A Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF) measures the total greenhouse gas emissions caused by your business over a reporting year. It follows the GHG Protocol, the global standard for corporate carbon accounting, and results are expressed in tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂e).
The activities that create emissions
Every emission in a CCF comes from something your business does, buys, moves or sells. The GHG Protocol recognises the full set of activities below. Together they make up your corporate carbon footprint.
The full set of activities recognised by the GHG Protocol
Not every activity applies to every company. Each one goes through relevance testing at the boundary-setting stage, which decides what to include for each entity and site.
Sorting activities into scopes
Every activity sits in Scope 1, 2 or 3. The scopes follow your value chain: upstream activities on the left, your own operations in the middle and downstream activities on the right.
Adapted from the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard
Scope 1: direct emissions
Emissions from sources you own or control, such as fuel burned at company facilities and in company vehicles. On a production site this includes any fuel burned in the process.
Scope 2: indirect emissions from purchased energy
Emissions from generating the electricity, steam, heating and cooling you buy for your own use, for example the electricity for an office or site.
Scope 3: all other indirect emissions
Emissions across your value chain that you don’t directly control but still have to measure. Scope 3 is split into 15 categories. Categories 1 to 8 are upstream (what you buy) and categories 9 to 15 are downstream (what happens to your goods after they leave your operation, such as how they are transported and used). For most businesses, Scope 3 is by far the largest part of the footprint.
Cat. | Upstream (Scope 3) | Cat. | Downstream (Scope 3) |
1 | Purchased goods and services | 9 | Downstream transportation and distribution |
2 | Capital goods | 10 | Processing of sold products |
3 | Fuel- and energy-related activities | 11 | Use of sold products |
4 | Upstream transportation and distribution | 12 | End-of-life treatment of sold products |
5 | Waste generated in operations | 13 | Downstream leased assets |
6 | Business travel | 14 | Franchises |
7 | Employee commuting | 15 | Investments |
8 | Upstream leased assets |
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