Carbon footprint

What it means

A carbon footprint is the volume of greenhouse gases attributable to a company, a product or an event, converted into CO2 equivalent. It is neither energy consumption nor an environmental certificate.

It splits into three scopes: own fuel burning, purchased electricity and heat, and the supply chain. A CSRD report covers all three, but the third is usually the largest and the hardest to evidence, because the figures have to be asked of suppliers.

A carbon footprint and carbon neutrality are not the same thing. Buying offset credits does not reduce the footprint, it only sets it against something, so it is shown separately in a report. Whoever shows only the post-offset result in reporting instead of actual emissions gives an incomplete picture.

How it works in practice

A small firm is asked for the number not by the state but by a customer or a bank, who need it for their own ESG report. The raw data sits in the accounts, which is why the question reaches the bookkeeper.

The inputs are energy and freight invoices, the mileage log, fuel receipts and travel orders. Importers of selected commodities report emissions separately under the CBAM regime.

To make the footprint computable from the books, we put energy, fuel and freight on separate analytical accounts and record the quantity alongside each invoice: kilowatt-hours, litres, kilometres. Emission factors are multiplied by quantity, not by the amount in euros.

What to watch out for

A number quoted without its scopes and its period is useless. Two footprints drawn on different boundaries cannot be compared, the customer questionnaire rejects them, and the firm drops out of a tender it prepared for months.

A calculation based only on invoice amounts moves with prices. When energy gets dearer, the footprint rises on paper even though consumption fell, and the firm ends up explaining to a customer an increase that does not exist, or recalculating all previous years to make the figures agree.