13 July 2026 
Ashley Shelbrooke, Procurement Specialist
The Higher Education Supply Chain Emissions Tool (HESCET) is used across the sector to estimate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with procurement.
The HESCET estimates emissions based on spend data and does this through spend based emission factors. The emission factors applied are published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) annually. These factors are produced by the University of Leeds for DEFRA by modelling consumption based GHG emissions through the use of multi-region input-output (MRIO), which allows UK production and consumption of goods and services to be mapped and modelled. MRIO is a powerful economics tool for tracking and mapping supply chains but tracks only monetary flows. An extension to MRIO is environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) which allows environmental attributes, such as greenhouse gas emissions, to be attached to monetary flows. However, MRIO and EEIO are top down approaches so map, track and measure on a sector level instead of product level. As a result, the emission factors produced by the University of Leeds and published by DEFRA are sector average carbon intensities (kg CO2eq per GBP spend).
In HESCET, spend based on Proc-HE categories is input into the tool; DEFRA do not publish emission factors based on Proc-HE. Instead, in HESCET, Proc-HE categories are mapped to DEFRA categories which are themselves mapped to categories from the classification of individual consumption according to purpose (COICOP) emission factors.
COICOP is one of two frameworks used to classify goods and services expenditure in the UK. COICOP classifies procurement based on consumer spending i.e. household level, and is used to calculate consumer price index in the UK. The other framework used in the UK is standard industrial classification (SIC). SIC classifies procurement on a business level (per their primary economic activity) and is used to calculate GDP. As a result, the categories used to classify sectors and spend categories are different between the two.
The University of Leeds produce both COICOP and SIC emission factors, and DEFRA published both COICOP and SIC consumption based emission factors for the UK. However, due to legacy reasons, HESCET only applies COICOP. Higher education institutes do not fit the target application of COICOP, as it is designed to track individual consumption. Thus, some Proc-HE categories will not have an ideal COICOP counterpart to be mapped to. SIC, on the other hand, is targeted at business level consumption which fits higher education institutes spending better.
For these reasons, since April 2025 a Technical Review Team, working under the GHG Reporting and Tools subgroup of the Responsible Procurement group, have been working on implementing improvements to HESCET. The aim is to improve the tool such that the emission estimates can be more accurate and representative to the higher education sector in the UK. The primary improvement that has been made to the tool is to apply SIC instead of COICOP based emission factors, as SIC is more representative of higher education spending.
The impact of the change to HESCET is to be determined on a sector scale, but preliminary testing and analyses indicate that procurement emission calculated through HESCET will reduce as the emission factors for some key Proc-HE categories are lower in SIC than in COICOP. However, this does not mean all UK institutions will experience a reduction in their procurement emissions. While some key Proc-HE categories, such as software and lab equipment, have lower emission factors in SIC than COICOP, others are higher in SIC e.g. capital projects and groceries. The impact of this change in HESCET per institute will vary depending on which Proc-HE categories are important in terms of spend.
The Technical Review Team are approaching the final stages of their work as they look to release the updated HESCET in autumn 2026.
If you have any questions about the HESCET, or the work of the Responsible Procurement Group more widely, then please do not hesitate to contact Ashley.
