Understanding a Carbon Report: What are scopes 1, 2, and 3?

The climate emergency is finally shaking up our society: national and international climate objectives are becoming more evident, programs aiming at global carbon neutrality are multiplying and laws aiming at limiting gas emissions are appearing on all sides. The business world has not escaped this revolution. Indeed, more and more companies are committing, voluntarily or by obligation, to report their emissions and to reduce them. These carbon reports are now very frequent and standardized.

What is included in a corporate carbon report?

The GHG Protocol, a 20-year partnership between World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) was the first organization to define reporting standards for greenhouse gas emissions, particularly for companies. All information related to corporate carbon reporting can be found here.

A company's carbon report describes in detail all the emissions related to the company's activities along the entire value chain. The major difficulty is to determine the boundaries of the emissions’ reporting scope and to assign responsibility to the right organization. Or put more crudely, to determine to what extent one counts and how far one is responsible. For this purpose, the GHG Protocol has defined some concepts of boundaries and scopes of emissions.

« The major difficulty when it comes to carbon accounting
is to determine the boundaries of the emissions reporting scope,
and to assign responsibility to the right organisation »

What are the boundaries and scope of emissions?

Initially, an organisation has to define the organisational boundaries, which are the physical sites, goods and facilities taken into account in the carbon report. Defining the organisational boundaries can be tricky for complex organisations with, for example, shares in or control of another organisation. However, for most organisations, this part is quite intuitive.

Then, the company has to define the sources of emissions that will be taken into account in the calculation method.
These sources are divided into 3 scopes of emissions:

« Generally, the responsibility for Scope 1 and 2 emissions
is attributed to the reporting company  »

For example, company X uses a third-party transportation company Y to make deliveries of its product. The emissions from the delivery trucks are part of company Y's Scope 1 and company X's Scope 3. The responsibility for these emissions is therefore attributed to the delivery company Y. However, Company X can reduce these transportation emissions by using less heavy and efficient packaging, choosing another greener transportation company that uses electric trucks,... It can also be pointed out that one's scope 1 and 2 are another one's scope 3.

The 3 scopes of emissions are themself divided into 23 emission categories, allowing you to precisely target the GHG flows within your organization. Those categories are represented in the following figure.

Tapio - Methodology

The objective of scope separation is to determine who is responsible for a source of emissions. But more importantly to include all significant emissions linked to a company's activities through the entire value chain of a product and on which it can have a reduction impact. This is the reason why it is an essential element found among all public carbon reports.

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Now what? Wonder what's the next step after carrying out your carbon report? Or you would like to start the exercise of doing a carbon report. At Tapio, we address these problems through our all-in-oneCarbon Strategy Platform. We make it easy and cost-effective to manage your carbon emissions by facilitating the aggregation of the data, with an overview of your carbon emissions, we give you the foundations on which to take action.