Earthcheck undertakes an extensive data collection and analysis to establish the required methodologies and emission factors to bring the tool up to international greenhouse gas reporting standards along with the quantified uncertainty associated with the parameters.

The Earthcheck Benchmarking System assists businesses in the travel and tourism sector to monitor and reduce their environmental impacts in the core areas of energy, water, waste, community, paper, cleaning and pesticides.

The Earthcheck system was developed by the Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre (STCRC) in March 2001. It is and internationally-trusted system of indicators that allows individuals, enterprises and destinations to systematically:

• Measure
• Benchmark
• Report and
• Manage their performance.

The following internationally accepted methodologies were used to base the upgrades of the Earthcheck tool:

• Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) 2006 IPCC guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.
• World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the world Resource Institute (WRI), 2004 The Greenhouse Gas Protocol – A Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard revised.
• International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) 14064 range of standards for greenhouse gas accounting.

Taken into account were

• The accounting period and boundaries of the tool,
• Categorising emissions within that boundary,
• Report on greenhouse gases to an internationally accepted standard, and
• Determining an operation’s annual carbon footprint.

The national Reporting requirements and the emission data available for the tool’s top 25 user countries (covers approximately 88% of all countries currently using the tool) was also collected and assessed to ensure the tool delivers the most accurate emissions estimates possible. International default emission standards will be used for countries outside the top 25 users and those countries within the top 25 that do not have country specific emissions factors. The individual country methodologies and emission factors have been provided for the following countries within the top 25 that had country specific emissions factors: