Overview of VCI Guidance v1.1
Designed & developed by: Climate KIC, CDP, Danone, Mars, Livelihoods Fund, WWF, and WRI
What is the guidance for?
- Written through the lens of companies with Scope 3 GHG targets.
- Aim: accounting for reductions/removals through interventions.
- Primarily focus on Interventions that affect purchased goods and services (Scope 3, Category 1).
Life-cycle approach?
They agreed that a life-cycle approach should be used when it came to calculating emissions, in that all direct and relevant upstream emissions associated with producing a purchased good or service should be accounted for.
Various concepts were agreed upon, which are in-depth and could each have a lesson of their own, but we will provide an overview of three of these concepts below.
Concept 1 – Intervention & Intervention Activity
Intervention: Any action that introduces a change to a Scope 3 activity or activities. An Intervention may include changes to several activities that reduce or remove emissions in different ways and that may or may not be included within the Scope 3 Inventory.
Intervention Activity: Technology or practice that reduces or removes GHG emissions in the intervention
- Interventions are limited to one geography
- Different activities may have different quantification approaches, different baselines, and different process data
Concept 2 – Supply Shed
A group of suppliers in a specifically defined geography and/or market (e.g., at a national or sub-national level) providing similar goods and services that can be demonstrated to be associated with the company’s value chain.
It may not be feasible to demonstrate which specific suppliers provide the goods and services, but it should be demonstrable that they are in the group that do, for example by demonstrating that these suppliers provide material to the company’s direct suppliers.
The concept of Supply Shed is introduced to cater to situations where a reporting company may not be able to trace sourcing directly to a specific supplier in the upstream supply chain, but it is known that sourcing comes from that group of suppliers.
Example – Wheat grown in the United States of America
- There are six major classes of wheat grown in the US (hard red winter, hard red spring, soft red winter, soft white, hard white and durum)
- Each class has a somewhat different end use, and production tends to be region-specific
- You could consider these six wheat classes as each being their own supply shed in the US
Concept 3 – Integrate ‘project accounting’ into ‘inventory’
Process substitution methods
