GHG Protocol: the operational guide to get started
Principles, organisational and operational boundaries, and the path to the first emissions inventory according to the standard.
The GHG Protocol is the world reference standard for measuring the greenhouse gas emissions of organisations. When a bank or a client asks for "your emissions", they almost always mean an inventory built with this methodology. The good news: the fundamental concepts are few and clear.
The five principles
The standard rests on five principles: relevance (the inventory reflects the real emissions of the company), completeness (within the declared boundary nothing is omitted), consistency (methods comparable over time), transparency (assumptions and sources declared) and accuracy (neither systematic overestimates nor underestimates). Every methodological choice is judged against these five.
Organisational and operational boundaries
Before calculating you decide what to include. The organisational boundaries establish which companies and sites enter the inventory (control or equity-share approach). The operational boundaries classify emissions into Scope 1, 2 and 3. For an SME with a single company the choice is simple, but it must still be declared: it is the first thing a verifier looks at.
From document to inventory
The operational flow: gather the documents (bills, fuel invoices, FIR, purchase invoices), extract the activity data, apply up-to-date emission factors, aggregate by Scope and by site. The result is the GHG inventory: the basis of the ESG VSME report, of the bank questionnaires and of the reduction plan.
Envify automates the entire flow: the AI reads the documents, applies the methodology and maintains the traceability of every number back to the source.
