The headline number
Your total footprint is expressed in tonnes of CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent) for the assessment period. CO₂e rolls all greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, refrigerants, and others — into one comparable unit, so a single number can describe your whole footprint. Two things to keep in mind when reading it:- The number is only meaningful alongside its boundary. “120 tCO₂e” means nothing without knowing what period and which operations it covers. When you share the number, share the boundary with it.
- Comparisons matter more than the absolute figure. Year-on-year direction, and the split between categories, drive decisions. The raw total mostly matters for reporting.
The scope breakdown
Results are split across Scope 1, 2, and 3 following the GHG Protocol. For most service businesses, events, and SMEs, expect Scope 3 to dominate — often the large majority of the footprint. That’s normal, not a data error. It reflects that most modern organisations’ impact sits in what they buy, not what they burn. If Scope 1 and 2 look small, that’s usually accurate. If Scope 3 looks small, it’s more often a coverage gap than a genuinely small supply chain — check whether your ledger period is complete.The category breakdown
This is the view that drives action. Categories (electricity, flights, freight, purchased goods and services, waste, and so on) show you where the footprint actually comes from, and they’re almost always concentrated: a handful of categories typically account for most of the total. How to work with it:- Identify your top three categories. They’re your reduction agenda. Effort spent anywhere else has limited payoff until these move.
- Check data quality on those three first. If a top category is running on spend-based estimates, upgrading it to activity data is the single best improvement you can make to accuracy.
- Ignore the long tail, deliberately. Categories contributing a fraction of a percent don’t warrant better data or reduction effort yet. Concentration is your friend.
Comparing over time
Once you’ve run more than one assessment, comparisons unlock:- Year-on-year for organisations — is the footprint moving in the right direction, and which categories drove the change?
- Event-to-event for recurring events — the most useful benchmark an event organiser has is its own previous edition.
When comparing periods, watch for boundary changes. If you added a site, an entity, or a new data source between assessments, the totals aren’t directly comparable — compare the categories that were consistently measured instead.