I've been trying to get my head around all this Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3 emissions malarkey. Although it appears that lots of people smarter than me are struggling with it.
Having spent a while looking at how the Scopes are defined, I can understand how this can be difficult.
OK, Scope 1 is an organisation's direct emissions. Presumably an organisation knows what it's doing and how it's doing it, so getting the Scope 1 emissions from that ought to be fairly straightforward.
And Scope 2 is electricity, steam, heating and cooling purchased from someone else. I'm immediately suspicious here because this is a weirdly specific categorisation. But at least it should be easy to calculate - there's a conversion factor but at least you know the usage because it's on a bill you have to pay.
Then Scope 3 is - everything else. The fact that there are 15 official categories included ought to be a big red flag. That it's problematic is shown by the fact so many organisations have problems with it. (And by the growth of an industry to solve the problem for you.)
Personally, I wouldn't have defined it this way. If the idea is to evaluate emissions across the supply chain, then dumping almost all the emissions into the vaguest bucket is always going to be problematic.
So, why wasn't Scope 2 simply defined as the combined Scope 1 emissions of everyone providing services to the organisation. (That includes upstream and downstream, suppliers and employees, by the way.) That has 2 advantages I can see:
- It's easy to calculate, because Scope 1 is pretty easy to calculate for all the providers of services (and they may well be doing it anyway), and an organisation ought to know who's providing services to it
- It makes Scope 2 bigger (obviously) because there's more included, and therefore makes Scope 3 smaller, so uncertainties in Scope 3 matter less
- Because you can better identify the contributors to your Scope 2 emissions, it's easier to know where to start making improvement efforts
