Corporate Carbon Strategies and Greenhouse Gas Emission Assessments: The Implications of Scope 3 Emission Factor Selection

John Downie and Wendy Stubbs

Business Strategy and the Environment, 2012, vol. 21, issue 6, 412-422

Abstract: Scholars and practitioners acknowledge the benefits of organizations understanding their contribution to global warming and implementing carbon management strategies to address climate change concerns. A key element of a carbon management strategy is to reduce emissions, which requires an assessment of a firm's greenhouse gas emissions. For most organizations the indirect (scope 3) emissions represent the largest portion of their total carbon footprint. When facility‐specific data are not available, firms are encouraged to use standard emission factors to calculate scope 3 emissions. This paper investigates how sampled Australian organizations assess their scope 3 emissions with respect to the emission factors they are using to convert activity data into units of carbon dioxide equivalent emission (CO2‐e), and the implications for producing an accurate emission assessment. The research study found that, where conversion information was not available in a recognized government publication, the use of varying conversion value sources resulted in wide discrepancies in reported emissions for like activities. This undermines the assessment quality, makes comparison of results across organizations difficult and can lead to inappropriate carbon management strategy choices and misallocation of resources. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.1734

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:bstrat:v:21:y:2012:i:6:p:412-422

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://onlinelibrary ... 1002/(ISSN)1099-0836

Access Statistics for this article

Business Strategy and the Environment is currently edited by Richard Welford

More articles in Business Strategy and the Environment from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().