Measuring What Matters

Carbon accounting, aka “measuring your carbon footprint”, is a useful tool in the fight against climate change. Put simply, it is the quantification of the greenhouse gases emitted as a result of the organization’s operations, or a project’s production process.

What is carbon accounting?

Unlike financial accounting, which measures the financial costs of a project - carbon accounting measures the climate cost of a production or business. Carbon accounting is the foundation of carbon reporting, carbon footprints, sustainability planning, and emissions reduction targets (like net zero).

You may have already measured a production footprint using BAFTA’s albert calculator (UK), or the PEAR Calculator Sheet in the Green Production Guide from Sustainable Entertainment Alliance (US).

In this Drawn to Change Toolkit, you now have a made-in-Canada animation carbon calculator. This calculator takes into account the tension between animation studio vs production level footprints, and follows the internationally recognized methodology of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol - the world's most widely used standard for greenhouse gas accounting.

A carbon footprint is the output of the carbon accounting process. A carbon footprint represents the total of a company or individual production’s greenhouse gas emissions and serves as the basis for the producer’s emissions reductions goals and progress.

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How are emissions calculated?

Carbon emissions are calculated by multiplying a quantifiable business activity (number of flights, or an electric bill, for example) by an Emissions Factor (EF) or the average emissions generated by that activity. Emissions factors are frequently pulled from national databases, like the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in Canada or the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DEFRA) in the U.K. Emissions factors are updated frequently in line with current science. The key benefit of using a pre-made carbon calculator or carbon accounting system is that the complicated task of choosing emissions factors is done for you.

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Emissions calculations usually fall into one of two categories:

Spend-based. Spend based calculations estimate emissions using the dollars spent on an activity or purchase (e.g.: the dollar amount of a gas or electricity bill).
Activity-Based. Activity based calculations use the metric from the activity itself to calculate emissions (the litres of fuel purchased or kWh used on an electricity bill.).

Activity-based calculations are almost always more accurate (and therefore useful) than spend-based estimates and should be the default where practical. Using spend-based carbon calculations is a perfectly acceptable method if activity-based data is unavailable.

Often the key to using activity-based calculations rests in the data your team is able to collect. It’s a near certainty that spend-based data will available as productions already track costs. However, new processes may need to be put in place in order to capture good activity-based data as it won’t be the default set up for most productions to capture it efficiently.

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Studio Vs Production Level Footprints

Unlike live-action productions, animation studios often operate as year-round businesses, with multiple productions sharing the same staff, facilities, equipment, and energy use. As a result, measuring the studio's annual carbon footprint - at corporate level - is often more practical and accurate than attempting to calculate a separate footprint for each production.

However, many funders and broadcasters require emissions reporting at the production level, and our calculator tool can do both.

When production-level reporting is required, emissions can be estimated by allocating a proportion of the studio's total annual emissions to the specific production. This allocation should reflect the production's share of the studio's overall activity during the reporting period.

Determining the allocation can be done in one of two ways:

Full-time equivalent (FTE) allocation: Determine the proportion of your team assigned to the production relative to the total studio workforce during the reporting period.
- Example: 100 team members worked in the studio for the reporting period across all productions. 50 of them worked for the production you want to measure, meaning 50% of the studio emissions can be attributed to the production's footprint.
Time-based allocation: Determine the proportion of total labour hours or production hours attributable to the production relative to the studio's overall activity.

The resulting percentage is then applied to the studio's total emissions to estimate the production's footprint. This proportional allocation provides a fair and consistent method for assigning shared emissions, ensuring production-level reporting reflects actual resource use without requiring studios to measure each project independently.

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The Greenhouse Gas Protocol

The Drawn to Change Calculator was developed to closely align with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP), a global standard for measuring carbon emissions. The GHGP uses three main categories of emissions, called "Scopes":

Scope 1 covers direct emissions from owned sources, such as fuel used in vehicles or on-site generators.
‍Scope 2 includes indirect emissions from purchased energy like electricity used in studios, workstations, and rendering infrastructure.
‍Scope 3 covers all other indirect emissions across the value chain, including cloud computing, data storage, travel, and purchased services—often the largest share in animation.

Carbon data is calculated in three ways:

Product-based data (measured usage like kWh or render hours),
Spend-based data (emissions estimated from the amount spent on gas or utilities), or a
Hybrid approach combining both for accuracy and practicality.

More information on the methodology of the Animation Toolkit Calculator can be found in the User Guide [link to User Guide].