Certification / Accreditation

ISO 14064 Greenhouse gas emissions quantification

ISO 14064-1 is the international standard for quantifying and reporting an organisation’s greenhouse gas emissions. It sets out how to define your reporting boundary, categorise your emissions, and build an inventory that others can trust and verify.

At its core, it is the foundation other carbon claims sit on top of: you cannot credibly claim carbon neutrality or set a net zero target without a GHG inventory built to a recognised method like this one. The current 2018 edition is under formal revision, moving towards the Harmonised Structure already used by ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.

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Who it’s for and what’s involved

Relevant if you are:

Reporting emissions to a customer, investor or regulator

Working towards carbon neutrality or a net zero target

Subject to mandatory climate disclosure such as CSRD or UK reporting rules

Building a credible baseline before setting reduction targets

Achieving certification involves:

Defining your organisational and operational boundaries

Identifying and quantifying emissions across relevant categories

Collecting activity data and applying appropriate emission factors

Securing independent verification under ISO 14064-3

How Q! supports certification

The inventory everything else depends on

A carbon neutrality or net zero claim is only as credible as the inventory underneath it. We build your GHG inventory to ISO 14064-1 first, get the boundary and categorisation right, then use that foundation for whatever comes next, whether that’s an ISO 14068-1 carbon neutrality claim or straightforward disclosure to a customer.

Get the inventory right first. Everything else, claims, targets, disclosure, builds on it.

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Mini FAQs

Not quite. ISO 14064-1 quantifies emissions at the organisation level, your whole business across a reporting period, while a carbon footprint under ISO 14067 or PAS 2050 covers a single product or service across its life cycle. Most businesses need an organisation-level inventory first, then can add product footprints where customers ask for them.

ISO 14064-1 is moving onto the Harmonised Structure shared by ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 42001, with the current edition under formal revision. The detail is still being finalised, but expect closer alignment with mandatory disclosure regimes such as the EU’s CSRD, which increasingly require third-party assurance of the kind ISO 14064-3 already provides.

Not always for an internal inventory, but increasingly yes for anything you disclose externally. Verification under ISO 14064-3 is what most mandatory and voluntary disclosure regimes expect, and a verified inventory carries far more weight with customers, investors and regulators than a self-reported one.

ISO 14064-1 gives you the inventory; ISO 14068-1 tells you what to do with it if you want to claim carbon neutrality. You cannot make a credible carbon neutrality claim without a properly quantified inventory underneath it, so the two standards work in sequence rather than as alternatives.

No, though the level of detail scales with your size and complexity. SMEs increasingly need a GHG inventory because larger customers and supply chains require it of them, often before any sustainability ambition of their own comes into play.