Organisational Footprint Verification

Organisational emissions

The term “organisational footprint” refers to the total GHG emissions you produce across all your operations including those from your direct activities as well as your indirect ones from your supply chain.

Your organisational footprint

The British Standards Institute published its guidance on how to develop a carbon footprint under International Standard ISO 14064. It has three parts with ISO 14064-1: 2019 specifying the principles and requirements for designing and developing GHG inventories (i.e. your footprint).
 
The World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development have also developed the Greenhouse Gas Protocol which provides guidance for calculating emissions at the both the organisation and product level.

These standards state there are three types – or scopes – of emission that can be reflected in a business’s footprint:
1

Scope 1

Direct emissions from the use of fuels and other activities within your full control e.g. petrol in company owned cars, fugitive emissions from owned equipment etc.
2

Scope 2

Indirect emissions from purchased energy (i.e. electricity, heating or cooling) from outside your organisation.
3

Scope 3

All other emissions from your organisation’s value chain. These can include those resulting from the goods and services you buy, business travel by your staff in non-company vehicles and from the production of waste.
Scope 1 and 2 emissions have typically constituted most reporting, as they’re the easiest for which to obtain data. However, Scope 3 emissions usually account for a higher percentage of an organisation’s footprint and reporting these is becoming more of a requirement from stakeholders and regulatory organisations.

As verifiers, we cannot produce your carbon footprint, but there a number of organisations offering help and advice to help you do this. To develop your carbon footprint, there are six key steps in that should be followed:
  • Define methodology and approach
  • Define the operational and organisational boundary of your organisation that the footprint will cover
  • Collect and Collate GHG Data
  • Apply emissions factors. These are numbers by which businesses need to multiply their various types of raw emission data to calculate their final footprints. Each factor is a co-efficient, expressing the rate at which a particular product or process emits carbon into the atmosphere. The UK government issues an updated set of emission factors each year.
  • Verify the results
  • Plan for emission reductions

Our process

Our typical organisational emission verification process consists of the following stages:
  • Initial meeting, at which you and we agree the scope of the assessment. The timescale for completing the verification process will be agreed here.
  • After receiving items such as your policies, supporting data and calculations, we develop the audit plan that the verifying process will follow.
  • We audit and review your operational carbon data and the calculations that produced it, to establish whether the details you’ve provided are accurate.
  • GBTS then reviews your policies and procedures to confirm whether the data supporting your carbon claims has been collected and analysed correctly.
  • We provide you with a summary of our initial findings. This includes highlighting any corrections you need to make or non-compliance you should address.
  • When we’re happy with all your data, we issue your verification report.
  • There should then be an annual review of your operational footprint, following measures being enacted to cut your emissions year-on-year within an agreed timeframe to achieve net-zero.

Benefits

The advantages of possessing a minimised embodied carbon footprint, which has been independently verified by an expert third party like us, are numerous and varied. Click below to find out more.

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Get in touch

If you’re interested in our services or would like to discuss your needs further, please contact us.