As organisations make things or provide services, they will generate emissions either from their direct activities, such as delivering a package, or indirectly through their "value chain", such as purchasing stock.

Emissions contribute to climate change by affecting the makeup of gases in our atmosphere, causing the world to heat up, which leads to more extreme weather events amongst other things.

To calculate your carbon footprint, you need to understand your direct emissions and those of your value chain. There are a number of tools available to figure out what this number is. You can use the numbers generated to offset your operations and reduce your emissions over time.

Classically, this was done by consultants, but CarbonTrail wants to democratise this process and make it available to everyone.

We need to start by saying that it is not possible to work out an “exact” carbon footprint for anything. Even the most accurate emissions calculations suffer from truncation errors – since the number of factors potentially influencing the carbon footprint of something is (literally) infinite, you always have to draw a line somewhere and sacrifice some amount of ‘accuracy’.

This means that, really, carbon footprinting exercises are therefore better or worse, as opposed to accurate or inaccurate.

We stand by our methodology. Every exported report shows the factors used to reach the number, which can then be independently verified.

Yes, we use industry-standard encryption and data protection methodologies to ensure that your sensitive financial data is looked after.

We use Amazon Web Services for hosting and data management, often using their managed services which are guaranteed by Amazon themselves.

Finally, only your organisation’s expenditure data is imported to CarbonTrail. We access your accounting data as read-only, and our staff do not have access to your data without your explicit consent