GHG Emissions/Carbon "foot print"

Why are Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Your Company’s Carbon “Foot Print” Important?
A company’s GHG emissions and resulting carbon “foot print” are increasingly becoming an issue in the perception of the general public, shareholders of publically held businesses, and the emergence of environmental regulations/policies designed to reduce GHG emissions. In addition, your carbon “foot print” is a surrogate for your energy expenditures. Reducing your “foot print” can lead to a reduction in your energy bill.

In an effort to curb GHG emissions from business, market-based approaches are also emerging in some parts of the world which involve trading emissions on both a mandatory and voluntary basis. The European Union GHG Emissions Allowance Trading Scheme will require each Member State to impose binding caps on emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from certain industrial installations. The UK and the Chicago Climate Exchange have offered voluntary emissions trading opportunities. While trading programs typically focus on business operations in a specified geographical region, some companies are setting voluntary GHG reduction targets (see Figure 1) for their global operations. These targets may be set independently by the company or as part of a formal program such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Climate Savers, Business Leaders Initiative on Climate Change, and EPA Climate Leaders program.

What is the next step?
A GHG inventory is a list of your business or organization’s GHG emissions sources and their quantities. As you begin planning your GHG inventory, you’ll need to set your “organizational” and “operational” boundaries. An organizational boundary defines the facilities/entities that you’ll include in your inventory. An operational boundary defines which emissions-producing activities will be part of your inventory. Some examples could be emissions from manufacturing, business travel and electricity use. In order to participate in the mandatory and voluntary programs that are on their way, businesses need to first establish a robust and credible GHG inventory system for accounting and reporting their GHG emissions. The existing GHG accounting systems are based on common standards. For external stakeholders, they improve the consistency, transparency and understandability of reported information, making it easier to track and compare progress over time. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative (GHG Protocol) is a multi-stakeholder partnership of businesses, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and others convened by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a US-based environmental NGO, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), a Geneva-based coalition of 165 international companies.

The standard was designed to serve multiple business goals and addressees a range of accounting issues, such as:

• Defining GHG accounting and reporting boundaries;
• Accounting and consolidating emissions from partially owned entities such as joint ventures;
• Calculating emissions from specific sources;
• Tracking performance over time in a dynamic business environment (e.g., mergers, acquisitions and divestitures etc.);
• Setting GHG reduction targets; and
• Publicly reporting GHG emissions.

The GHG Protocol corporate standard has been widely adopted around the globe, with more than 100 companies using it to compile a GHG emissions inventory. The standard has been used as the basis for the accounting and reporting systems of numerous climate programs, including: US EPA's Climate Leaders program, WWF's Climate Savers program, California Climate Action Registry, World Economic Forum Global GHG Registry, the UK's emissions trading scheme, Chicago Climate Exchange, and the French REGES Protocol.

How can FY Consulting help?
FY Consulting can help you develop a GHG inventory for your site or your multisite operation using the GHG Protocol. We will help you set your organizational and operational boundaries. We will collect activity data and an emissions factors specific to your situation and summarize this in a report that describes your carbon “foot print”.

Ongoing reporting can be arranged so you can track performance over time. We can also review your current energy management program and make recommendations for reducing your energy usage and resulting carbon “foot print”.

For additional information, contact Frank Yazhari at 908 874 7466 or frank@fyconsulting.com.