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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.

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.

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 currently aiming for the end of 2021.

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