How ‘official’ will my See Through Carbon score be?
Part of the problem See Through Carbon is addressing is the issue of there being no universally-adopted ‘gold standard’ for carbon audits, particularly for small businesses. If your bigger customers haven’t yet required you to submit your carbon footprint so they can report theirs, they soon will. Adopting See Through Carbon gets you ahead of the game.
When will my rating expire?
It’s entirely up to you. Your rating is current until you update it.
Can I use carbon offsetting?
No. Offsetting schemes have proved themselves to be too unreliable. Outsourcing carbon reduction by paying others is ineffective, encourages complacency, and delays taking action to reduce carbon emissions under your direct control. Carbon insetting (i.e. a carbon-reducing scheme you directly control) might be permitted, but these are beyond the reach of most SMEs who are plenty busy with their core businesses.
How do you prevent people gaming the system?
All the data collected will be analysed by a team of carbon audit experts for quality control. They’ll identify anomalies, whether inadvertent or deliberate, and conduct random spot-checks.
I don’t want all my company’s information to be made public
The only data we collect is related to the emissions generated by your business – nothing financial. You gain reputational credit if you’re honest and transparent about your carbon footprint, which is why it’s important to make all your data available.
How will my contribution help others?
Your information becomes part of an international, transparent, open source resource that will always be free to use. As businesses sign up, trust in the score will grow, and the scores will become ever more accurate and fair. Being an early adopter means a longer track record.
How secure is my data?
An international team of IT veterans used best data security practices and standards to design See Through Carbon. We keep the amount of personal data held to the minimum required to be functional. Minimally, this is your name, email address, post code and country. Whenever possible the data is encrypted and anonymised, referred to only by your membership reference number.
Why do you need my data to come up with my score?
Comparing different small businesses from different sectors is far from straightforward. We want our scoring system to reflect reality, but also to provide an effective incentive for businesses to improve their scores (an algorithm that generates 100% Green or 100% Red scores is no use). It will take our experts some time to analyse the data, calculate reasonable grade boundaries, and give fair weighting to different sectors.
There are loads of carbon calculators out there – what’s different about See Through Carbon?
Carbon auditing is an imperfect science requiring many estimates and approximations. The more average values and dodgy offsettings are applied, the less accurate the result, and the less incentive any individual business has to improve their score. Our Pilots are designed by world experts to minimise the amount of guesswork, and apply as much real-world data as possible.
How long will it take me to enter all the data?
This depends on how easily accessible your information is, your type of business and your familiarity with carbon calculators (our facilitators are available to guide you through the data collection App if you’d like help). On average, we estimate it should take around an hour.
How soon will I get my score?
To fine-tune a system that delivers a reasonable distribution of grades, the Pilot needs data from around 100 businesses. Once we reach that figure, our carbon auditing experts will analyse and verify the data, before fine-tuning the algorithm that generates your score, which will take a few days. We aim to deliver your score by December 2023, but it could be much sooner.
Surely See Through Carbon will need some money at some stage?
If See Through Carbon is widely adopted following a Pilot, it will require some funding to guarantee continuity, reliability and integrity. Developing a standard without money is what makes See Through Carbon unique, something that is literally priceless. Many funders supporting a rapid transition to sustainability are following our Pilots with great interest, so we don’t anticipate a problem in covering these costs if it succeeds.
If you’re not charging me, who’s paying?
See Through Carbon is an open source project, driven by an international collaboration of volunteers: expert carbon auditors, IT professionals, software engineers, communications experts and business veterans. Donors are paying for web hosting, the only hard costs.
What’s the catch – will you start charging me later?
See Through Carbon will always be free to use. Its entire purpose is to remove the obstacles to small businesses to high-quality carbon auditing and consultancy. Being free to use is the keystone of its mission.
I may have to pay for it, but See Through Carbon’s commercial rivals give me a lower carbon footprint. Even if it’s free, why would I want to admit responsibility for more emissions?
This gets to the heart of the flaw in the current system – ‘Carbon Accounting 1.0’ – where market forces incentivize giving the lowest number at the lowest price, to the detriment of accuracy.
See Through Carbon is interested in both accuracy and reduction.
Your initial audit from us provides your baseline measurement – the starting point from which to measure carbon reduction. The bigger your baseline carbon footprint, the greater your margin for reduction. The critical thing is to apply the same, accurate standards to measuring both before and after. When you make demonstrable reductions, that is a strong and positive market signal.