Humanitarian Carbon Calculator

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 HCC 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.

As of December 2025, technical maintenance and support of the HCC was handed over to the Climate Action Accelerator, with the support of the Crisis and Support Centre of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (CDCS). This transition ensures the tool’s long-term continuity, broader reach, enhanced community support, and the development of new functionalities, allowing the humanitarian sector to continue advancing its decarbonisation efforts.

You can download the calculator and access support in the Accelerator’s webpage

Using the carbon accounting tool:

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.

Need help? Here are some videos on particularly complex aspects of carbon accounting:

Please note, these videos are based on the first version of the Humanitarian Carbon Calculator (HCC), so the interface may differ slightly from the current HCC+ tool. However, this will not affect the overall learning or content provided in the videos.

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.