Question on Separating Emissions in Scope 3.1 Accounting Using PyMRIO

[jbnsn]

Hello Konstantin & everyone,

I have a question about greenhouse gas emission accounting following the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

It’s common for companies to estimate Scope 3.1/3.2 emissions (Purchased Goods and Services) using average emissions per monetary value of goods which can be done with EE-MRIO databases and PyMRIO. However, according to the Section on Scope 3.1 emissions of the Technical Guidance of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (p.20):

Emissions from the transportation of purchased products from a tier one (direct) supplier to the reporting company (in vehicles not owned or controlled by the reporting company) are accounted for in category 4 (Upstream transportation and distribution).

My question is: How can I separate these emissions when using PyMRIO? Does PyMRIO have a feature or method to allocate transportation emissions separately, or is there a workaround to achieve this?

In fact, my current understanding is that if the cost of transporting a product from a tier one supplier to the reporting company is included in the invoice for the product, rather than in a separate invoice for the transport service, then these emissions simply cannot be reported separately using the spend-based approach with input-output data.

I hope it's appropriate to ask this question here. Any help is much appreciated.

Best regards,
Jonas