know the distance each employee travels to work, their mode of transport and how often they make that journey. If they use a car, you need to know if it is a passenger or heavy-duty vehicle and what type of fuel it runs on. Do not let that stop you, though. The process of mapping your emissions means that you suddenly discover new things about how you run your business and that will help you identify areas for improvement. It is up to you and your consultants to agree which level of detail is feasible. Do not let perfect stand in the way of good. GHG accounting is always somewhat imperfect. You simply cannot know exactly how much you are emitting, but you can make the best possible estimation by using reliable activity data, valid assumptions when actual data is not available and the right emission factors. Instead of aiming for perfection straight away, try to improve your reporting every year. If in one year you made estimations for one source, try getting activity data the year after. If you suspect data is incomplete, you can aim for strengthening data collection in the future. / Capturing activity data Activity data is usually collected within the organization. You are probably already collecting some activity data which you can build on. Energy consumption is an example of something which is frequently measured and seems fairly straightforward. But even with the simple metrics, you may need to spend more time than expected on validating, clarifying or harmonizing data before you can consolidate. Examples of challenges that could come up as part of your process could be that you get your consumption data in various units because you operate in different countries with different standards; the local utility only sends you a total bill for your energy, and it includes various energy sources but not the breakdown of each; you are part of a shared facility and do not have meters to indicate your own consumption. None of these cases are particularly difficult to solve, but they may require extra time to address and will require you to make choices and maybe accept trade-offs in terms of accuracy.