How to Calculate Your Company's Carbon Footprint: A Step-by-Step Guide

Calculating your company's carbon footprint is the foundational step in any serious ESG or climate strategy. Without accurate measurement, you cannot set credible reduction targets, assess your CCTS compliance position, respond to BRSR disclosure requirements, or make substantiated carbon neutral claims. The good news is that the methodology is well established and, with the right process, accessible to companies of all sizes.

Step 1: Define Your Organisational Boundary

Before collecting any data, decide which entities and operations are included in your carbon footprint. The two most common approaches are operational control (you include all facilities where you have operational authority, regardless of ownership share) and equity share (you include emissions in proportion to your ownership stake in each entity). Most Indian companies use the operational control approach for BRSR reporting. Your boundary should be documented and applied consistently year over year to enable meaningful trend analysis.

Step 2: Collect Activity Data

Activity data is the raw information that drives your emission calculation — litres of diesel consumed, kilowatt-hours of electricity purchased, tonnes of raw materials used, kilometres driven by company vehicles. For Scope 1, you need fuel consumption records from all combustion sources, process emission data, and refrigerant top-up records. For Scope 2, you need electricity and heat purchase invoices broken down by location. For priority Scope 3 categories, you need supplier data, logistics records, and waste disposal information. The quality of your carbon footprint is entirely dependent on the quality of this underlying activity data.

Step 3: Apply Emission Factors

An emission factor converts your activity data into tonnes of CO2 equivalent. For example, the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) publishes India's national grid emission factor — currently around 0.71 kg CO2e per kWh — which you use to convert your electricity consumption into Scope 2 emissions. IPCC default emission factors are used for most fuel types. For process emissions (cement clinker production, steel making, chemical manufacturing), sector-specific emission factors from recognised databases apply. The resulting number, calculated as activity data multiplied by emission factor and summed across all sources, is your gross carbon footprint in tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Step 4: Verify and Disclose

For BRSR Core disclosure and CCTS compliance, your Scope 1 and Scope 2 figures must be independently verified by an accredited third-party assurance provider. This means your data collection process, boundary definition, methodology choices, and emission factor sources must all be documented in a way that a verifier can audit. Csquare helps Indian companies build GHG inventories that are assurance-ready from day one — saving the rework that comes from building measurement systems without assurance requirements in mind.