The whole business of carbon calculating could, and often does, sound complicated.  However we are keen to make it all as easy as possible for our clients to understand.  So here’s our ‘let’s make this simple’ CarbonMate glossary of key terms and descriptors that you may find throughout this website, or when we work with you in the future.

The Baseline is a reference to the estimate of the quantity of carbon that was emitted by an enterprise before any carbon reduction project is carried out.

Carbon accounting is the accounting process undertaken to measure the amount of carbon dioxide equivalents that will not be released into the atmosphere as a result of ‘Flexible Mechanisms’ projects under the Kyoto Protocol. Such projects include (but are not limited to) renewable energy projects and biomass, forage and tree plantations.

A Carbon Calculator is a tool that, with specific data input by the user, will undertake a calculation to provide a Carbon Dioxide equivalent value (CO2e) for the business or enterprise being studied.

Climate Change refers to the series of changes to the Earth's climate which include, and are mostly caused by, global warming.

Carbon Dioxide Equivalents relate to the dominant man-made greenhouse gas; carbon dioxide (CO2), which is emitted whenever we burn fossil fuels in homes, factories or power stations. But other greenhouse gases are also important. Methane (CH₄), for example, which is emitted mainly by agriculture and landfill sites, is 25 times more potent per kilogramme than CO2. Even more potent but emitted in smaller quantities are nitrous oxide (N₂O), which is about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide and released mainly from industrial processes, farming, and refrigerant gases.

In Carbon calculating, CO2e is a quantity that describes, for these given greenhouse gases, the amount of CO2 that would have the same global warming potential.

Flexible Mechanisms are essentially carbon off-setting and carbon trading processes whereby companies can trade their carbon permits with those who emit more, or less, greenhouse gases than them.

Global Warming  is the recent increase in the Earth's temperature, believed to be a result of human greenhouse gas emissions.

On Demand Software or Software as a service (SaaS), is a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally, typically on the Internet (sometimes called the cloud) and are typically accessed by users using a web browser.