Avoided emissions
As organisations seek to cut their own emissions, a growing spotlight is on the solutions that will help us reach Net Zero. Having been at the forefront of avoided emissions since 2015 and authored industry standards, we help you quantify the emissions that your products or services save.
What are avoided emissions?
Avoided emissions refer to the greenhouse gas emissions that have been ‘avoided’ by using a specific product or service, comparing it to a situation had the product or service not been used. For example:
- Solar panel installations and the emissions avoided by replacing fossil fuel energy sources.
- Agricultural IoT sensors communicate soil conditions to farmers to minimise fertiliser and water usage.
- Concrete mix control technology to minimise cement usage during construction.
The benefits
By quantifying the avoided emissions of your products, services or business decisions, you have an opportunity to:
- Accurately communicate and substantiate the carbon savings your customers can achieve.
- Give yourself a competitive advantage by scaling solutions that support the Net Zero transition.
- Inform your product strategy and identify new opportunities to maximise the emissions savings from your product portfolio.
- Identify and minimise potential risks within your products and services.
- Attract finance as more financial institutions seek to invest in solutions that will help decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors.
Avoided emissions analysis is a powerful way to innovate and scale the solutions to meet Net Zero. We help you identify the parts of your portfolio that will accelerate the sustainability journey for your customers.
How we can help
Whether you want to prove the ‘carbon enablement’ effect of your solutions or identify new opportunities in your product portfolio, our experts help you assess the net impact of your solutions. This assessment will uncover valuable insights into your specific products, services or product strategy. Our analysis considers:
Individual solutions
From high-level impact assessments to detailed case studies, we help you identify your low carbon solutions and their associated emissions savings. The assessment is tailored to your products, sector and needs, for example, if you wish to use the findings to support internal decisions or to communicate emissions savings to consumers.
Assessments of multiple products or the full product portfolio
This type of deep analysis can help identify your product priorities for the next three, five and ten years. Our experts support you with the necessary data collection and walk you through the analysis to drive informed decision-making across your teams.
Why the Carbon Trust
Avoided emissions is a fast-changing area, so it is important to calculate these emissions with care. As early movers in this space, our experts have been developing methodologies and authoring industry standards on calculating avoided emissions since 2015.
We have significant experience developing dedicated methodologies to calculate avoided emissions in different sectors, including the ICT sector having worked with GSMA, Vodafone and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative.
At Telia, we seek to push the boundaries within the telecommunications industry for emission reductions. The Carbon Trust has been a valuable partner in helping us understand our supply chain footprint as well as the potential of avoided emissions through our customers.
We have been partnering with the Carbon Trust on ICT-related projects since 2014. Their in-depth expertise on avoided emissions has been invaluable, particularly as part of the European Green Digital Coalition (EGDC) secretariat which aims to harness the enabling emission-reducing potential of digital solutions to other sectors.
Vodafone is committed to not only reducing our carbon emissions but also supporting our customers and stakeholders to do the same. There’s a lot of work needed to make that happen and the Carbon Trust offers the expertise and broad background knowledge to tackle the huge data challenges.
