Measuring Scope 1 and 2 Without Buying a System

The first request usually arrives from a customer, a lender or a tender document: what are your Scope 1 and 2 emissions. For a business that has never measured them, the instinct is to look for software.

Do that second. The first footprint is a data exercise, and the data is in invoices you already have.

Draw the boundary first

Before any numbers, decide what is inside your footprint. Get this wrong and everything downstream is wrong with it.

Two choices. Which entities are included, usually driven by whether you take an equity share approach or a control approach, with control being the common pick for a group because it aligns with the consolidation you already prepare. And which period, which should be your financial year so the footprint can be compared against financial data and audited alongside it.

Write the boundary down. It is the first thing anyone assuring the figure will ask for, and the first thing you will need when a subsidiary is bought or sold and the comparative has to be restated.

Scope 1 is what you burn

Direct emissions from sources you own or control. For most businesses this is a short list.

Gas for heating, from the meter readings on your invoices. Fuel for vehicles you own or lease, from fuel cards and expense claims, in litres rather than pounds spent, because prices move and emissions do not. Any on-site generation or process emissions. And refrigerants, which is the one people forget: the gas topped up in air conditioning and refrigeration units has a very high warming potential, and the figure comes from your maintenance contractor’s service records.

Collect quantities, not costs. A year of gas invoices gives you kilowatt hours. A year of fuel card statements gives you litres. Multiply by the published emission factors for your jurisdiction and year, and keep a note of which factor set you used, because they are revised annually and your comparatives need to be on a consistent basis.

Scope 2 is the electricity you buy

Purchased electricity, heat and steam. Simpler, with one wrinkle worth understanding.

There are two numbers, and the Protocol expects both. Location-based applies the average intensity of the grid you drew from. Market-based reflects what you actually contracted for, so a genuine renewable tariff with the right certificates produces a lower figure.

Companies that report only the market-based number because it is flattering get asked for the other one. Calculate both from the start; the extra work is a second column.

The practical difficulty is usually landlords. In shared or serviced offices you may have no meter of your own. Ask the landlord for your apportioned consumption. If they cannot provide it, estimate from floor area and say so, labelled as an estimate with the basis recorded.

Build it so somebody else can repeat it

The output is a workbook, and its quality is judged on whether a different person can reproduce the number next year.

One row per source per site per month. Columns for the quantity, the unit, the source document, the emission factor, the factor source and the resulting tonnes. A tab listing every factor used with its publication reference. A tab documenting the boundary, the methodology and every estimate made, with the reason.

That last tab is the one that matters. Estimates are entirely acceptable in a first footprint. Undisclosed estimates are not, and an assurance provider will find them.

Expect gaps, and label them

Your first year will have holes. A site with no sub-meter. A vehicle whose fuel went through expenses with no litres recorded. A landlord who does not reply.

Estimate, disclose the estimate, and record what would be needed to replace it with actual data. Then fix the collection for next year: ask for litres on fuel claims, request landlord data in writing each quarter, get the refrigerant log from the maintenance contractor as a standing item.

This is the real return on a first footprint. The number is useful, but the more valuable output is a list of the data you could not get, which tells you precisely what to change before anyone asks you to have it assured.

Then consider software

Once you have done it once by hand you know your sources, your boundary, your gaps and roughly how long it takes. At that point you can judge whether software earns its cost, and you will evaluate it far better, because you will be asking whether it handles your actual sources rather than being shown a demonstration built on somebody else’s.