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How to measure and report carbon footprint

On October 14, 2021, the Slovak Investment and Trade Development Agency (SARIO), in cooperation with the consulting company SUSTO - Sustainability Tools and the Circular Slovakia platform, organized a webinar on the topic of How to measure and report carbon footprint.
The webinar was the second in the series of webinars SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS: TRENDS AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES.

The event, moderated by Denisa Rášová - Chair of the Circular Slovakia platform, was part of an international initiative, Circular Week 2021, which took place from October 11 - 17, 2021. The Circular Week was a set of various events - workshops, seminars, meetings, and panels, at the international level dedicated to the circular economy.
The webinar focused on topics such as measuring and reporting the carbon footprint of a product, service, or company as a whole and how this footprint can be reduced.
 
The main speaker was the Czech expert Viktor Třebický, co-founder of the non-profit organization CI2 and the company CI3, within which he has been measuring the carbon footprint for various entities for many years. In addition to a global and theoretical introduction, Třebický focused on the composition of the carbon footprint of various companies (categories 1-3 according to the GHG protocol) and also on specific examples of companies or products that are approaching or have even reached carbon neutrality.
Similarly, as was shown during the first of a series of webinars on non-financial reporting and the new EU taxonomy, the topic of sustainability is becoming more and more pronounced among Slovak companies, especially from the perspective of their customers, investors, or financing banks.
In the second part of the webinar, Marek Frecer and Lucia Korbelyiová, from the Risk Assurance Department of the consulting company PwC (member of Circular Slovakia), spoke about their practical experience in verifying the carbon footprint report of a global manufacturing company in the automotive industry. PwC representatives talked about their verification process, main findings, and recommendations.

In addition to the relatively high number of registered participants, the success of the webinar was confirmed by a number of specific questions during the subsequent discussion, as well as by an interactive poll voting between the participants. The results of the poll:

- Promoting (eco) innovation capacity has been one of the main drivers of interest in measuring the carbon footprint of more than half of respondents.
- Almost 40% of respondents cited legislative and regulatory measures as well as the economic side of cost reduction as reasons for interest in carbon management.

- As many as 45% of respondents voted that they do not measure their carbon footprint, but plan to start within a short period of one year.
- The positive news is that 9 out of 49 respondents already have experience with measuring the carbon footprint. At the same time, the answers of the respondents show that having available and clear data for measuring the carbon footprint is a challenge for many companies in Slovakia.

- Only 15% of respondents stated that they have available data for the so-called Scope 1 and 2 and only one respondent had the data needed to quantify emissions at Scope 3 level.

We will conclude the series of autumn webinars SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS: TRENDS AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES in November (provisionally on November 24) on the topic of preventing Greenwashing in communication.