Most fertilizer emissions happen in the field, and how much depends on where and how the product is used. A single global average hides that. Here is how to get a number that reflects your own portfolio, and why it is worth it.
Averages are no longer enough
Nitrogen fertilizer is one of the largest emission sources in crop supply chains, and most of it happens after the bag is opened. Nitrous oxide (N₂O), a greenhouse gas about 273 times more potent than CO₂ over 100 years, is released in the field. How much depends on the product, the soil, the climate and whether a nitrogen stabilizer was used.
Yet most inventories still treat every tonne of nitrogen the same, using one global default from the IPCC. That keeps the maths simple, but it hides where emissions actually sit. It also makes the levers that work, such as stabilized products, lower-carbon ammonia or a shift in markets, almost invisible in the numbers.
The guidance is moving the other way. The GHG Protocol's Land Sector and Removals Standard and the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) both push companies towards data that reflects their own supply chain, with sources an auditor can follow. We built a planner to make that step practical.
Who it is for
The planner is for companies that buy, make or sell nitrogen fertilizer and need to account for it properly, without building a carbon team to do so.
Fertilizer producers and distributors want to know where the emissions from their sales come from, product by product and country by country. They also want to show customers what a stabilized or lower-carbon product is worth in the customer's own Scope 3.
Food and beverage companies want a fertilizer number that reflects the crops and regions they actually source from, so that the projects they fund with farmers show up in their inventory and count towards their targets.
Both face the same question from the other side of the supply chain: what are the emissions of this portfolio today, and what would really bring them down?
From factory to field, for your own portfolio
The planner follows each tonne of fertilizer from the plant where it was made to the field where it was spread. You enter what you sell or buy: the products, the countries and the tonnes. The planner then works out two things for each sales line. The first is the production footprint, from the product's own carbon footprint where you have one, or a regional default where you don't. The second is what happens in the field: direct and indirect N₂O, ammonia volatilisation and nitrate leaching.
The in-field factors are where most of the precision comes from. Where a country has published its own emission factors in its national inventory, the planner uses them, and falls back to IPCC 2019 only where it has none. A tonne of urea spread in the UK therefore carries a different footprint from a tonne spread in France or Brazil, as it does in reality. Nitrogen stabilizers are handled the same way. Urease and nitrification inhibitors get factors by product, country and climate, with conservative assumptions, and the planner applies national rules too, such as Germany's requirement to use a urease inhibitor with urea.
On top of the baseline you build scenarios. Move volume into stabilized products, add an inhibitor downstream through a distributor, bring in lower-carbon ammonia or shift sales between markets. Then compare every scenario side by side against the reduction targets you have set. A bridge chart shows what drives the change, from volume growth to each lever, so the reason a number moved is never a mystery.
What you gain
The first gain is time. An inventory that used to take weeks of spreadsheet work and several rounds with consultants can be set up from a sales list in an afternoon. Changing an assumption updates every result, so there is no need to rebuild anything when a market or a product changes.
The second is a number that is yours. Because the factors follow your products and your markets, the result reflects your portfolio rather than a global average. As the example above shows, that number can be lower or higher than the default, and either way it is the one that holds up. It also makes the difference between a lever that looks good in a presentation and one that moves your reported emissions.
The third is a clear view of what to do next. The planner shows which targets each scenario meets and what would close the gap, for example adding a nitrification inhibitor to more volume in two specific markets. For fertilizer companies it also puts a value on each reduction, and shows the cost of CBAM, the EU's carbon border tax, on sales into Europe. For food companies it shows which reductions they can count towards their SBTi targets and which they cannot.
Numbers that hold up under audit
Specific numbers are only useful if someone else can check them. Every factor in the planner links to the published source it came from, whether a national inventory, the IPCC 2019 Refinement or the EMEP/EEA guidebook, and you can see how each value was worked out. Where the evidence is thin, the planner leans conservative rather than optimistic.
When it is time for assurance, the planner exports an audit workbook in which every result is rebuilt with live formulas, together with a note on the method and data. An auditor can follow any number back to its inputs without access to the tool. The planner is built for planning and forecasting: it supports assurance, but it is not itself an assured inventory.