Volvo Cars (VCC) has the ambition of becoming climate neutral by 2040 (Volvo Cars Sustainability). To secure

reduced energy use and reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement

and supporting SDG 13 (UN:s Sustainable Development Goal 13: “Take urgent action to combat climate change

and its impacts”), we will focus on short term actions and aim to reduce supply chain GHG emissions by 25 %

per average car 2018–2025 (Volvo Cars Annual Report 2019).

In order to reach these targets, VCC needs to assess and follow up on the environmental performance of the

cars. VCC currently lack supplier specific data to evaluate our real situation. VCC´s LCAs and GHG reporting rely

on general data for the supply chains and even if this gives a good estimate, getting specific data would give a

better picture of what the actual situation is in VCC’s supply chains. Hence, it is important for VCC to get these

data to understand where VCC is now and to guide decision-making to reach the targets.

This guideline has been created to guide our suppliers in their carbon footprint calculations. VCC will use

supplier specific carbon footprints to improve the carbon footprint assessments on car level and organisational

level and to help product developers in their decision-making. It is important that the carbon footprints from

our suppliers have been calculated in a similar way, to enable comparison of apples with apples, and enable

combining the results for the complete vehicle. The ambition has been to not leave room for different choices

or interpretations. When in the near future (hopefully), there is an internationally agreed standard for

performing LCA calculations in the automotive sector, we will refer to this instead. In the meantime, this is the

guideline VCC wants the suppliers to use. Furthermore, we will update this document in the future to align with

other initiatives and after receiving feedback from our suppliers.

The guideline is currently focused on carbon footprint assessments, i.e., assessment of the climate impact. In

the future, we expect to expand it to include guidance for other relevant environmental impact categories.

The approach described in the guideline is attributional, i.e., a book-keeping assessment, which does not allow

for accounting for credits (see more in the section on allocation).