FOOTPRINTS FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability cannot be reduced to carbon emissions. The strong current focus on carbon emissions may be an opportunity for other environmental indicators to be developed and adopted, in the sense that platforms and accumulated experience related to carbon footprinting can be beneficial.

- Dr. Pranjal Kumar Phukan

Climate change is a key issue in sustainability, as it may lead to dangerous increases in temperature and sea level, flooding, droughts, etc. Scientists all over the world are providing information supporting the fact that the climate is changing and that this change is partly due to human activities through the release of greenhouse gases (GHGs). “Carbon” is often used as shorthand for GHGs, as carbon dioxide is the main GHG released by human activities. As a consequence, the activity of measuring GHG emissions is often referred to as carbon footprinting.

A carbon footprint may concern an organisation, a value chain, or a product as per Carbon Trust 2014. The organisational carbon footprint accounts for emissions from all activities across an organisation (including building energy use, industrial processes, and the company’s vehicles). The value chain carbon footprint includes also emissions outside the organisation’s own operations (i.e., emissions from both suppliers and consumers, including product use and end-of-life emissions). Finally, the product carbon footprint includes emissions over the whole life cycle of a given unit of product or service, from the extraction of raw materials and manufacturing to its use and final reuse, recycling, or disposal.