An investigation of Organisational Carbon Accounting (OCA) practices in the Defence Sector to determine how these can best support Low Carbon Technology Innovation

Abstract

‘Climate change’ and ‘defence’ are becoming closely associated topics, particularly in relation to the potential that the defence sector has to support the development of low carbon technologies. This exploratory research applies an inductive approach and a strongly archival strategy in order to investigate how Organisational Carbon Accounting (OCA) practices in the defence sector can best support low carbon technology innovation. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to the literature, drawing on the fields of Carbon Accounting, Defence Industrial Policy, and Innovation Studies.
It finds that there some difficulties allocating emissions to organisations in existing OCAs, which are particularly marked in the defence sector due to close working relationships between organisations. These allocations can result in abstract OCAs that do not always reflect the underlying activities causing emissions to be produced. In contrast, ‘Project Level’ Carbon Accounts focused on large-scale collaborative programmes can better account for the emissions of the defence sector in an understandable way that engages new and relevant actors to defence-energy debates. These accounts are therefore more likely than existing OCA practices to support low carbon technology development across innovation networks. A positive selection environment for low carbon technologies can be promoted if these ‘Project-Level’ Carbon Accounts are presented within an appropriate strategic framework, and this research describes the relevance of the defence sector concepts of ‘resilience’ and ‘endurance’ and the related metric of the Fully Burdened Cost of Energy (FBCE).
The findings emphasise the value of sector-level analyses of OCA practices, which are not represented in the literature at present. The sector-level perspective can help identify relevant methods from the wider Carbon Accounting field that can improve existing organisational approaches. More importantly, it can help researchers engage with the fundamental question of what Carbon Accounting is for, by analysing how the OCA practices within a specific sector support or inhibit its most effective contribution to climate change mitigation.