Carbon accounting and carbon footprint – more than just diced results?

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the growing public interest in climate protection and the desire for climate‐friendly consumption which has led to a previously unimagined demand for Carbon Labels on products and various approaches to calculating the carbon footprint of firms or individual products.

A principal problem in calculating the carbon footprint is the input required to genuinely map the emissions from cradle to grave, in other words the product life path as is customary in a life cycle assessment. Small‐ and medium‐sized companies especially encounter major problems in practice when trying to calculate their footprint and take aspects of upstream CO₂ emissions from their suppliers into account as well. The different options regarding how to balance and to include these emissions are compared.

Such analyses are indispensable against the background of decreasing vertical integration in industrialised countries. This is the classic question concerning the boundaries of balancing, but here with far‐reaching consequences, as incorrect selection of the limits will also falsify the results and conclusions.

The paper demonstrates that there are new methods that can be used to determine CO₂ emissions in supply chains from stage to stage recursively and simply pass the data on to the next actor in the chain. A company then only needs to take the data from its direct trading partners into account and can dispense with comprehensive life cycle analyses. This would make CO₂ calculations easier but it requires a discussion about the question for what kind of decisions the different approaches are really helpful.