Dr. Christoph Meinrenken et al publish important analysis of product carbon footprints in Nature Scientific Reports
We are pleased to announce the publication of a peer-reviewed article authored by a team of current and former CoClear affiliates under the guidance of Dr Christoph Meinrenken, Columbia University Adjunct Professor and Chief Data Scientist at CoClear. The article, “Carbon emissions embodied in product value chains and the role of Life Cycle Assessment in curbing them” has been published in Nature Scientific Reports.
The article used data reported to CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, to build a database of 866 product life cycle assessments (LCA), from 145 companies, 30 industries, and 28 countries, to elucidate the breakdown of emissions across product’s value chains, how this breakdown varies by industry, and whether the reported emission reductions vary with the granularity of the LCA.
The publication is available online here.
The article seeks to identify which parts of a product’s life cycle cause highest emissions in each industry, and how sectors track and manage these hotspots over time. This can help industries identify potential efficiency improvements throughout their value chain. According to Dr Meinrenken, “Our analysis found that, on average across sectors, 45% of total value chain carbon emissions arise upstream in the supply chain, 23% during the company’s direct operations, and 32% downstream.”
This is the first time that the downstream fraction of total emissions was quantified for such a large internationally representative dataset – and together with the 45% upstream emissions, the findings underline the importance of LCA as a key enabling tool for companies to unearth efficiency improvements and reduce environmental impacts by looking beyond their own operations – both for meeting their science based targets® and for wider sustainability and profitability goals.
Demonstrating the particular benefits of LCA, companies with granular LCAs of their products reported on average 3 times higher emission reductions than those who reported only total product footprints. Sally Paridis, Co-founder of CoClear, explains, “These companies were able to leverage the insights afforded by LCA to steer various emissions reduction initiatives toward those that yield the highest reductions along a product’s value chain. The LCAs point the way.”
The article has other critical findings that can benefit companies looking to curb emission impacts and is the only known analysis performed on such a large five year dataset of globally reported product carbon footprints. The dataset is available at: CarbonCatalogue/Coclear.co
CoClear will shortly follow the publication of the peer-reviewed article with the release of their second report, “The Carbon Catalogue Report”. The authors gratefully acknowledge Columbia University’s Data Science Institute and members of Columbia’s NetImpact chapter for supporting the data analysis, and the partnership with CDP for making the raw data available to CoClear for data mining and analysis.