Climate declarations - background

Climate declaration is a further development of the EPD^®systems environmental product declarations. The difference is that EPDs accounts for several types of environmental impact in addition to climate change. A climate declaration can be said to be a part of the EPD. The EPD^®system provides the ability to specifically declare a certain type of environmental impact, such as greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate declarations were launched by the Swedish Environmental Management Council and the Swedish Environmental Research Institute in May 2007. The background was increasing pressure on companies and organizations to report what they are doing to reduce their contribution to the greenhouse effect. The purpose of the climate declarations is to create a standard for describing the climate impact of goods and services in a transparent and credible way. Climate declarations can be used as a basis for comparison between products within the same product category. Climate change is a problem that needs a international solution, which in turn need to rest on credible and comparable basis. Therefore climate declarations could act as a tool for climate information, and a possible basis for a future climate labelling system.

The first company who developed a climate declaration was the paper producer Cascades Djupafors. They chose climate declarations to give customers the opportunity to see the company's climate impact for one of their products.