Compare emissions of two reporting periods

Comparing two time periods shows you in a few clicks how your greenhouse gas emissions have developed against an earlier period — the basis for the year-on-year comparative disclosures under ESRS E1-6 and for evaluating progress toward your climate targets.

Prerequisites

• Emissions calculations have been recorded for at least one of the two periods.
• You know the start and end dates of both periods: the current reporting period and the comparison period (previous year or base year).

Step by step

1. Open the “Greenhouse gas emissions” page.
2. In the “Emission records” section, click “Compare time periods”. The “Comparison of time periods” dialog opens.
3. In the “Select time periods” section, enter the date fields “Start of current period” and “End of current period”.
4. Below that, enter “Start of comparison period” and “End of comparison period”. All four date fields are mandatory.
5. Click “Compare”. The result appears directly in the dialog.
6. End the comparison with “Close”.

Reading the result

The dialog splits the deviation analysis into four blocks:

• “Totals” — “Total value of current period”, “Total value of comparison period”, “Absolute change” and “Percentage change”, each in tCO2e.
• “Breakdown by scopes” — one row each for “Scope 1”, “Scope 2 (Location-Based)”, “Scope 2 (Market-Based)” and “Scope 3”, with both values and the change.
• “Location comparison” — the change per facility. Locations that did not yet exist in the comparison period are marked with “New”.
• “Main deviation drivers” — the activity types with the greatest absolute change between the periods.

If a location is flagged as “New”, part of any increase is explained by the wider recording scope rather than by actual emissions growth — note this in your reporting.

Base year, not just the previous year

Always compare the current reporting period with the base year of your climate targets as well — not only with the previous year. This lets you see early whether the overall reduction pathway is being maintained, even when individual years fluctuate. Run the comparison twice: once against the previous reporting period and once against the base year period.

The resulting rates of change are also the basis for evaluating progress toward your reduction targets in the “Climate targets” module.