What is the difference between attributional and consequential carbon accounting, and which do buyers want?
Attributional accounting gives your product or company its share of the emissions that actually happened, using average factors. Consequential accounting estimates how emissions change because of a decision, using marginal effects. Buyers asking for a product footprint or Scope 3 data want attributional figures; consequential thinking belongs to avoided emissions and project claims.
Attributional: a share of what happened
You trace the flows that went into your product or company and multiply by average factors: the grid average for electricity, a supplier's average per tonne. The GHG Protocol Corporate and Product Standards are attributional. Totals across all companies add up, roughly, to the world's emissions, which is why buyers can add your figure to theirs.
Consequential: what changes because of a choice
You ask what happens in the wider system if a decision is made: which power plant runs less when you add solar, which supplier expands when demand rises. It uses marginal data and system expansion. LCA practice under ISO 14044 can take either view. Results do not add up across companies, so they cannot sit inside an inventory.
Which one goes where
- Product carbon footprint, Scope 1, 2 and 3, BRSR, CBAM: attributional.
- Avoided emissions from a product that replaces another: consequential reasoning, reported separately from the inventory.
- Carbon credit project baselines: closer to consequential, using margin factors set by the method.
- Policy or investment decisions: consequential is often the better question.
Signs a figure has mixed the two
A supplier subtracts avoided emissions from its own footprint, uses a grid margin factor inside Scope 2, or claims a credit for a reduction it also reports in its inventory. Ask which view each number takes before you add it to yours.
Illustrative example: 100,000 kWh of rooftop solar used on site
- Attributional, location-based Scope 2: 100,000 fewer grid kWh x 0.710 kg CO2 per kWh (grid average) = 71,000 kg less in your inventory
- Consequential: grid generation displaced at the margin, assumed 0.90 kg CO2 per kWh for this example = 90,000 kg avoided
- The two figures answer different questions; only the 71,000 kg change belongs in your Scope 2
The CEA CO2 Baseline Database also publishes operating, build and combined margin factors, which carbon credit methods use; 0.90 here is a placeholder, not a CEA value.
What Senseible does here
Senseible's Scope 1 and 2 figures are attributional: activity from your bills times average factors, such as the CEA grid weighted average of 0.710 kg CO2 per kWh (version 21.0). Reports built from that record are self-declared drafts.
Sources: GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard (2011), ISO 14044:2006, Life cycle assessment (iso.org), WBCSD Guidance on Avoided Emissions (2023)
Last reviewed 2026-10-19.