Preparing for your verification session
Emissions boundary
Greenhouse gases (GHG) are emitted from various activities, including heating and cooling buildings, travelling to meetings, or shipping products to consumers. The GHG Protocol Corporate Standard classifies a company’s GHG emissions into three ‘scopes’. Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions from owned or controlled sources. Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy. Scope 3 emissions are all indirect emissions (not included in scope 2) that occur in the value chain of your organisation, including both upstream and downstream emissions.
What do you need to include in your emissions boundary?
This is dependent on your company’s current business goal.
- For carbon neutral certification, you are required to include all direct GHG emissions and all electricity indirect GHG emissions and other indirect GHG emissions will be assessed against the GHG protocol relevance test
- For measurement, it is driven by your organisations' ambition of scope of measurement.
Be prepared to provide information
Verification of your emissions boundary is completed by assessing the emission sources on the platform against various sources of supporting information.
Ahead of your boundary verification, please consider:
- Organisational structure, including parent and child companies,
- All stationary energy and fuels used in buildings, machinery, or vehicles are in the organisation’s control. Including natural gas and fuels used in generators or vehicles.
- Complete value chain map or complete list of activities in the company's value chain, including; purchased and sold goods and services, suppliers and other relevant value chain partners.
Financial information is a reliable indication of an organisation’s activities. Therefore, as part of the verification process, the following will be required:
- Expense Listing (extract from Profit & Loss (P&L) statement) or Trial Balance in Excel format.
- General Ledger (GL) transaction listing (with an appropriate level of transactional mapping to the P&L or Trial Balance) in Excel format.
It is often helpful to involve a member of your finance team as part of the process
Preparing for boundary support
The boundary verification session will give you and the business confidence that your carbon reporting is consistent, comparable, comprehensive, and in line with your reporting goal.
Ahead of your verification session, ensure you:
- Invite your internal project group, including a representative from your finance & operations teams,
- Bring your organisational structure; including any parent and child companies,
- Be ready to share supporting information on each emission source within your emission boundary,
- Provide an Expense Listing (extract from Profit & Loss (P&L) statement or Trial Balance) in Excel format.
The customer success team can assist if you're unsure of your eligibility for verification.
Complete boundary verification
To complete the verification process, each emission source included in your boundary requires an activity data entry and should be marked as “complete”, this includes:
- Entering activity data such as spend and kWh consumed
- Uploading evidence such as a P&L and energy bills
- Comments for additional context, for example, when a source had no spend in a given reporting period, this requires an explanation e.g. due to the COVID-19 lockdown during 2022, there was reduced air travel.