How To Understand the PEF Production Baseline Report 

Clicking on Volume in the top menu opens a modal with five choices. If you select Baseline, you will be redirected to the Baseline Overview.

If a baseline is already set for the active workspace, you will be directed to your baseline footprint report, which consists of a dashboard and a full report. The creation flow will also redirect you here once the calculation is finalised. By default, the PEF Production report will be selected, but you can switch to the GHG Protocol emissions tab to view the baseline report using the GHG Protocol methodology. This article focuses on the PEF Production lens of the report.

The dashboard summarises the key takeaways of the report:

• Total environmental impact of the manufacturing output

• Summary of the number of units produced and the reference year

• Top 3 impact categories and processes

• Top 3 tips to improve your baseline impact

• Worst offenders

• Product SKU contribution to the total environmental impact

• Highest and lowest impact products

• Breakdown by impact category

• Impact analysis results summary:

  • By Impact category

  • By Life cycle stage

  • By Process

• Major contributors summary

• Contextual examples translating the physical outputs of the analysis into easy-to-understand comparisons (e.g., car journeys, showers, basketball court sizes).

From this view, you can reset the baseline by clicking on the ‘Reset baseline’ button. This will reset it for everyone in your workspace.

If any product included in your baseline calculation has less than 100% first-party data (i.e., defaults were applied), the baseline will be marked as preliminary, with a warning displayed at the top.

From here, you can also view the full baseline report, which follows a similar structure to other reports but with slight differences in the section contents. To access the full report, click ‘See Full Report’ at the top.

• Summary: Presents an overview of the assessment, including the number of products, units, and total impact.

• Volumes: Summarises the production volumes used in the baseline calculation.

LCIA (Life Cycle Impact Assessment): This section includes a new ‘impact by product’ lens, showing results in the following ways:

• Impact by product

• Impact by category

• Impact by life cycle stage

• Impact by process

As with all reports, the data in tables can be exported as CSV by clicking on ‘Export as CSV’.

• Interpretation: Provides additional context and contextual examples to help translate the impact results, including comparisons to familiar benchmarks like car journeys or household activities.

• Appendix: Includes four appendices:

  • Detailed breakdown by product

  • Detailed breakdown by impact category

  • Normalisation and weighting factors

  • Assumptions behind the contextual examples