One of the first steps towards becoming more sustainable is knowing where you currently stand in terms of your emissions. Calculating this may seem like a mammoth task, especially if you have multiple sites or assets such as company vehicles to keep track of. David Algar joins Mel today to discuss how to calculate your Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, starting from Establishing boundaries through to number crunching and quantification. What is the first step when embarking on quantifying your GHG emissions? One of the first steps is getting leadership commitment - This allows for quicker decision making and the allocation of roles and responsibilities, which really helps with the data collection Once you have this leadership commitment, the next steps is to start establishing boundaries. So how do you define your boundaries? There are 2 ways you define your boundaries as specified in ISO 14064-1: The first are your organisational boundaries, you’ll need to outline which facilities are included within the quantification. It is not as simple as just saying ‘everything’, you’ll need to specify which sites, buildings, factories etc You can define your organisational boundaries via the control approach, so what facilities do you have financial or operation control over? Or the equity share approach, where you account for your portion of emissions and removals from facilities The next step is defining your reporting boundaries. This refers to activities and specific sources of GHGs. Emission sources are split up into 3 categories; Scope 1 – direct emissions from combustion, or leaks, normally at sources you own , Scope 2 – indirect emissions from imported energy, and Scope 3 – all other indirect emissions, these will be from sources you don’t necessarily own or have much control over such as staff commuting, supply chains or emissions from the use of products you manufacture Depending on your organisation, Scope 3 will account for somewhere between 60-80% of your total emissions. How would you recommend going about collecting to data? ISO 14064-1 wants you to have primary data, i.e. data you have collected yourself. Some of the most common sources of the information you’ll need to quantify your emissions include, utilities bills, expense claim, meter readings. What some organisations are doing is sending out simple surveys to staff to gather information on commuting habits or the mix of home and office working. In the real world all the information you need isn’t going to be available, or at least it won’t be available in the way you would like. it’s important to have someone dedicated managing data collection as this may involve multiple sites or international locations. Ideally, you’d start setting a framework to use when going forward and to make sure you can collect the relevant data each year.           Selecting a base year   If this is the first time you have quantified your emissions, it will automatically become your base year. This will be the year you compare future emissions against, and track reductions against, whether they are absolute, or intensity based, such as tonnes of CO2e per employee or product sold You may have to re-visit your base year calculations if new data or more accurate methods arise. A base year review may also be required if there has been a change in organisational boundaries due to a merger or acquisition.   The Number Crunching At the end of the process, we want to see our levels of emissions for each of the Kyoto gases, this will allow us to see emissions as tonnes of CO2 equivalent when each gases’ global warming potential has been taken into account. Some gases can have global warming potentials 200 times or 1,000 times or even over 20,000 times stronger than CO2 on its own, hence why even the smallest leak of can be important, say, from an air conditioning system. We calculate emission from specific sources by using conversion factors. In the UK we are very lucky to have emission co