Overview

Calculating a carbon footprint is an essential starting point to understand the impact of your business. Footprinting, also known as ‘carbon accounting’, provides the baseline you need to implement an effective sustainability and carbon reduction strategy. It allows you to identify where there are real opportunities to reduce emissions, and take steps to reach your climate ambition. 

There are different types of carbon footprints that relate to businesses, institutions, public sector bodies, and cities. These include organisational, value chain, and product carbon footprints.

The benefits

Carbon footprinting offers companies the opportunity to:

• Be recognised as a credible and robust climate leader.
• Take climate action to create genuine, quantifiable and visible change for your stakeholders.
• Tell your sustainability story. 
• Understand your supply chain in detail.
• Leverage sustainability to reduce costs and maximise efficiency.

How we can help

Our experts are on hand at every stage of your footprinting journey to help engage your stakeholders, collect and analyse the data you need, calculate your footprint and report the findings. We help you use your calculated footprint as the baseline to launch your decarbonisation journey.

Areas where we can share real expertise include:

Corporates

The Carbon Trust provides independent verification, recognising real achievements in sustainability.

Organisational footprinting 

Our organisational footprinting analysis can be tailored to support the needs of your specific organisation, or align with the ISO or GHG Protocol Organisational Footprint Standard.  

Value chain footprinting

We also help you develop value chain Scope 3 carbon footprints constructed in line with the GHG Protocol Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard. In particular, we support companies progress from high-level spend-based footprinting, to developing more reliable and informative Scope 3 footprints based on supplier-specific or activity-based data. This enables companies to make effective strategy and decarbonisation planning decisions, as well as more robust external reporting for communication and assurance. 

Product footprinting

We develop footprinting models and product footprints that can be aligned to internationally recognised standards. We also offer carbon footprint labelling services, so that your customers can clearly identify that your products have had their carbon footprints verified by the Carbon Trust. Robust product footprinting also enables better decision-making for sustainable product design, and meeting your customers' growing requirements for impact disclosure.

Cities and regions  

Public bodies partner with us to measure their carbon emissions from organisational Scope 1, 2 and 3 sources, using the GHG Protocol Footprint Standards to determine a robust boundary of emissions. This can include direct emissions caused by the energy consumption of your buildings and vehicles, as well as indirect emissions from waste, water, leased assets, investments, business travel, employee commuting and supply chains.     

We also help cities, local governments and their partners to measure and set baseline footprints that will inform concrete area-wide climate action. Through territorial and consumption-based emissions accounting, using frameworks such as the the GHG Protocol for Community-Scale GHG Inventories (GPC), we assess regional emissions energy consumption in domestic and non-domestic buildings, industry, transport and waste, as well as non-energy emissions from Land Use, Land Use Change & Forestry (LULUCF).     

Real estate

Real estate is responsible for around 37% of total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While approximately 10% of these emissions are attributed to the construction industry, most are related to the day-to-day operation of buildings.

• Whether you’re a developer, an asset manager or a housebuilder, we can help you calculate your carbon emissions, establish the right boundary and appropriately allocate Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions for your carbon footprint. 
• Accurate measurement of GHG emissions is essential for compliance and best practice, as well as baselining and benchmarking, target setting and monitoring of targets for real estate portfolios. We work with you to calculate the most accurate carbon footprint for your portfolio, based on the available data, and advise you on how this can be improved over time, and align to best practice. Ultimately, an accurate footprint will enable you to strategise and implement the most cost and resource-effective transition towards Net Zero for your portfolios.
• With our knowledge of the construction industry and commercial real estate, we can address the most common issues in footprinting; those related to leased assets and other Scope 3 emissions associated with the construction, operation and transaction of buildings. 
• Our services cover all aspects of building life cycles – operational carbon, embodied carbon and whole-life carbon.

Financial institutions

Impact reporting and assessment

We develop tailored approaches to impact assessment and reporting for financial institutions and financial products, including thematic bonds and loans. We work with clients to produce high quality, easy-to-understand impact assessments for relevant stakeholders that communicate genuinely green and sustainable outcomes.

Portfolio footprints

We work across financial institutions to help them understand the carbon footprints of their portfolios. We apply our leading understanding of international standards and methodologies to create tailored approaches and solutions for financial institutions looking to deepen their climate understanding and accelerate their transitions. We also work with financial institutions to communicate the results to stakeholders in a credible way.

Alignment with sustainability taxonomies

Sustainable taxonomies are classification systems for economic activities considered as sustainable, based on specific criteria and performance thresholds. Their aim is to increase transparency and comparability of investments. To date, disclosures are only mandatory in respect to the European Union Taxonomy. However, other green taxonomies are being developed in other parts of the world, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Colombia, South Africa and the UK. With access to green finance experts and climate experts in the relevant sectors of the economy, we can provide advice to financial institutions and companies on sustainable taxonomies.

Why the Carbon Trust

For more than 20 years we have been mobilising decarbonisation for businesses, governments and organisations around the world. Our experts co-authored the PAS 2050 Standard for footprinting and contributed to the development of the ISO 14067 and GHG Protocol Product Standards. We bring dedicated teams with sector-specific expertise who have supported over 3,000 organisations across 70 countries in their climate action, so we know how to turn your climate ambitions into a reality.