Carbon Accounting: Essential for Achieving Net-Zero Targets
As the global climate crisis accelerates, businesses face growing pressure to measure, manage and reduce their carbon emissions. Carbon accounting—the process of quantifying greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—is now a critical foundation for any credible sustainability strategy. Like financial accounting, it must be carried out with rigor, transparency and consistency, aligned with international best practices and standards.
By accurately measuring their emissions, organizations can set informed climate goals, identify reduction opportunities and communicate their environmental impact to stakeholders with confidence. Most importantly, carbon accounting enables companies to take concrete steps toward achieving net-zero emissions and managing climate-related financial and operational risks.
Is your business ready to report the carbon footprint?
A carbon footprint refers to the total amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted directly and indirectly by an individual, organization, event, or product throughout its lifecycle. This includes emissions from activities such as energy use, transportation, and production processes. Major frameworks and regulations, such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol), the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), set clear guidelines for carbon footprint reporting.
Core Steps in the Carbon Footprint reporting :
- Define the organizational scope - Determine the reporting period and identify all entities included—such as subsidiaries, joint ventures or investments.
- Establish the reporting boundary - Identify relevant emissions sources, categorize them under Scopes 1, 2, and 3. Scope 3 is further divided into 15 categories, covering the full value chain.
- Collect and validate data -Gather raw input data from operations, facilities, suppliers and purchased goods or services.
- Calculate emissions - Apply the appropriate calculation methodologies and emissions factors, as specified by the relevant standards, to quantify your carbon footprint.
Carbon Reporting : Detailed guidance for Scope 1, 2 & 3 emissions
Carbon reporting is the process of measuring and disclosing an organization's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It involves conducting carbon accounting—quantifying emissions from operations and supply chains—and then reporting the results in a transparent and standardized manner.
The visualization below illustrates the different activity streams to report on:
Data granularity is crucial, especially for Scope 3 emissions, which require detailed information across a range of activities along the value chain. These emissions are largely outside of company's direct control, and there is limited data transparency and traceability. This is where CCH Tagetik Carbon Emission solution adds value – by integrating multiple calculations methodologies incorporated into a single, streamlined platform.
Carbon Emission reporting with element61
Carbon emissions are a critical concern for modern businesses and global regulations mandate to act now. In response, CCH Tagetik has expanded its ESG solution suite—beyond the existing CSRD and EU Taxonomy modules—to include a dedicated Carbon Emissions module. This pre-packaged solution is designed to help organizations measure, calculate, and report their emissions in line with regulatory standards and best practices.
element61 supports organizations through the implementation, leveraging expertise. Our approach ensures seamless integration of data from multiple sources, enabling full traceability and auditability throughout the carbon accounting process. The Carbon Emissions module automatically feeds calculated data into the reporting modules, strengthening the overall process. Full integration with the CSRD module ensures an end-to-end ESG reporting process that is both compliant and future-ready.
CCH Tagetik Carbon Emission Solution provides a dedicated Carbon Emissions Analytical Workspace, pre-configured with default dimensions, datasets, and a data transformation package designed to enrich and structure data collection process and specific rules to manage the business process related to the main emission factors databases included in the solution. A standard end-to-end workflow that reflects best practice, consist of the following key phases -
Base settings - This phase focuses on defining the required level of granularity for disclosures and output reports. It starts with configuring a set of predefined analytical dimensions, along with the unit of measure and the calculation methods for Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.
Emission Factors - In this phase, the setup of emission factors, exchange rates, inflation rates, and the mapping of emission factors per level and per method is carried out for each category of Scope 1, 2 and 3.
Data Collection – For each Scope 1, 2, and 3 category, there is a dedicated data entry report to support the data collection phase. While these reports share a consistent structure, the editable fields may vary based on the calculation method applied. Fields become editable depending on the selected calculation approach.
Calculation – In this phase all the configurations are applied and emission produced in the different gases are calculated.
Output Reports – Pre-built reports are available to deliver clear insights into GHG emission calculations.
With comprehensive dashboards, carbon emissions tracking becomes a powerful step towards achieving net zero goals.
Embracing the challenge of not only calculating and reporting, but monitoring and guiding your company towards a more sustainable future.
element61 is Platinum Partner with CCH Tagetik, don't hesitate to contact us for more information.