A USEFUL KEY TERMS GUIDE

Communication around the impacts of climate change is much clearer than it was a decade ago.

Here is a quick list of some basic concepts in sustainability to understand GHG accounting and other intricacies of carbon markets and net zero economies.

GHG Protocol

The standard global accounting method for measuring an entity's direct, downstream, and upstream GHG emissions. This protocol defines methodologies for calculating and defining the scope of emissions, as well as informing the standard setting criteria of many other reporting frameworks such as CDP, GRI, TCFD, SASB, and SBTi.

Greenhouse Gasses (GHG) and Carbon

Greenhouse gases are gases contributing to the greenhouse effect (atmosphere warming) by absorbing infrared radiation. Carbon is the most common greenhouse gas emitted by human activities and is therefore used in shorthand to refer to a number of other greenhouse gases.

CO2e

Carbon (CO2) is typically used as the equivalent metric for quantifying other gasses, known as CO2 equivalents or CO2e. A quantity of GHG can be expressed as CO2e by multiplying the amount of GHG by its Global Warming Potential.

Global Warming Potentials

The Global Warming Potential (GWP) was developed to allow comparisons of the global warming impacts of different gasses. Specifically, it is a measure of how much energy the emissions of 1 ton of a gas will absorb over a given period of time, relative to the emissions of 1 ton of carbon dioxide (CO2).

Footprint-based approaches

These include pure accounting methods for current emissions and do not necessarily regard emissions reduction strategies. Approaches include Life Cycle Assessment methods and GHG/Carbon Accounting. Carbon accounting is the process of quantifying the amount of greenhouse gases produced directly and indirectly from a business or organisation’s activities within a set of boundaries.

Sustainability reports

Reports that provide emissions information developed and released by a company.

Carbon offsets

Allow businesses, who cannot reasonably reduce or halt their own emissions to balance out the total emitted greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to zero by purchasing the active emissions reductions of another party elsewhere. Offsets are calculated relative to a baseline that represents a hypothetical scenario for what emissions would have been in the absence of the project.

Carbon sink

A carbon sink is anything, natural or otherwise, that accumulates and stores some carbon-containing chemical compound for an indefinite period and thereby removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Corporations may acquire land rights for designated areas of carbon sinks such as forests or seagrass meadows, or contribute to restoring these natural areas in order to qualify the area as an offset.

Scope 1, 2, and 3 Emissions

Emissions are classified into scopes for differentiating between direct and indirect emissions of a business and for more accurate measurement and reporting overall.

CONCLUSIONS

Carbon Accounting requires access to accurate real time and historic energy data that can be traced back to the source, easily audited for compliance and rooted in international standards for GHG emissions factors.

Spreadsheets and excel are most likely not enough when trying to run data accurate calculations across multiple business operations and with differing sources of emissions.

Bramo Portal is a market-leading, energy and sustainability data management platform that uses cloud-based software to collect, automise, and analyse utility, energy, and sustainability data metrics.

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