A strong and credible methodology to assess your carbon footprint developed by one of Australia's leading institutions

The Sustain Group employs a hybrid input‐output analysis (IOA) methodology to calculate an organisations supply chain emissions. The advantage of IOA is that it is a technique that quantifies all the economic linkages in an economy, which in turn, can be used to trace and quantify physical indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions. The IOA method was used to calculate the emissions intensities of 115 Australian industries in the development of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). We also use similar data sets that are specific to Europe and the United States. 

IOA is the only methodology that can comprehensively estimate full Scope 3 emissions. All other methodologies involve a “truncation error”, which stems from it being impossible to manually account for emissions from every single supplier, and their suppliers, and their suppliers’ suppliers, and so on 

The hybrid extension of IOA involves specifically including information from suppliers in the IOA framework, as well as from other appropriate data sources (such as life cycle inventories). This hybrid technique contains the advantages of the complete coverage of IOA, and the specificity of using real supplier information, or reliable life cycle data. The challenge with hybridising is to correctly combine the data from the three sources, given that it is unlikely that any suppliers will have published accurate assessments of their Scope 3 emissions, and even the Scope 1 and 2 emissions of all major suppliers will not be known directly. A further advantage of the hybrid IOA method is that it can include estimates of supply chain emissions from the provision of services, which in many cases can be significant, and are not always considered.  

The Sustain Group uses two specific tools to calculate and validate an organisations carbon footprint. For Australian based organisations we use a series of Input Output tools first developed by the University of Sydney’s Integrated Sustainability Analysis Research Group. It is an internationally accepted accounting procedure that tracks all monetary flows to and from 344 economic sectors in the Australian economy. It is governed by United Nations Standards and more specifically, the Input Output tables as published regularly by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The methods integrate the structure and function of the financial economy with other national physical accounts such as energy, greenhouse emissions, water, land disturbance, employment and so on to account for the social and environmental, as well as the economic impacts of operating a business. The analysis determines the total greenhouse gas emissions commensurate with your businesses expenditure in each sector. In essence our method is able to effectively calculate your carbon footprint. The other important use this method has is the fact it is not restricted to one or other element of a business, it encompasses the entire business, a project or a product and services. The Sustain Team is also able to go much further and assess specific sites, individuals or groups within a supply chain.

Because large organisations operate a series of simple and complex supply chains domestically and globally, we are able to take the model further by assessing the specific impacts and intensity of suppliers who reside in a multitude of jurisdictions. Our method automatically calculates the greenhouse gas emissions throughout the entire supply chain and therefore covers:

§   Scope 1 emissions

§   Scope 2 emissions

§   Scope 3 emissions 

If you would like to find out more about this particular methodology please call and speak with a consultant today on +61 2 9016 4278