PAS 2060 was withdrawn by BSI on 1 December 2025. It has been superseded by ISO 14068-1:2023, the international standard covering principles, requirements and guidance for achieving and demonstrating carbon neutrality.
That makes an article presenting PAS 2060 as the current route actively unhelpful. What remains useful is the operational lesson behind it: demonstrating a claim requires a reproducible evidence record, not a sentence in a report.
This page is an engineering overview, not certification advice. Confirm the current standard, programme and jurisdictional requirements with your qualified adviser or certifier before choosing a route.
The evidence disciplines that remain
Reduced to essentials, a credible carbon-neutrality process still needs you to establish and evidence:
What is in scope. The subject of the claim — an organisation, a site, a product, an event — and its boundary. This sounds administrative and is the decision everything else rests on.
What it emits. A quantified footprint, calculated by a stated methodology, from data you can produce.
What you are doing about it. A carbon management plan with a reduction target, a timescale, and the means — not an intention.
How the remainder is dealt with. Offsetting the residual, with the offsets documented and retired, and evidence of that retirement.
Then it is repeated. Neutrality is not achieved once; it is maintained, re-evidenced each period, which is what makes the manual version so expensive.
Where it goes wrong
Almost never at the claim. Almost always at the file.
The boundary shifts. A site is added, a business unit sold, a lease changes. If the boundary was never recorded precisely, this year's footprint is not comparable to last year's and nobody can say by how much.
The methodology drifts. Someone new calculates it slightly differently. Both figures are defensible; the trend between them is not.
The evidence is scattered. The footprint is in a consultant's spreadsheet, the offsets in an email, the reduction plan in a slide deck from two years ago. Each piece exists. The file does not.
Nobody can reproduce the number. The most common and the most serious. A figure that cannot be traced back to source data is a figure you are asserting rather than demonstrating — and the whole point of the exercise is demonstration.
The test worth running now
Take one figure from your most recent carbon declaration. Ask whoever owns it to produce, in writing: the source data behind it, the conversion factors used and their version, who reviewed the calculation, and when.
Give them a day. If it arrives, your evidence base is sound and the rest is efficiency. If it takes a week and arrives with caveats, the gap is not a claim problem — it is a record-keeping problem, and it is much cheaper to fix before a certifier or a customer's procurement team asks.
Claiming versus showing
This is the distinction the whole standard exists to enforce, and it maps exactly onto a distinction we spend most of our time on elsewhere.
A financial regulator does not ask whether your system is clever. They ask what it touched, what changed, and who reviewed it. A carbon certifier is asking the same three questions in different vocabulary: what is in scope, what changed, and who checked. In both cases the answer either exists as a record made at the time, or it does not exist at all — because evidence for a past period cannot be created retrospectively.
Which is why the evidence layer is a design decision rather than a reporting task. Get it right and each period's demonstration is a re-run. Get it wrong and each period is a reconstruction.
What we build
The record: footprint data collected from source on a schedule, conversion factors versioned, boundary changes logged with dates and reasons, calculations reproducible, and the supporting evidence retained alongside the number rather than in someone's inbox.
We do not certify — that is your certifier's role. We build the thing they will ask to see. That is the layer, built to the same standard we build for financial regulators, and a Reality Check will tell you in a week what your current data could and could not evidence.
This is the part we do — the crossing from a demo to a system that survives production.