Climate Charter

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.

After receiving input from many of the organizations who have used the HCC, it was decided to review the tool during the second semester of 2023. Following a participatory consultation, several new features are included in the revised edition of the tool, the HCC+, such as the capacity to:

• Measure up to 200 entities (like different offices or projects)
• An alternative method of data input, particularly for organizations with big datasets and lots of entities
• Added ability to look for problems in data input
• Improved GHG results per entity and primary subcategories presentation
• A new feature that makes it possible to integrate to an external data visualisation and analysis tool, such as Microsoft Power BI or Tableau
• New emission factors added and several existing ones updated
• Use different techniques for allocating emissions across entities
• Analyse outcomes at the grouping (super-entity) level of entities
• Add comments and explanations to each data input point, that simplifies collecting data from multiple individuals across an organisation
• Analyse emissions associated with leased/rented assets.

In early 2024, the HCC+ underwent pilot testing by various organizations such as the Climate Action Accelerator and IFRC. In May 2024, the revised tool was formally presented to the humanitarian sector and is now available for use, accessible via the link below.

Other 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.

Organizations are encouraged to contribute to the refinement of the calculator and its supporting materials, ensuring that it remains a relevant and effective instrument for the humanitarian sector to address environmental impacts. To share your insights and suggestions, please use this designated feedback form.

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.

The HCC+ tool and resources:

• HCC+ user manual: please read me before using the tool.
• HCC+ tool: watch the May 2024 presentation.

The first version of The Humanitarian Carbon Calculator (HCC) is still available for anybody who would still like to use it. It is especially appropriate for small organisations who are just starting out with carbon accounting.  Be sure to start by reading the User manual before using the tool and/or viewing the tool’s January 2023 presentation.

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

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.

Provide feedback:

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.

Get in touch:

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. Collective intelligence is key and today the group has more than 40 organizations and 110 participants.  To learn more about this group or to join it, please contact Juan Galvez at juan.galvez@ifrc.org.