"Don't do my company's GHG assessment, teach me how to do it instead!"
The proliferation of solutions for carrying out a "GHG assessment in 3 clicks" is worrying consultants specializing in GHG assessments, who have been trained in the historic "Excel" tool developed and improved over many years. This simplification of the realization of a carbon footprint makes them fear a new type of Greenwashing which would result from calculations not in conformity with the Carbon Footprint method.
It is important to take a closer look and understand the definition of the proper execution of a complete and compliant Balance Sheet.
Only the complete application of the "GHG inventory®" method allows a serious calculation of the GHG emissions of companies' activities, and thus to know precisely where and how to act to reduce them. "The downstream carbon of one is always the upstream carbon of the other". It is therefore also imperative to have the same calculation tools.
But the "method" can only be considered as correctly applied if it is implemented by an Excel spreadsheet whose complexity and the numerous possibilities of appropriation, all personal to certain consultants, are recognized by everyone.
Many of the online platforms are just as respectable in their application of the regulations, and some are much more powerful and easier to use. Better ergonomics, multiple databases accessible online, consistency and completeness checks and computing power easily explain this.
To carry out a complete and compliant carbon footprint (scopes 1, 2 and 3): is it really as complex as people have been making out for years?
A complete balance sheet is the inventory of an organization's GHG emissions through three categories, also called scopes. The objective of these scopes is to categorize the greenhouse gas emissions by item or by type of activity of a company.
The three scopes, named 1, 2 and 3 correspond respectively:
- Direct emissions: emissions from fixed or mobile installations located within the organizational perimeter;
- Indirect energy-related emissions: emissions associated with the production of electricity, heat, steam or cold;
- Other indirect emissions.
The integration of all these emissions in a GHG assessment allows for a complete review and then for the implementation of solutions to reduce them.
Even if a balance sheet may seem complex at first glance, there are solutions on the market that allow for a simplified and intuitive approach that is complete, accurate and compliant with regulations.
The GCI platform, a simple, compliant and accessible online solution
The design of the "GHG inventory®" method was financed in 2006 by the ADEME, which associated a powerful spreadsheet for calculations. The use of this spreadsheet requires a few weeks of learning to be mastered.
Before the appearance of online platforms, having your company's GHG assessment done required the intervention of a consultant who was an expert in this spreadsheet to fill in the data necessary to calculate GHG emissions.
This complex approach was naturally expensive and could therefore only be supported by large organizations.
To avoid this cumbersome service, considerably improve the quality of the calculations and significantly reduce the cost of the operation for the company, Global Climate Initiatives (GCI) has invested over the past ten years to digitalize the entire process. Thus, any entity, from small businesses to large corporations, can access the platform and, in complete autonomy, carry out its own GHG assessment.
GCI allows you to understand and fully appropriate the process, to adapt it to your activity, and then, to easily organize and monitor your GHG emissions reduction plan.
➔ The online process of the GCI platform is 100% compliant with all the teachings and requirements of the GHG inventory® method, but also those of the GHG Protocol and the ISO 14063 standard.
➔ Thanks to the tutorials, Faqs, help and online videos completed with a "methodological" hotline, everyone can acquire the perfect mastery of the exercise in less than 4 hours of video training.
How the GCI platform teaches you how to do your company's GHG assessment
In order to help users identify all of their organization's emissions, GCI has decided to ask users to enter their emissions data not just in the three regulatory scopes, but in these seven much clearer ones: Travel, Materials and Services Input, Energy, Refrigerants, Water Consumption, and Waste.
The emissions thus naturally filled in are then computerized and distributed among the 3 expected scopes. The GCI platform service also offers to carry out an audit of the results, and then to detect and simulate avenues for improvement. The company can then focus on reducing the most significant items.
If necessary, the 80 accredited experts, spread throughout France and in several countries, are available, along with GCI's central support services, to answer your questions or help you develop your organization's decarbonization strategy.
The GCI platform therefore provides everyone with the means to simply and completely appropriate this fully operational and regulatory compliant calculation technology.
Propagation: every user of the platform will quickly realize that the performance of his organization's low-carbon trajectory depends essentially on the carbon weight of purchases from suppliers, which account for 50 to 80% of its total emissions. As a result, users will advise their suppliers to commit to a low-carbon or even carbon-neutral trajectory, and if they don't already have a high-performance, competitively-priced tool, to use the GCI platform too.
Everyone quickly understands that the GCI online solution is much more powerful and accurate than any spreadsheet, and structurally more communicative with its internal and external ecosystems, with the added advantage of extremely low cost due to the 100% digitization of the process.
The richness and finesse of the calculations performed, the greater openness to different emission factor databases (Impacts, Defra, Inies, Ecoinvent, etc.), the possibilities for simulating reduction plans, analytical breakdowns, consolidation, waterfall analyses, and the interconnection between GHG Assessments to share emission factors by unit of work - and thus considerably improve the reality of the footprint calculations performed - will complete the process of convincing you to use the GCI platform.
The GCI solution meets the flexibility and efficiency required by business leaders. Who still makes their pay slips with a spreadsheet?
Our thousands of users can attest to the strength and compliance of this "online" approach.
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