Corporate Carbon Footprint

A Corporate Carbon Footprint – CCF for short – is a greenhouse gas balance at the level of a company or other organisation. It assigns the greenhouse gas emissions caused during a reporting period, or attributed to the organisation, to defined accounting categories.

The primary methodological basis for Corporate Carbon Footprints is the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. In the version applicable at the time of publication, natureOffice relies in particular on:

Relevance: The assessment boundary and the emission sources included must adequately reflect the actual activities and economic relations of the organisation. The balance sheet should contain the information required for its intended users and decisions.

Before starting the calculation, the subject of the balance sheet and the reporting period are clearly defined.

The organisational boundary determines which companies, investments, locations, and activities are attributed to the CCF. The GHG Protocol allows for various consolidation approaches for this:

Once the organisational boundary has been defined, the emission sources are assigned to three scopes:

- stationary combustion, such as in boilers, furnaces, turbines or emergency generators,

Scope 2 includes emissions from the generation of electricity, steam, heating and cooling purchased or otherwise acquired by the reporting organisation and consumed within its organisational boundary.

Scope 3 represents the other indirect emissions of the upstream and downstream value chain. The GHG Protocol assigns them to 15 categories. These categories must be applied within a company's balance sheet in such a way that no double counting occurs between them.

The calculation is based, as far as possible, on data that reflects the actual activities during the reporting period. The appropriate data source depends on the source of emissions, the intended use, materiality, and availability.

An emission factor connects an activity level with the resulting greenhouse gas emissions. It can contain a single greenhouse gas or a total value already converted into CO₂ equivalents.

If individual gases are calculated separately, the conversion is then carried out as follows:

Completeness does not mean that every emission source must be calculated with the same depth of data. However, it does mean that relevant sources are systematically considered and missing components are disclosed. natureOffice does not currently use flat-rate quantitative cut-offs below which known emission sources are excluded without review.

Every greenhouse gas balance sheet contains uncertainties. They can arise from:

Reporting year The reporting year is the period whose activities are recorded in the current balance sheet.

An annual update of the CCF is recommended, but is not a general obligation. For each new reporting year, current activity data is used and changes in organisation, balance sheet boundary, methods and factors are reviewed.

A lower calculation result is not automatically a real emission reduction. For a reliable statement, the compared balance sheets must be sufficiently comparable in terms of methodology and organisation.

The result is reported in tonnes of CO₂ equivalents and broken down at least as follows:

To ensure that a software result is not confused with a technically audited or externally verified balance sheet, different statuses are clearly designated:

The quality of a CCF depends on the methodical design, the quality of the input data, the correct technical implementation, and comprehensible documentation.

Voluntary project involvement is not part of the CCF calculation. It is optional and is documented separately from the greenhouse gas balance.

The methodology framework is versioned and regularly reviewed. An ad hoc adjustment may become necessary in particular due to: