Carbon Accounting Editing and Proofreading Services

A company reports "carbon neutral operations" alongside a total emissions figure. What the figure does not disclose is that it covers only the emissions from the company's own buildings and vehicles, known as scope 1 and 2, and excludes the far larger volume of emissions embedded in its supply chain and the use of its products, known as scope 3, which for most companies dwarfs the reported figure many times over. The number is accurate for what it measures. The claim built on top of it implies something the number was never actually built to support.

We edit what organisations produce to report and account for greenhouse gas emissions — emissions inventory and scope boundary disclosures, carbon neutral and net zero claim substantiation, offset and reduction methodology explanations, year-over-year comparison and baseline documentation, and the correspondence responding to a stakeholder's question about what a specific carbon claim actually covers. Our editors work on the gap between an emissions total and the boundary it was actually drawn around.

The disclosed scope boundary is what a carbon claim actually needs to mean something, and its failure is a total presented without stating which emissions it includes and which it leaves out. Carbon neutral operations, alongside a scope 1 and 2 figure, is accurate about a boundary it never names, and a reader who assumes the claim covers the company's full footprint has been let down by an omission rather than a false statement. We work through these so the scope boundary is stated explicitly with every emissions figure — scope 1 direct emissions, scope 2 purchased energy, scope 3 value chain — since a total presented with no scope stated invites a reader to assume it covers everything, and for most organisations scope 3 is the majority of actual impact; so any offsets counted toward a neutrality claim are disclosed by type and quantity, given that a claim resting on offset purchases is a different achievement from one resting on actual emissions reduction, and a reader needs to know the proportion of each; so year-over-year comparisons state whether the boundary and methodology are consistent between periods, because a reduction that partly reflects a narrower boundary or a changed calculation method is not a genuine year-over-year reduction; so the specific standard or protocol used is named, given that different accounting standards can produce different figures for the same activity and a reader comparing two companies' claims needs to know whether they used the same method; so any category excluded from an inventory is stated as excluded rather than silently absent, since an inventory that omits a major source without saying so implies a completeness it does not have; and so a stakeholder's question about what a claim covers receives the actual boundary, not a repetition of the headline claim. Disclosures written this way let a reader know what a carbon claim actually accounts for.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including emissions data, methodology and stakeholder correspondence. We are editors rather than carbon accountants, sustainability consultants or emissions auditors, and we offer no view on emissions figures, methodology or claim validity. What we can do is make sure the boundary is stated alongside the number.