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Designing a carbon footprint
T
he carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that it emitted during the reporting period.In order to get this, you will need to undertake three activities. First you need to design and set up an GHGinventory: the emissions sources and their emissions. Then you collect and process greenhouse gas emissiondata. The resulting emission report is often verified by a third party.Both the GHG Protocol and the ISO14064-1 standard leave some important choices open for the user. The first step in the design of an emission inventory is therefore to see what these choices are, what consequences they have, and take a decision on the application in your specific case. What are these choices?
Organizational boundaries
You may have different installations, and youhave 2 main options for consolidating these emissions: the control approach and the equity approach. In a
con-trol approach
you account for all GHG emissions from facilities over which you have financial or operational con-trol. In an
equity share approach
you would account for GHG emissions in proportion to the percentageownership over the facility. A special case is leased assets. In a financial control or equity share approach youdon’t own or operate the emission sources. Therefore you would report these emissions as scope 3. In anoper-ational control approach you would report 100% of the emissions.
Base year
You have to set a base year so you can follow the emission trend. You can choose a sin-gle base year, an average of several years or a rolling base year [the base year is always last year].There may be circumstances that require the recalculation of the GHG inventory. For example, you may havedetected an error in the calculation methodology or emission sources have been transferred in or out the or-ganizational boundaries. You will have to develop a policy for this, stating how the recalculation has to takeplace, and at at what threshold.
Operational boundaries
You have to decide which emissions you report. Re-porting of direct emissions and energy indirect emissions is mandatory. Reporting of other indirect emissions[scope 3] is not, and there is also no definition of what these emissions are in your particular case. So you haveto decide whether you report scope 3 emissions or not. Then you decide which emissions you would report.
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