Dominique Gómez, Cascadia Consulting Inc.

Carbon accounting has become an essential step for any business attempting to reduce its overall carbon footprint. But navigating through pending legislation, registries and offsets can be daunting. Most companies have yet to dedicate full-time staff that can sift through it all and come up with a plan for action.

Understanding some basic concepts can help businesses determine why carbon mitigation is becoming an increasingly important business strategy, and the necessary steps to creating a carbon reduction plan. A necessary starting place, carbon accounting, measures the climate change impact of a business’s operations. 

Often referred to as a carbon footprint, the process entails gathering data on activities such as building energy use and transportation to calculate the total greenhouse gases (GHG) produced over the course of one year. In the process, all GHG are converted into one base metric: carbon dioxide equivalent.

Once a business has determined its carbon footprint, it can identify elements of its daily operations that significantly contribute to climate change. The results of such an analysis provide a business with a plan of action to reduce its footprint.

A business may choose to determine a carbon footprint for many reasons, and their motivations should shape the kinds of tools used to calculate the footprint. These tools will vary in the time and resources required, the accuracy of results and, ultimately, the amount of real feedback they provide based on company-specific information. 

Almost all carbon accounting systems rely on the work of the World Resources Institute, which together with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development created the internationally accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol.