Carbon disclosure

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This page describes one of the worksites to develop Carbon on Invoices and to associate to each product or service its precise and sincere weight in greenhouse gases (or « carbon footprint »). The list of worksites is at the bottom of the page.

General presentation

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A simple answer is to transpose, where they exist, the rules of publicity and confidentiality that already exist for prices and accounts and to check that they do not pose a problem. The sanctions would be the same (failure to publish, insincere accounts, false invoices, …).

Product footprints

For imprints of market products and services, the rule would be that the imprint should be advertised in the same way as the price, be it through point-of-sale displays, door-to-door sales, commercial advertising, etc.

Concerning imprints of public products and services,

    • The rule would be the same if there is a price (e.g. entrance to a swimming pool or a day in hospital).
    • For the part financed by taxes, the rule could be to display the carbon with the tax notice. Companies would add it to their footprint, like a supplier’s footprint.
    • A rule is to be defined for the VAT financing.
Funding contributions

Any reference to the monetary performance of an investment would be accompanied by its financial carbon contribution (single investment, portfolio, current account).

Financial intermediaries present their financial footprint to savers on their statements.

Contributions from institutions and individuals

An organisation’s footprint would have the same publicity (or privacy) as its accounts.

For a company whose accounts are public, this means the same detail in the analytical data, by country or product. A priori, if data in euros does not pose a problem of business secrecy, neither should data in carbon?

On the other hand, the footprint or contribution of individuals remains protected by banking secrecy, whether it concerns consumption, financing or production.

 

Points to be clarified,

    • Is there a time lag? If the accountant knows how to integrate the euros of the invoices into the accounts, he can also integrate the carbons. But can he take out the analytical allocation of the invoices immediately?
List of worksites

Start, Primary carbon, Electricity, Accounting framework, Customs scale, Carbon disclosure, Software, Contributions to the trajectory : Companies, Finance, Individuals, Territories