What carbon accounting actually is.
Most explanations of this are written for people who already understand it. This one is not. No jargon, no assumed knowledge, and a few things you can try yourself.
The one-sentence version
Carbon accounting is counting the greenhouse gases a business is responsible for, using the same discipline you would apply to money: defined boundaries, source documents, consistent methods, and a number someone else can check.
That last part is what makes it accounting rather than estimating. Anyone can produce a figure. The question is whether it survives being examined.
Why it exists at all
Governments and large companies have committed to reducing emissions. You cannot reduce what you have not measured, and you cannot compare two companies unless they count the same way. So a common method was agreed — the Greenhouse Gas Protocol — and it is now the basis of nearly every reporting rule in the world.
How a number is actually produced
Every emissions figure in the world comes from the same simple sum. Change the inputs below and watch it work.
This one counts as Scope 1
Activity data
What your business actually did, in physical units. Litres of fuel, kilowatt hours, kilograms bought, tonne-kilometres shipped. This comes from your own records — meter readings, invoices, fuel logs.
Emission factor
How much greenhouse gas one unit of that activity produces. Published by governments and research bodies. Crucially, it differs by country — a kilowatt hour in Ghana is not the same as a kilowatt hour in Poland.
CO₂e
Carbon dioxide equivalent. Several gases cause warming at different strengths, so they are all converted into the equivalent amount of CO₂ to give one comparable number.
The three scopes
Emissions are sorted into three buckets, based on how close they are to your control. This is where most confusion lives.
Scope 1 — what you burn
Fuel combusted in equipment you own or control: generators, boilers, your own vehicle fleet. Also gases that leak directly from your equipment, such as refrigerants. If the burning happens on your site, in your machine, it is Scope 1.
Scope 2 — the energy you buy
Electricity, steam or cooling you purchase. Someone else burned the fuel, at a power station, but they did it to make energy you consumed. This is usually the easiest scope to calculate, because you have the bills.
Scope 3 — everything else you cause
The emissions of your suppliers making what you buy, the transport of your goods, your staff commuting and flying, waste you send away, and what happens when customers use your product. You do not control any of it directly, but your business caused it.
Scope 3 is routinely more than 90% of a company's total footprint. It is also the part almost nobody can measure, because the data sits inside other companies.
Which scope is it?
Eight quick ones. Most people who work with this every day get two wrong.
Question 1 of 8
0 out of 8
Why the grid matters so much
The same factory, producing the same goods, has a different carbon number depending on which country's electricity it runs on. Drag to change how much power you use.
Same output. Same machines. A difference of 1,020 tonnes of CO₂e a year, purely because of where the electricity came from.
Illustrative figures, for showing the shape of the difference rather than for use in a report. Published estimates of Ghana's grid intensity vary by source and year — Ember and the IEA both publish national figures, and Baseline maintains its own. Use a sourced, dated factor for anything you file.
This is the part worth sitting with. Producing in Ghana is, on this measure, a genuine commercial advantage. It only counts if you can document it — and if you cannot, buyers apply a default value that assumes the worse case.
Why this arrived in Ghana
Three pressures, none of which came from Ghanaian regulation.
Your buyers
The largest companies in Europe are required to report their own Scope 3, and your emissions are their Scope 3. The EU narrowed that obligation sharply in March 2026 — roughly 80% of the companies originally captured are now out of scope — but the ones that remain are precisely the large buyers, and they still push the request down the chain. It reaches you as a questionnaire from procurement.
Carbon at the border
Since January 2026 the EU charges importers for the carbon embedded in certain goods — cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen, with metal-intensive finished goods proposed to follow from 2028. The first payment falls due in September 2027. That turns your emissions into a cost your customer carries, which gives them a direct reason to prefer suppliers with lower, provable numbers.
Money
Banks and investors increasingly price climate risk into lending. A company that cannot describe its own exposure gets assessed on assumptions, and the assumptions are rarely generous.
That is the whole idea.
Measure what you burn, what you buy, and what your supply chain does on your behalf. Keep the evidence. Be able to show your working.
The first two are manageable on your own. The third is what we built Baseline for.