Greenhouse Gas Accounting and Verification Consultancy

What GHG is usually taken with

Few organisations stop at one standard, and the second costs far less than the first — the clauses that take longest are the ones they share. Where GHG sits next to something else, this is what carries over.

• ISO 14001 consultancy — shares clauses 4 to 10 with this standard, so context, leadership, competence, internal audit and management review are built once and audited together.
• ISO 14064 consultancy — shares clauses 4 to 10 with this standard, so context, leadership, competence, internal audit and management review are built once and audited together.

Certified to more than one, you hold a single management system with one set of objectives, one internal audit programme and one management review — audited in one visit. Run as separate systems they cost roughly twice as much to keep, which is the usual reason a second certificate feels harder than it was.

Counting emissions in a way that stands up to scrutiny

A greenhouse gas inventory is a structured account of the emissions your organisation causes, split into direct combustion and process emissions, purchased energy, and the wider value chain. The methods come from the GHG Protocol and the ISO 14064 series. Requests arrive from several directions at once: listed company disclosure rules, customers passing their own reporting burden down the supply chain, lenders assessing transition risk, and tender documents that now ask for a footprint figure alongside price.

Who asks varies by market. In India, large listed companies report under BRSR and increasingly push the question to their suppliers. Exporters to the European Union face carbon border reporting on goods such as cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertiliser, electricity and hydrogen. Multinational buyers want Scope 3 data from anyone they purchase from. The common thread is that someone outside your organisation wants a number they can rely on, which means it has to trace back to meter readings, invoices and production records.

Building the inventory, source by source

Work starts with boundaries. We fix the organisational boundary, decide between operational control and equity share, then list every emission source at every site. After that comes data collection: electricity bills, diesel and furnace oil purchases, refrigerant top ups, process chemistry, company vehicles, and for Scope 3, procurement and logistics records. Most of the effort sits here, because the data usually lives in five different systems and nobody has ever pulled it together for a full financial year.

Then we calculate. Activity data is paired with emission factors chosen for the country and the fuel, converted to carbon dioxide equivalent using published global warming potentials, and documented so every figure can be reproduced. We write the methodology down, set out where the uncertainty sits, and build a workbook your own team can run next year without us. Where third party verification is wanted, we prepare the evidence pack and support you through the verifier's questions rather than answering them on your behalf.

The inventory report and what it lets you claim

You end up with a base year inventory, a methodology document, a data collection procedure with named owners, and a report structured for whoever asked for it. If verification is in scope, an independent verification body issues the assurance statement. We do not verify our own calculations, and no consultant should. The workbook matters more than the report, because it is what turns a one off exercise into an annual number your finance team is willing to sign.

What changes is the conversation. Once the sources are quantified you can usually see that a handful of them carry most of the total, which makes reduction planning an engineering discussion instead of a guessing game. Target setting becomes possible, because you finally have a baseline. Tender responses stop being awkward. And the second year costs a fraction of the first, since the boundary, the factors and the data routes are already fixed and only the numbers change.