Carbon accounting

Carbon accounting refers generally to processes undertaken to "measure" amounts of carbon dioxide equivalents emitted by an entity. It is used inter alia by nation states, corporations, individuals – to create the carbon credit commodity traded on carbon markets (or to establish the demand for carbon credits). Correspondingly, examples for products based upon forms of carbon accounting can be found in national inventories, corporate environmental reports or carbon footprint calculators. Likening sustainability measurement, as an instance of ecological modernisation discourses and policy, carbon accounting is hoped to provide a factual ground for carbon-related decision-making. However, social scientific studies of accounting challenge this hope, pointing to the socially constructed character of carbon conversion factors or of the accountants' work practice which cannot implement abstract accounting schemes into reality.

While natural sciences claim to know and measure carbon, for organisations it is usually easier to employ forms of carbon accounting to represent carbon. The trustworthiness of accounts of carbon emissions can easily be contested. Thus, how well carbon accounting represents carbon is difficult to exactly know. Science and Technology Studies scholar Donna Haraway's pluralised concept of knowledge, i.e. knowledges, can well be used to understand better the status of knowledge produced by carbon accounting: carbon accounting produced a version of understanding of carbon emissions. Other carbon accountants would produce other results.

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