Subject

Climate change arising from anthropogenic activity has been identified as one of the greatest challenges facing the world and will continue to affect business and citizens over future decades.

Climate change has implications for both human and natural systems and could lead to significant impacts on resource availability, economic activity and human wellbeing. In response, international, regional, national and local initiatives are being developed and implemented by public and private sectors to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere, as well as to facilitate adaptation to climate change.

There is a need for an effective and progressive response to the urgent threat of climate change on the basis of the best available scientific knowledge. ISO produces documents that support the transformation of scientific knowledge into tools that will help address climate change. GHG initiatives on mitigation rely on the quantification, monitoring, reporting and verification of GHG emissions and/or removals.

Carbon neutrality is a condition in which anthropogenic GHG emissions are balanced by anthropogenic GHG removals over a specified period.

Carbon neutrality is generally used for organizations and products, while achieving carbon neutrality commonly involves offsetting to counterbalance the carbon footprint (see ISO 14067).

The carbon neutrality is considered as a pathway of continual improvement along which the carbon footprint of the subject is reduced by implementing emissions reduction and removal enhancement activities, and therefore the need for offsetting decreases over time.

In addition to the carbon neutrality there is a concept of Net zero GHG emissions that is generally applied to territories (e.g. a country, a municipality) and to organizations, but not to products. Net zero GHG emissions is defined and assessed differently in different contexts. For organizations, Net Zero GHG emissions is commonly considered as the condition in which emissions have been reduced such that only residual emissions remain, and offsetting is restricted to removal credits only. With respect to territories, assessment of net zero GHG emissions considers the emissions and removals under direct control or jurisdiction of the territory, and offsetting is sometimes excluded.

Standards

ISO 14068-1 an International Standards for Carbon neutrality is designed to build upon existing International Standards addressing GHG quantification, reporting, validation and verification, such as ISO 14064-1, ISO 14064-3 and ISO 14067. Figure 1 illustrates the relationship with documents within the ISO 14060 family of GHG standards as well as some related International Standards on environmental labels and declarations.

This document provides a standardized approach to achieving and demonstrating carbon neutrality. It is applicable to organizations and products e.g. goods and services, including events and buildings.

The hierarchy approach presented in this document prioritizes actions to reduce the direct and indirect GHG emissions and enhance GHG removals of the subject, with offsetting used only for the carbon footprint remaining after these actions.

Achievement of carbon neutrality by organizations and products entails actions that reduce GHG emissions and enhance GHG removals, and thus can help support countries to fulfil their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Our services

The SSA provides high quality services of Validation and Verification of declaration towards Carbon neutrality of organizations and products/services based on ISO 14068-1.

The service includes a complex of onsite and off-site assessment of data on carbon neutrality and the way of its calculation. One of the focus area of the assessors is analysis of methodology and tools applied for calculation as well as check of the input data used for calculation including those measured at the enterprise and taken from external expert and public sources.