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Life Cycle Assessment: Principles, Practice and Prospects
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Gas Protocol in turn provides a more ambitious approach. If one standard is met, the other is
also likely to be met.
The following elements are common to both ISO 14064 and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol:
s determining the boundaries for greenhouse gas accounting – the Greenhouse Gas
Protocol gives more guidance and examples than ISO 14064
s classification of emissions – although named differently in ISO 14064, the classifica-
tions are broadly similar to those provided by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol with more
guidance
s identification and calculation of greenhouse gas emissions
s rules for changing base year inventories
s rules for tracking emissions over time
s rules for assessing uncertainty
s rules for greenhouse gas reporting.
Given the urgency of the need for effective carbon management, both the presence of
carbon accounting standards and the methodological history of LCA are considerable assets.
In Australia’s National Greenhouse Factors report (Department of Climate Change 2008),
based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, emissions are classified as:
s scope 1, or direct emissions from within the boundary of an organisation such as fuel
combustion
s scope 2, or indirect emissions from the consumption of purchased electricity
s scope 3, which includes other indirect emissions that are a consequence of an
organisation’s activities, such as the extraction and transport of fuels included in scopes
1 and 2, losses in the delivery of electricity, travel and transportation of products, and
any other products or services consumed by an organisation.
Users of this framework have difficulty deciding which scope 3 emissions to include in
reporting, beyond those associated with the delivery of fuels. For example, for an employee
embarking on air travel for business, the emissions are generated in the course of making a
financial profit and therefore, it can be argued, are just as important as electricity used directly
to manufacture a product. However, the emissions generated by the flight are the responsibil-
ity of the airline operating the service, as they are covered under scope 1 emissions for the
airline. These difficulties in deciding what to include and exclude under scope 3 emissions can
lead to quite different total carbon emissions – and also potentially to double counting.
However, LCA can solve this dilemma by first providing a functional basis to the measure-
ment. The extent to which things are included depends on their connection to the functional
delivery. The issue of double counting is avoided, as emissions are followed along supply chains.
Each part of the chain includes all emissions up to that point in the supply chain. Each step
includes its ‘own’ emissions and those of all suppliers. The Goods and Services Tax (GST)
system in most companies works on this principle for calculating taxes payable at any given
point in the chain. Each company only effectively pays for the ‘value addition’ they make to the
product or service, but they are also responsible for data collection regarding the tax from their
inputs. The benefits of this approach are that shared responsibility for emissions provides
improved data quality throughout the chain.
Greenhouse accounting systems provide two distinct reporting approaches for organisa-
tions with joint operations: equity share and control. In the equity share approach, emissions
counted by a company are based on the company’s equity share in the operation under investi-
gation, which will normally be the percentage ownership of the operation. In the control
approach, a company accounts for 100% of emissions from operations over which it has either

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