Session
TU.2.D || Sustainability Assessments in Industry Creating Meaningful Information
Authors
Tesch, Jasmin; Forin, Silvia
Abstract
In the context of climate change adaptation and mitigation, companies increasingly report their life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Once the carbon footprint is calculated, two main questions arise in most companies: 1. Where do we stand in comparison to our competitors? 2. How can we motivate our suppliers to do better – and by this helping us to improve our overall performance? We take the activity categorization of the most widespread reporting standard, the GHG Protocol, as a starting point, and calculate an industry’s average scope 1, 2 and upstream scope 3 emissions by linking financial data to macroeconomic data and emission factors. This is done by means of an environmentally extended Input-Output Model primary based on EXIOBASE (1), WIOD (2) and EORA (3). This procedure allows generating benchmarks for the cradle-to-gate emissions of 57 industries in 188 countries. To gain deeper insights into the contribution of upstream activities, the scope 3 activity categorization proposed by the GHG Protocol is depicted in the model. This allows to attribute upstream emissions to “Purchased goods and services”, “Fuel and energy related activities”, “Upstream transportation” and “Waste generated in operations”. The broad category “Purchased Goods and Services” can be further disaggregated into the industrial sectors to which purchased materials are related, thus building a bridge between high-level carbon accounting and available LCA results at the product level. This way, supplier-level data can be benchmarked to data at the macrolevel, supporting supply chain transparency and target setting. We would appreciate the opportunity to provide insights into our model and examples for the so obtained benchmarks and their use in practice. (1) www.exiobase.eu (2) http://www.wiod.org/database/wiots16 (3) https://www.worldmrio.com/