What Scope 1 and Scope 2 Actually Mean
The terminology around Scope 1 and Scope 2 is more intimidating than the concept. Here is the plain-English version.
If you're new to GHG reporting, "Scope 1" and "Scope 2" get thrown around like everyone already knows what they mean. They don't take long to actually understand. The terminology is more intimidating than the concept.
Scope 1: emissions you create directly
Scope 1 covers anything your company burns or releases itself. If you own it and it produces emissions, it's Scope 1. The clearest examples: fuel burned in your company vehicles, natural gas burned in a boiler or furnace at your facility, and refrigerant that leaks out of your HVAC or refrigeration systems. In each case, the emissions are happening because of something you're physically doing: burning fuel, or losing gas from equipment you operate.
Scope 2: emissions from the energy you buy
Scope 2 is different in one specific way: the emissions don't happen at your location. When you buy electricity from the grid, the actual emissions occur at the power plant that generated it, not at your building. But because you're the one who purchased that power, and your demand is part of what keeps that power plant running, those emissions count as yours under Scope 2. The simplest way to think about it: Scope 1 is what you burn yourself; Scope 2 is what someone else burned to make the energy you bought.
Where Scope 3 fits (and why it's not covered here)
There's a third category, Scope 3, that covers everything else in your value chain: emissions from your suppliers, from business travel, from the goods you purchase, from how your products get used after you sell them. It's a much bigger, messier category, and a genuinely different kind of problem than Scope 1 and 2, which is why it has its own separate timeline and its own separate set of challenges. If you're just starting out, the useful thing to know is that Scope 3 isn't your first problem to solve. Scope 1 and 2 come first, both in sequence and in difficulty.
Why the distinction actually matters
This isn't just categorization for its own sake. Scope 1 and Scope 2 use different data sources (fuel and refrigerant records for Scope 1, utility bills and energy contracts for Scope 2), different calculation approaches and, depending on the regulation you're responding to, different deadlines. Getting the category right determines where you go looking for the data and which method you use to calculate the number, so it's worth having this straight before you start pulling records.
A quick way to keep it straight
If you burned the fuel yourself, it's Scope 1. If someone else burned fuel to make something you bought, like electricity, it's Scope 2. If it happened anywhere else in your value chain, upstream or downstream of your own operations, it's Scope 3.
Once the categories are clear, the next question is what data to actually go collect. The Scope 1 & 2 Data Collection Checklist walks through exactly that, organized by category.