Your questions answered

• What is Ecologi Zero?

  Ecologi Zero is an emissions calculation tool, designed to help your business work out your operational carbon footprint.

  The tool supports you through securely importing your business’s data, producing emissions calculations from the data for Scopes 1, 2 and 3, and helps you to identify where emissions hotspots are, within your value chain. Using Ecologi Zero over time will allow you to track your business emissions, and set targets to reduce them over time, in order to play your part in transitioning to a low-carbon future.

  Whilst complex – often very expensive – consultancy services to calculate business emissions are available on the market, Ecologi Zero makes carbon calculation more accessible: making the exercise affordable and rapid, and requiring no prior knowledge of carbon accounting.

• Who is Ecologi Zero for?

  The emissions calculator tool is most suited to SMEs up to 200 employees, primarily operating in the services industry.

  This is because manufacturers and producers of goods are better served by producing a life cycle assessment for each of their products produced and sold. 

• How can Ecologi Zero help me reduce my organisation’s emissions?

  Once our system has produced your emissions values, the easy-to-read dashboard will update in real time with new transactions and emissions data, and you’ll be able to set annual emissions reductions targets, track your actual emissions over time and identify emissions hotspots – and Ecologi Zero will even make recommendations for how to make these emissions reductions, to send you on your way to zero.

• How does Ecologi Zero work?

  Once you’re on the platform, you’ll be able to enter essential information about your business, like your office premises, number of employees, and so on. This will help our system to calculate your Scope 1 (direct) and Scope 2 (electricity generation) emissions. 

  For your operational and value chain (Scope 3) emissions, you’ll connect Ecologi Zero to your accounting software – like Xero, or QuickBooks. Once connected, you can import transaction data from your accounting system securely into the platform, and Ecologi Zero will produce emissions values for each transaction, based on a “top-down” approach to emissions calculation.

  These emissions values are based on data pertaining to the emissions output of the industry that the transaction was conducted within. For example, if your organisation operates primarily in the air travel sector, your emissions output values will be higher than if you operate primarily in financial services – since aviation is a higher-carbon industry.

  This value chain calculator is driven by a complex input-output table to produce emissions outputs for each industry. You can make industry adjustments based on the specific context surrounding individual transactions, and over time our smart system will learn to automate this process, ensuring that the flow from input (transactional data) to output (emissions data) is quick and seamless.

• How does Ecologi Zero calculate emissions?

  Ecologi Zero uses a number of data sources to produce as precise of an estimation of your organisation’s carbon footprint as possible. The base data layers used are complex input-output tables which produce emissions values for your financial transactions, based on average emissions figures across whole industries. The types of industries where your organisation spends its money – and the amount of money you spend in them – will therefore influence the calculated emissions. 

  Example: You spend £100 on business software with Microsoft, and plug in your finance data to Ecologi Zero. The tool will match Microsoft to its industry (IT software), and take the UK average emissions figure from the IT software industry (which is measured in CO2e per £ spent), and then multiply it by 100, for your £100 spent. Ecologi Zero produces a footprint of 1.2kg CO2e for this purchase – because the industry emissions factor for this industry is 0.012kg per £ spent.

  For the moment, the emissions factors used to make the calculations are applicable to the UK only – we will be adding more regions very soon. You’ll also soon be able to include additional specific data about your organisation (such as vehicles, premises and energy) in order to exploit further data to hone your footprint even further.

• Is carbon footprinting with Ecologi Zero accurate?

  Firstly, it is important to understand that it is not possible to work out an “exact” carbon footprint for anything. Footprint 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. 

• What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up approaches to measuring emissions?

  Ecologi Zero is an example of a “top-down approach” to carbon footprint calculation. Top-down approaches take categories as a whole (in this case, industries) and use average values across those categories to make estimations about discrete events within those categories. For example, to calculate a UK resident’s carbon footprint using a top-down approach, you might have a total emissions value for the UK, and the total UK population, and divide the total emissions value by the population value, to give a figure for the carbon footprint of the ‘average’ UK resident.

  The alternative is a “bottom-up” approach, where carbon footprint calculations are carried out attempting to account for everything, from the ground up. In the case of a UK resident’s carbon footprint, a bottom-up approach might give them a questionnaire to find out about their specific lifestyle, travelling habits, food choices etc. in an effort to account for all possible sources of emissions within the individual’s life. The more comprehensive the questionnaire, the more likely it is to produce a closer approximation of the individual’s ‘true’ carbon footprint.

