Development of an industry-driven carbon footprint tool for UK’s seafood sector
One-stop-shop platform to calculate carbon emissions of seafood
© Seafish is the UK public body supporting the UK seafood sector to thrive. One of Seafish’s 2023-38 Corporate Plan priorities is to support the sector’s response to the climate change emergency, by providing practical resources. To make this possible, accurate insights into carbon emissions and supply chain hotspots (‘risks’) are crucial. Following its tender process, in 2023 Seafish commissioned MxNS | Blonk to create a powerful digital solution, enabling UK seafood businesses to calculate product footprints and gain insights to drive transformational supply chain improvements.
The result is the Seafood Carbon Emissions Profiling Tool (SCEPT); this tool demonstrates perfectly how our expertise on environmental footprinting, software engineering, and data analysis comes together to enhance sustainability in the agri-food sector.
Understanding the impact to reduce emissions
As a business you first need to understand the footprint of your products and services to make meaningful decisions on how to improve. You need data and information to identify the hotspots and risks in your supply chain. However, this can be a complex exercise. The SCEPT is developed to support seafood businesses in the UK with this, it helps them to understand their impact, and make informed decisions to become more sustainable. Besides that, it also helps to report on (Scope 3) emissions under the GHG protocol for instance. At last, it also offers the ability to benchmark results against sector peers.
© We are delighted with the industry support to align behind one easy to use profiling tool which includes transparent methodology and consistent measurement capabilities. Throughout the project we worked alongside MxNS | Blonk, including design workshops and beta-testing with supply chain businesses, to crucially ensure the tool meets the sector’s needs and aspirations going forward.
User-friendly One-Stop-Shop Platform
One of the benefits of SCEPT is that is serves as a ‘one-stop-shop’ platform, which can be used by entire seafood sector in the UK for carbon footprint calculations. During its development, the entire user base was considered, and no specific technical knowledge is needed to use the tool. Through an intuitive interface, seafood business, in both wild capture and aquaculture sectors, can input their data and receive visual insights into their product carbon footprints. Users can click through a multi-layered sunburst diagram to drill down further and obtain more detailed information on specific hotspots. In this way, the tool translates rather technical and complex information into something simple for anybody to access and understand.
Impression of the Seafish Carbon Emissions Profiling Tool
Click on the images to expand
© Built on industry inputs
The tool is built on industry inputs and expertise, ensuring that its functionalities and usability align with industry needs. Additionally, a Scientific Advisory Panel guided the development of the calculation model, which is aligned with several international calculation standards, such as PAS 2050-2:2012. To ensure transparency, the methodology is publicly available, and can be downloaded via the Seafish website. Within the tool all input data are stored securely. If a user doesn’t have access to certain operating data, there is an option to use embedded default data. These default data comprise the best available secondary data from licensed lifecycle databases, such as Agri-footprint. The design of the tool allows for future expansion, making it possible to add extra environmental impact categories.
Access to the tool
Access to SCEPT is restricted to validated seafood businesses in the UK. If you want to become user, please reach out to Seafish.
The tool has also public area, which gives insights into the carbon footprint of various seafood products in the UK.
More information
Get in touch
Bart Durlinger
Do you have any questions related to SCEPT? Or are you interested in the development of a Footprint tool for your sector, please reach out to Bart.