The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is the world’s most widely used greenhouse gas accounting standard.
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative is a multi-stakeholder partnership of businesses, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), governments, and others convened by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a U.S.-based environmental NGO, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), a Geneva-based coalition of 170 international companies. Launched in 1998, the Initiative's mission is to develop internationally accepted greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting and reporting standards for business and to promote their broad adoption.
GHG Protocol overview
The GHG Protocol splits carbon emissions into different scopes related to the company's activity.
The figure above displays the different activities encompassed by each scope of the GHG protocol. These activities are categorised into scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, as described below:
- Scope 1: Emissions associated with fuel combustion directly onsite or within company vehicles and direct emissions released during production or processing by an organisation.
- Scope 2: Emissions associated with purchased electricity, heat and steam. These are considered linked to the operational emissions, but indirectly as the emissions are generated at the point of combustion, not at the point of use at the company facilities.
- Scope 3: Emissions associated with indirect activities. These can be split into 16 individual categories, including upstream and downstream emissions as follows:
- Upstream scope 3: All GHG emissions from the supply chain and associated cradle-to-gate activities. This includes purchased goods and services, capital goods, transmission and distribution emissions of fuel and electricity use, and transport and distribution of goods (both inbound, such as suppliers bringing materials to the company, and outbound, with the distribution of final product to customers). The corporate footprint also includes wider expenditure, employee commuting and business travel.
- Downstream scope 3: GHG emissions are associated with the life cycle of any products or materials produced by the company after the point of sale. This includes ongoing processing, use of product and end-of-life (disposal/recovery of products when no longer needed).
- Please note that the scopes we calculate will depend on your company or customer's agreement with Emitwise and may not include all categories.