Signatories of the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations commit to working to reduce the impacts of the climate and environment crisis, and to rapidly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But organizations cannot reduce what they cannot measure. The Humanitarian Carbon Calculator (HCC) was developed to address this gap, under the umbrella of the Sustainable Supply Chain Alliance, a collaborative project led by the ICRC to strengthen the integration of sustainability principles into humanitarian logistics.
The development of the tool was informed by consultations with over 100 humanitarian organizations, experts, and ECHO throughout 2021. These consultations helped define a methodology for estimating an organization’s greenhouse gas emissions that would both be specific to the humanitarian sector and follow an international standard (the GHG Protocol).
The Humanitarian Carbon Calculator allows organizations to assess the direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions associated with their activities. This in turn makes it possible to set reduction targets and to build emission reduction plans. The Humanitarian Carbon Calculator can also be used to monitor the evolution of an organization’s emissions over time, thereby assessing the effectiveness of efforts to reduce emissions.
The resources listed below will support organizations in their carbon accounting exercises, explaining steps they must take, the data they need, key reduction levers, and so on.
This tool and these resources are a first step. They will need to be regularly reviewed and improved, with the support of all humanitarian organizations. As you test the Humanitarian Carbon Calculator, please share your feedback with us.
Completely new to carbon accounting? Watch this video on the Why and How of Carbon Accounting:
How to do carbon accounting? Read the Methodological guide to help you get started.
Carbon accounting principles
Emission factors
Humanitarian supplies
Freight transport
Cash transfers
To see major opportunities for emissions reductions read this first list of emissions reduction levers.
To dig deeper and understand how we arrived at these deliverables, see this methodology note. This will be important for organizations wishing to build their own tool in order to ensure consistency across the sector.
To provide feedback on the tools and resources to help us improve them in the future, please use this form.
Please use this click here to submit new emission factors that you collect from well-recognized databases, suppliers or Life-Cycle Analyses for certain products/services commonly used in the humanitarian sector.
If you are interested to know more, or to learn about the tools, resources, challenges and lessons learned that informed the development of the Humanitarian Carbon Calculator, please contact Carmen Garcia at cgarciaduro@icrc.org.
During the pilot phase of the Humanitarian Carbon Calculator, an informal forum of interested organizations was formed to exchange experiences, lessons learned, and questions. To learn about this group or to join it, please contact Juan Galvez at juan.galvez@ifrc.org.