Calculating your carbon footprint

Your expert for questions

Ann-Sophie Groos
Manager, Sustainability Services at PwC Germany
Tel: +49 151 20048975
Email

Working together to get you on your way to net zero

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, and companies play a pivotal role in this global change: they are responsible for a large portion of our global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Integrated into a holistic climate strategy, calculating your carbon footprint is the first step to take as a company towards fully understanding your own impact on the climate. Your carbon footprint is the foundation you need to identify targeted emissions reduction measures, and it’s the benchmark for measuring your progress. Carbon footprints, both at company level and for individual products, are also increasingly being mandated by regulations, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. And it doesn’t end there: more and more customers also want GHG information from suppliers, and GHG intensity is increasingly becoming a key criterion for choosing a product, alongside price and quality. This means that calculating carbon footprints for your company and your products also offers long-term economic benefits.

Let’s work together to create a structured approach to reducing global GHG emissions. We use state-of-the-art tools to calculate your GHG emissions, ensuring that your results are auditable from the get-go.

Calculating your carbon footprint in full

Calculating your company’s carbon footprint in full presents a wide variety of challenges.

Obtaining high-quality data
To reflect the reality of business operations, your carbon footprint calculations need to be based on current and reliable data, such as your energy consumption, and the right emission factors. Quantifying the emissions generated in your upstream and downstream value chain (Scope 3) presents a particular challenge, as the relevant data is often passed on in an inconsistent manner and fails to adhere to standard methods or is simply not available at all. 

Choosing your approach
Choosing and using the right methodology for your carbon footprint requires specialist knowledge. It’s often necessary to choose one of several suitable methods and clearly communicate how the decision is made.

Complex global supply chains
For companies with global supply chains, calculating the emissions produced by their entire value chain is a challenge. To overcome this challenge, it’s necessary to work with suppliers and partners around the world to collect data and verify it. Supplier engagement programmes, which are designed to create networks and promote collaboration, are becoming increasingly important in this context.

Reporting and communication
Publishing GHG emissions data is becoming ever more important, whether as a result of new regulations, or investors and customers demanding more climate-related information. Carbon footprints and reporting in line with established methodologies, such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, are becoming increasingly important for meeting these demands.

Transforming your business model
Companies can and should take the transparency created by carbon footprints as an opportunity to review their strategic direction and business model. New technologies, renewable energy sources and more sustainable raw materials are all areas which you should consider investing in on your journey towards net zero. Our experts at PwC can address all these challenges and help you to set up a modern carbon accounting system.

Our promise: tailored carbon footprinting

We developed our modular approach to carbon footprinting over a wide variety of client projects, giving us in-depth expertise in calculating carbon footprints for many different global supply chains, industries and sizes of company.

We’ll show you the fundamentals of calculating a carbon footprint and develop an approach that reflects your corporate structure. This will get you to a position where you’ll be able to measure your own carbon footprint. We’ll also work with you to reduce complexity in your business operations and supply chain and set up an efficient data management system. Our experts know all the best practices in the world of ESG tools, and they’ll help you to make sustainable investments to monitor your carbon footprint.

We also keep new regulations in mind during the carbon footprinting process. This ensures that methods and processes comply with applicable standards, both for calculating emissions (e.g. the Greenhouse Gas Protocol or the Science Based Targets initiative) and for non-financial reporting – e.g. the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), ESRS E-1 in particular.