Total Carbon
What is Total Carbon
Total Carbon is an approach to carbon accounting that counts absolutely everything in the supply chains of all products and organisations. Our method allows your supply chain carbon assessments to use both spend-based and life-cycle analysis data, without introducing the serious errors that often occur when these two methods are simply mixed together.
Total Carbon solves one of the key problems that has plagued carbon footprinting for decades. For the first time, it allows you, routinely, to make comparisons between products, projects, organisations, industries and even nations, in a meaningful way. After decades of muddled methods throughout the industry, Total Carbon makes the practice of carbon footprinting fit for the needs of a rapidly decarbonising world.
Total Carbon makes your carbon accounting more valuable
Total Carbon increases the realism of the results that you will obtain, for any given level of resource that you have available for your carbon assessment. It will improve your ability to identify hotspots within your supply chains.
Using Total Carbon makes the exercise of carbon accounting more practical and more valuable for organisations of every type.
What is the Total Carbon package?
Total Carbon offers three datasets, underpinned by a transparent and robust methodology, and guidance on how to use our datasets for your carbon footprinting in a practical and robust way.
Uniquely and importantly, all emission factors in the datasets adhere to the same system boundary of including the entire supply chain without truncation. (All traditional life cycle analyses contain truncation errors, which result from their inability to follow every supply chain pathway, and usually result in a serious underestimation of the total carbon emissions.)
The 3 Total Carbon datasets
Spend-based emission factors: SWC MRIO
We give you a comprehensive global set of over 250,000 spend-based emissions factors.
Drawn from our multi-regional input-output model (MRIO) which, unlike many others, is robust, has a fully transparent methodology, draws entirely on publicly available source data and has been carefully sense-checked for the realism of the emissions factors it produces.
Unlike other spend-based datasets, the emissions factors in our SWC MRIO give you more realism by allowing you to match your purchase data to the most appropriate factors based on critical variables such as:
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If you know the country of supply or only the country of demand of the purchase.
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Whether your spend includes taxes, subsidies.
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Whether you purchased directly from the supplier or from a wholesaler or retailer.
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Whether your whole analysis includes or excludes emissions included in capital goods and infrastructure.
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Whether or not you wish to include in your analysis beyond C02 climate impacts from aviation, such as those produced by contrails.
The SWC MRIO dataset also splits each emission factor into your suppliers’ Scope 1, 2 and supply chain Scope 3 components. This is important because it allows you to readily substitute your suppliers’ Scope 1 and 2 emissions into your analysis for greater specificity, where this data is available (for example, from CDP).
Total Carbons Principles
1. Count everything
Analysis of company and product supply chains (upstream scope 3) and resulting emissions intensity factors must be system-complete without double-counting. To put it simply, this just means always counting everything in the supply chains of all goods, services and companies.
(Without this principle, carbon accounting is like asking someone how much they weigh without knowing which body parts they are including in their answer, or whether clothing and luggage is in or out. The inability of traditional lifecycle analysis to follow all supply chain pathways results in a serious systematic underestimation, known as truncation error. It is a show-stopping problem, not addressed by many practitioners but is well understood in the academic community – not as a theoretical issue, but as a practical show-stopping problem for those seeking realistic management information.
In the carbon accounting industry there is still very widespread use of emissions factors that are drawn from traditional truncated life cycle analyses that do not honour the principle of counting everything.
2. Transparency
You should be able to see how any emission factors you use have been made.
Spend-based emissions factors should be drawn from models that have a fully transparent methodology, available for scrutiny in detail, and should use publicly available, trustworthy datasets.
PCF emissions factors should also have a transparent methodology that explains core assumptions, secondary emissions factors used and how calculations were made. Ideally, it should be possible to check the calculations.
3. Independence
Research and analysis should be as independent as possible from interests that could gain from particular results. Any direct or indirect interests must be clearly declared. This includes PCFs or LCAs produced by or sponsored by commercial interests.
4. Practicality
Emissions factors should be readily available and affordable for all users, with guidance on best-practice use and application. Users should expect to support the maintenance and evolution of high-quality methods, guidance and datasets.
(Total Carbon requires resource for its creation, and iterative improvement, and this will require reliable funding, which at the moment means charging a realistic and affordable-for-all fee for datasets.)
5. Continuous improvement
The field of carbon accounting is improving to meet the needs of a decarbonising world. It is important to track progress as well as benefit from improvements in best practice and data.
Total Carbon allows you to make use of more specific data as it becomes available, whether spend, activity or product based. It allows you to track progress against a baseline at the same time as moving with improving practice.
