Carbon Audits

A carbon audit answers a straightforward question: how much greenhouse gas does your organisation cause, where does it come from, and what would it take to reduce it. We have been doing this work for Australian and New Zealand organisations since 2006.

What an audit gives you

A measured inventory rather than an estimate. Emissions attributed to the parts of the business that cause them, so the result is useful to the people able to act on it. And a clear view of which reduction opportunities are worth pursuing first, on cost as well as on tonnes.

Most clients come to us for one of four reasons: a board or parent body has asked for a baseline, a customer or tender has requested emissions data, a reporting obligation is approaching, or someone internally wants to reduce emissions and needs to know where to begin.

What we measure

Inventories are prepared in accordance with the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard and ISO 14064-1, using Australian national emission factors where they apply.

  • Scope 1 — direct combustion under your control: reticulated gas, LPG, diesel and petrol in stationary equipment, fleet fuel, heating oil, and refrigerant loss from air conditioning and refrigeration.
  • Scope 2 — purchased electricity, reported location-based and, where you hold GreenPower or surrendered certificates, market-based as well.
  • Scope 3 — value chain emissions, scoped to what is material to your organisation.

Refrigerants are worth particular attention. They are often reported as zero by default, which is rarely accurate in a portfolio with significant air conditioning or cold storage.

Scope 3

Scope 3 requires a deliberate approach if it is to stay proportionate. We begin with a materiality assessment across the fifteen GHG Protocol categories, establishing which are significant for your business and documenting the basis on which others are screened out.

The categories that usually matter are purchased goods and services, business travel, employee commuting, waste, upstream transport and distribution, and leased assets. Where procurement spend dominates, we can work from spend data initially and move to supplier-specific data for the suppliers that drive the footprint. More detail is on our supply chain analysis page.

How the work runs

  1. Scoping. Organisational boundary, reporting period, which sites and entities are included, and which Scope 3 categories are material. Getting this settled at the outset avoids rework later.
  2. Data collection. We work from source records — meter data, retailer accounts, supplier statements, fleet and fuel card records, finance system extracts — and take on the collection work ourselves wherever we can.
  3. Calculation and review. Activity data converted using published energy content and emission factors, with the method and factor recorded against every line, and anomalies queried and resolved.
  4. Reporting and briefing. The inventory, the analysis, and a session with the people who need to act on it or sign it off.

What you receive

  • Emissions inventory report — Scope 1, 2 and material Scope 3, broken down by site, entity and source.
  • Benchmarking and emissions intensity — emissions per FTE, per square metre, per unit of output or per dollar of revenue, so results are comparable year on year.
  • Marginal abatement cost curves — reduction options ranked by cost per tonne, to help direct capital where it achieves most.
  • Strategic recommendations — emissions reductions, data quality improvements, and the regulatory changes ahead.
  • Executive summary — a concise, board-ready overview of findings, risks and priorities.

Depending on scope, we can also provide a phased reduction roadmap with costs, timelines and internal ownership; a legislative outlook covering NGER, the Safeguard Mechanism and mandatory climate disclosure; and practical tools such as calculators, dashboards and supplier engagement templates so you can maintain the inventory between audits.

Our aim is to build your internal capability. Most long-standing clients take on more of the process themselves each year, and we support that.

Prepared to withstand scrutiny

We are preparers. We build the inventory so that it stands up when someone else reviews it — a tender panel, a regulator, a reviewer, or your own board.

In practice that means every figure traces to a source, every data point is tagged as measured, provided or estimated, the method and emission factor sit alongside each activity, and the judgement calls — boundary decisions, estimates, refrigerant assumptions — are set out clearly rather than buried.

What it does not mean is that we verify our own work. An inventory we prepare is prepared to a documented and traceable standard; it is not a verification under ISO 14064-3. Where third-party verification is required, we build the inventory so that a reviewer’s task is straightforward, and we are glad to work alongside them.

If you also report under NGER

Many of our audit clients are NGER reporters, or are approaching the thresholds. The same underlying data serves both: an NGER submission is a regulated subset of a full inventory, and a well-built inventory makes the statutory report easier rather than harder.

If you are close to the NGER thresholds, or already over them, see our NGER reporting page.

Talk to us

Tell us roughly how many sites you have, what data you already collect, and what has prompted the question. That is usually enough for us to outline what an audit would involve and what it would cost.

Get in touch