Greenhouse gas emissions accounting

What is the climate impact of your business? How big is your organisation's carbon footprint? How can you reduce emissions from your operations? Understanding your GHG footprint is the key first step on your climate leadership journey.

South Pole's consultants have a proven track record in GHG accounting & reporting; having delivered 200+ accounting assignments for products, events and organisations. We bring a wealth of experience supporting companies across a variety of sectors and reporting our results that are compatible with leading environmental indicators including Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the CDP. Our broad range of expertise in corporate sustainability and GHG accounting also includes dedicated teams focused on the agriculture and finance sectors that can support you with addressing your portfolio and supply chain emissions respectively.

We are here to help you build your GHG inventory and understand your footprint. We can do this through providing you with a variety of different approaches; that can range from distributing surveys and data collection sheets or alternatively using our online proprietary GHG accounting and analytics packages.

Our team will be on hand to provide the appropriate solution for you.

The benefits of measuring your GHG footprint

1. Continuous monitoring: Comprehensive GHG accounting allows you to monitor your climate strategy and make adjustments to continue to improve your climate performance.
2. Cost savings: You can identify GHG emission hotspots across your business and increase the potential for emissions reductions. Remember, emission reductions also mean saving money. (The less fuel you're burning, the more money you're saving).
3. Becoming carbon neutral: Comprehensive GHG footprinting is the first step to become a carbon neutral organisation.
4. Map out an internal carbon price: Your current carbon footprint defines the internal carbon cost to your organisation. Reducing the footprint, reduces the cost. Many companies use this fact as an incentive to motivate divisions and departments to focus more on better managing energy use. An internal carbon price is also used as a parameter to manage risks of future investments.
5. Become a sustainable business brand: SvanteTM allows you to set up a standardised monitoring system to improve your score at reporting standards such as CDP. Higher scoring increases your reputation and profile as a sustainable business.

Scopes 1,2,3 - explained

There are three ways a business or organisation emits greenhouse gases and carbon through the use or consumption of energy. In our world we refer to them as 'scopes.'

Scope 1:

These emissions result from sources directly owned or operated by you. For example, do you have a fleet of vehicles? Do they burn fossil fuel? Maybe you have buildings with boilers. Something as seemingly benign as neon signs can be REC-worthy.

Scope 2:

These are emissions based on energy you purchase to directly operate your enterprise. The most common across-the-board example is - your electricity consumption.

Scope 3:

Emissions resulting from activities not directly owned by your business but are associated with its operation. Examples; business travel, waste management, commuting, third-party distribution, etc.

Licensed AA1000 AccountAbility Assurance Provider

We are a licensed partner to AccountAbility and can help you validate that your GHG accounting is accurate, reliable and transparent.

Disclaimer: To measure emissions from air travel, South Pole uses an RFI recommended by UK BEIS–a multiplier of 1.9 as a central estimate, based on research from the European Assessment of Transport Impacts on Climate Change and Ozone Depletion (ATTICA, http://ssa-attica.eu) and analysis by Lee et al (2009) reported on by the Committee on Climate Change (2009).