  It’s important to remember that no method of emissions calculation can possibly be exact, and each approach has its uses and limitations. Top-down approaches are quicker and easier to implement, but tend to ‘smooth out’ individual footprint differences and favour average values. Bottom-up approaches are considered more comprehensive and granular, but are expensive to implement, and are ‘leaky’ because it’s impossible to account for every possible thing that could have caused emissions that contribute to a carbon footprint.

• Why do I need to match and approve my suppliers?

  Your expenditure is a great indicator of your business’s carbon footprint. When Ecologi Zero identifies your suppliers, it can use the amount you spend with them to estimate the emissions for each transaction.

  Our system identifies the industry and country of origin for your suppliers by looking them up in our company database. In most cases this will be automatic, and in others it will ask for your input. This information is then correlated with expansive carbon databases to arrive at the emissions per transaction.

  As this supplier information forms the basis for Ecologi Zero to calculate your supplier emissions, you are asked to confirm that the details suggested are correct, or to enter them if they are missing.

  This only needs to be done once for each of your suppliers! Ecologi Zero will then automatically recognise all new transactions with them, and calculate the associated emissions.

• When will I be able to use this tool?

  We’re onboarding our waiting list customers now, prioritising those with Xero accounting software.

  When we’re confident the tool requires no handholding from our team, we will open it up for any business to use, self-service. We are aiming for summer 2022.

  If you’re interested in using this tool before then, please put your contact details into the form on this page.

• How much will it cost?

  It will be free to all businesses to measure their carbon footprints, something we’re immensely proud of given the opportunity to create change.

  There is a Premium version of Ecologi Zero, please see the introductory video above for details.

• What is Carbon Neutral & Net Zero?

  Carbon neutrality involves offsetting your emissions through purchasing carbon credits to prevent greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere (such as renewable energy projects which displace existing fossil fuel energy). Whilst you should always be looking to reduce your business emissions, carbon neutrality can be achieved now, regardless of whether you have already reduced your emissions or not.

  Want to find out more about carbon reduction offsets? Read our article on the role of carbon offsets in tackling the climate emergency. You can use your Ecologi business profile to become carbon neutral today.

  Net Zero provides the necessary next step after carbon neutral, in your sustainability plan. It is ambitious, but essential: collectively we must reach net zero by 2050, or else we will exceed the 1.5°C targets and lock-in some of the most extreme impacts of climate change.

  This requires reducing carbon emissions in line with the latest climate change science for your industry, and then balancing residual, hard to reduce emissions by removing carbon from the atmosphere (such as through carbon credits from matured tree-planting projects, or sophisticated carbon removal technology). Note that these specific kinds of offsets eligible to contribute to a net zero plan must remove carbon from the atmosphere, instead of simply preventing future emissions from taking place. For more information, have a look at our article on the difference between carbon neutral and net zero.

• Is my data secure, and who can see it?

  We place the utmost importance on keeping your data secure.

  Firstly, only your organisation’s expenditure data is imported to Ecologi Zero – and no other financial data. Ecologi Zero accesses your accounting data as read-only, and Ecologi staff do not have access to your data without your explicit consent. We will not share your data with third parties. 

  All data is encrypted in transit and encrypted in storage on our servers. You can revoke Ecologi Zero’s access to your accounting software and delete your data at any time.

  Finally, the holy grail of data security, ISO27001 is currently being undertaken by Ecologi. Please bear with us as we become compliant.

• Which standards is Ecologi Zero compliant with?

  We’re working hard behind the scenes to ensure that – by the time it’s ready for a full public launch – Ecologi Zero will be compliant with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Standard (and its supplements, the Scope 2 Guidance and the Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard), as well as helping you become carbon neutral under the standards set by PAS 2060. Our ultimate goal is to build Ecologi Zero into a tool that can help your business go net zero under the new criteria for net zero which is being set by the Science-based Targets initiative.

  In this initial Beta phase, we’ll be making iterative improvements to Ecologi Zero across the platform – to make its data visualisations even more user-friendly, make it learn automatically about your business and emissions, and to make sure that the emissions calculations it produces are everything you need on your journey to zero.