Calculation of the carbon footprint

Electricity and heating emissions for Luke’s premises and research infrastructures are based on figures provided to Luke by Senate Properties. Senate Properties is the Finnish government’s real estate specialist and Luke’s main real estate partner. It procures 100% of its electricity from renewable energy sources and procures mainly carbon-neutral district heat for its premises in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Jyväskylä and Vaasa. In a few locations, Luke operates on university campuses, for which it was not possible to disaggregate Luke’s electricity and heating emissions, so they were excluded from the 2022 calculation.

For arable farming and livestock production, the calculation was performed using a farm-level carbon footprint calculator developed by researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) (Tuomisto et al. 2015). The carbon footprint calculator quantifies greenhouse gas emissions according to international standards and life cycle assessment (LCA) guidelines (ISO 2006a, 2006b, 2013, GHG Protocol 2011; PAS2050 2011). The different greenhouse gases have been converted into CO2 equivalents using factors from IPCC 2013.  For arable farming and livestock production, GHG emissions from the production of inorganic fertilisers, liming materials and growing media, digestion and manure of livestock and application of fertilisers and lime to fields were included in the calculation.

For aquaculture, the calculation was based on data from each aquaculture farm on feed consumption, additional growth of fish and the amount of chemicals used. The average carbon footprint of feed was obtained from the ‘Climate Impacts of Finnish Fish Products’ project, which ended a year ago, and the data on the climate impacts of chemicals were mainly obtained from the Ecoinvent v3.0 database. The nitrogen excretion of the fish was calculated based on the average nitrogen content of feed and the nitrogen fixed in the fish, and the share of nitrous oxide in the nitrogen excretion was calculated according to the IPCC (2006, 2013) calculation guidelines.

To avoid double counting, electricity, heat and water consumption and the operation of machinery were excluded from the calculation of emissions from arable farming, livestock production, horticulture, seedling production and aquaculture as they are already included in the total emissions figures reported by Senate Properties under the categories ‘electricity’, ‘heating’ and ‘fuels’.

Although the carbon footprints of the different categories have been estimated separately, they are broadly based on the same calculation guidelines. Certain Luke activities, such as transportation and research laboratories, are not included in the 2022 calculation. In addition, the research and gene reserve forests used by Luke and managed by Metsähallitus have so far only been included in Metsähallitus’ own calculations.