Glossary
Carbon and regulation, defined
The vocabulary this site uses, written out. Regulatory terms link to the official text, so you can check the definition rather than take ours.
- Allocation How the emissions of a process that yields several outputs are divided between them.
- Anchoring Publishing a hash to an independent, append-only ledger so that a record can later be shown to have existed unchanged.
- CBAM The EU's carbon border adjustment mechanism: importers of certain goods must declare — and eventually pay for — the emissions embedded in them.
- Commitment hash A hash over the exact inputs, factors and result of a calculation, so the same inputs always produce the same value.
- Cradle-to-gate A boundary that counts emissions from raw material extraction up to the factory gate — excluding distribution, use and disposal.
- CSRD The EU directive requiring in-scope companies to report sustainability information, audited, alongside their financial statements.
- Default values (CBAM) The fallback emissions figures an importer must use when actual data is not supplied. They are conservative by design, which means high.
- Digital Product Passport (DPP) A structured, machine-readable record of a product's composition, origin and impacts, reachable from the product itself.
- Embedded emissions The greenhouse gases released in producing a good, expressed per tonne of that good rather than per site or per year.
- Emission factor The coefficient that converts an activity — a kWh, a kilogram, a tonne-kilometre — into greenhouse gas emissions.
- Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) A published, third-party-verified summary of a product's life cycle impacts, following defined product category rules.
- ESPR The EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation — the framework that makes digital product passports a legal requirement.
- ESRS The European Sustainability Reporting Standards — the detailed rules that say what a CSRD report must contain.
- EUDR The EU regulation prohibiting placing certain commodities on the market unless they are deforestation-free and legally produced.
- Functional unit The quantity of product a footprint is expressed per — one garment, one tonne, one square metre, one kWh delivered.
- GHG Protocol The most widely used standard for corporate greenhouse gas accounting; the origin of Scope 1, 2 and 3.
- Global warming potential (GWP) The factor that converts a greenhouse gas into an equivalent quantity of CO₂, over a given time horizon.
- ISO 14064 An international standard for quantifying, reporting and verifying greenhouse gas inventories.
- Life cycle assessment (LCA) A method for quantifying the environmental impacts of a product across its life cycle — not only carbon.
- Merkle proof A short cryptographic path showing that one record belongs to a set, without revealing the rest of the set.
- Precursor An input that already carries embedded emissions of its own — the steel in a bolt, the clinker in cement.
- Primary data Data measured at its source — your meter, your supplier's actual production — as opposed to an industry average.
- Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) The greenhouse gases attributable to one unit of a product across a defined part of its life cycle.
- Provenance tier A label recording how a figure was obtained — measured, calculated, estimated or declared — kept separate from the figure itself.
- SBTi An initiative that assesses whether a company's emissions targets are consistent with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
- Scope 1 Direct emissions from sources a company owns or controls — its own combustion, its own vehicles, its own process emissions.
- Scope 2 Indirect emissions from the electricity, heat and steam a company buys.
- Scope 3 All other indirect emissions across the value chain — purchased goods, transport, use of sold products, end of life.
- Verifiable, not verified A record anyone can check for themselves is not the same as one an accredited body has audited. Both are useful; they are not interchangeable.
No term matches that.