Carbon Accounting Solutions

Wood and Disney believe that the same high standards to accounting for our financial impact must also be applied to accounting for our environmental impact.

• The data we use must be accurate, real time and replicable.
• The data generated must be relevant and usable - we don't want to generate reams of numbers that are meaningless in the sense that we can't easily turn them into actions. The data needs to tell us:
• which areas of our business are the worst for environmental impact so we know where our efforts will have the greatest impact - we need to be able to prioritise
• it needs to be accurate: just as with our finances, we don't want to be making important business decisions based on inaccurate or incorrect data
• it must be relevant to the individual operations within our business so that we can develop action plans that we know will work to reduce the emissions from each component part of our business
• we need to be able to generate the data regularly so that we can measure the effectiveness and impact of actions taken on our carbon footprint
• it needs to be easily understandable. We are accountants and understand numbers but we are not environmental scientists. The data must be available in a format that we can easily understand and relate to. We want our whole team to be engaged in this process
• The system needs to be affordable. We are a business and our environmental impact is important to us, but so is the financial sustainability of our business. Our environmental strategies must work within the financial constraints of running a profitable business. This is in terms of both the cost of putting a system in place and managing it and the cost of implementing changes.
• We need to be able to realise impactful, positive results. The accounting system must deliver actionable data to give us control of our environmental impact so that we can make a real, measurable and meaningful difference in reducing our carbon footprint.

Accuracy and affordability: Using your financial accounts to generate your carbon accounts

In the past, carbon emission calculations were carried out independently from financial accounting in businesses, largely on an ad hoc basis, and only by large companies. This was expensive. It produced results which were often inaccurate, difficult to compare between businesses and even departments within the same business, due to a lack of standardisation. Hard to replicate year on year, because of a lack of systemisation, making measurement of the impact of changes hard to quantify and gauge their effectiveness.

Over the last few years, there has been real progress in the development of carbon emission accounting systems that tie in with the financial accounting systems of a business. The availability of commercial, standardised systems has:

• reduced costs: systems are available commercially on a license basis rather than the development of proprietary systems, bespoke to a business. The data is only being entered once.
• improved accuracy: one set of data is being used to generate financial accounts and carbon accounts so that the data is directly apportionable to the financial elements and activities of a business
• standardised: so comparisons can be made, year on year (or more regularly), between business functions, between departments, between businesses, between market sectors



Which carbon accounting system have  Wood and Disney embraced?