Carbon footprinting
Carbon Accounting
We provide carbon accounting services to organisations of all sizes and types. We help you identify your hotspots and set bold science-aligned targets throughout your supply chain. We are leading experts in supply chain emissions assessment (upstream Scope 3). These are often the hardest emissions to quantify and usually make up the largest portion of a company's emissions.
Measuring your Scope 3 emissions is how you start influencing others through your supply chain, amplifying your positive climate impact.
Our approach is to get the most reliable carbon assessment with the data available. We start with a spend-based footprint, to capture every emission in your supply chain. Then we look at where we can use activity and supplier-specific data to increase the granularity and reflect your unique emissions. Finally we look at where Product Carbon Footprints can be used, first making them comparable with spend-based analysis - mixing these two methods without PCF hybridisation introduces serious errors.
Total Carbon data models
Total Carbon is an approach to carbon accounting that counts absolutely everything in the supply chains of all products and organisations. It allows your supply chain carbon assessments to use both spend-based and Product Carbon Footprint data, without introducing the serious errors that often occur when these two methods are simply mixed together.
Total Carbon has 3 datasets:
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Spend-based emission factors - SWC MRIO
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Truncation error adjustment factors - SWC TEAF
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Hybridised Product Carbon Footprints - system-complete and compatible with spend-based analysis
We publish our methodology, and give your guidance and support to create your system-complete carbon footrpint, with whatever data and resource you have available.
Standards compliant carbon accounting
We make sure your carbon footprint meets leading global and national standards. In some areas we'll take you beyond standards to world-leading best practice and the most reliable reporting to gain the most business benefits from your carbon reports.
What to look for in a carbon accountant
Your carbon accountant should break down your spend data into Scopes 1, 2 and 3. They should be able to show you where they got their data from to calculate their emissions factors, which years they have data for and how they've inflation-adjusted for years that aren't available yet. Each year should have different emissions factors. They should be able to show their methodology and explain any improvements they've made to the data.
And they should be able to explain all of this in a way that anyone can understand.
We are on a mission to push the standards of carbon accounting across the industry and make it fit for purpose.
If you want to check that your carbon accountant is giving you a reliable, robust carbon footprint, we've listed 4 simple questions you can ask them, along with the kind of answers they should be able to give you.
Carbon Reduction
There is no substitute for cutting carbon in line with the science. After setting targets, plans and actions to cut emissions in line with keeping temperature change to within 1.7 degrees, some of our clients also want to fund projects that remove carbon outside of their company and supply chain. We help them to select high-quality nature-based projects that we scrutinise for wider environmental and social responsibility.
Our client work is increasingly focused on the whole sustainability journey. Carbon accounting is simply part of the groundwork. We assist companies with taking a whole system approach and then help them to embed this into the current global context and bigger picture. This work ties in to our Big Picture Thinking and Land, Food and Carbon work.
Our carbon accounting clients
We help organisations such as BT Group, Dishoom, AMRC, Verner Shipley, HKA and many more to monitor and manage their carbon.
We enable city and county councils and National Parks to develop consumption-based carbon budgets, measuring the carbon impacts of residents, visitors and the landscape.
“ The work and methodology applied by the Small World team is probably some of the most refined and rigorous in the corporate GHG reporting landscape.”
Matt Manning, Head of Sustainability, BT Group.
Support for in-house carbon accountants
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Advice on your GHG data inventory, how to check it's comparable and how to improve it over time.
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Easy to use MRIO dataset. No additional calculations needed because our data is already inflation-adjusted, comes with country of supply and demand, and basic and purchase prices.
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Guidance on how to make your carbon assessment more supplier-specific, using activity and Product Carbon Footprint and making them compatible with spend-based data.
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We can check over your carbon footprint report to ensure its accurate and your methodology is sound, giving you confidence to face questions from the board, stakeholders or a full audit.