Why the ‘Scope’ of Carbon Emissions Matters

What amount of greenhouse gas emissions is a given company responsible for? That depends on what’s measured — or, to use a term increasingly relied on by regulators, what “scope” of emissions is applied. An oil company’s direct emissions – those from its trucks, drills and facilities – are only a small fraction of the CO2 released when the fuel it sells is burned, just as the ranchers who raise cattle for McDonald’s Corp. generate far more emissions than the company’s offices do. Regulators are taking more or less ambitious approaches to the subject, but many companies around the world will soon find themselves required to make an accounting based on the scope framework.

It’s a method of tallying a company’s impact on climate change, using three categories to account for the various ways that companies can pollute the atmosphere. Under what’s known as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, emissions are classed as Scope 1, 2 or 3.