CNaught is building the easiest way for companies to access a diversified portfolio of carbon credits that you can trust. Our approach follows scientific best practices, and we handle all of the logistics that come with buying and retiring offsets for you. Starting today, we are also offering our calculators as a way to estimate aspects of your carbon footprint that you might want to offset.

In order to use carbon credits, you have to know how many tonnes you want to purchase. Sometimes a company may have a number of tonnes in mind, perhaps representing the company’s emissions after they first took steps to reduce their footprint. But in other circumstances, the company may be looking to offset a particular aspect of their business like business travel or use of office space. Or the company wants to enable their customers to offset the carbon footprint of an aspect of their customer’s purchase, like shipping. Those companies need help estimating the amount they want to offset, and that is what CNaught’s calculators are designed to do.

There are a lot of carbon calculators out there, and you may have noticed that they don’t always estimate the same amount of carbon emissions for the same activity. This is because estimating emissions based on a limited number of data points requires assumptions about other information. It is possible to design a calculator to require extensive inputs to reduce the necessary assumptions and generate maximally accurate estimates. However, such a calculator has a downside: many users will not have the required inputs and will not generate any estimate at all.

CNaught’s calculators are designed to be easy to use by people who have the typical amount of information of someone in their shoes. The calculators take in that information and then use third-party data on things like fuel efficiency or emissions coefficients and make assumptions or take industry averages to generate an estimate of carbon emissions. You can read our full methodology, but we believe that our estimates give you a fast way to help you make decisions on how to reduce your emissions and/or calculate how much you need to offset.