By Stephen Russell

Since its creation in 2002, the U.S. EPA Climate Leaders Program has assisted more than 150 companies to develop and implement long-term climate change strategies. This includes developing a GHG inventory, an inventory management plan, and a GHG reduction target. To replicate the U.S. EPA Climate Leaders Program's successful model in India, WRI, U.S. EPA and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Green Business Center (GBC) are partnering together to replicate the Climate Leaders program there.

Last week’s Rio+20 conference failed to yield strong sustainability commitments from corporations. The gap between where we need to get to avoid climate change’s worst effects and the actions companies are willing to take to get us there have never been further apart.

The Mexican government has adopted a new national climate change strategy that identifies the GHG Protocol-based Mexico GHG Program as the basis of a step-by-step approach to climate change mitigation.

On October 4th the GHG Protocol launched the new Product Life Cycle and Corporate Value Chain Standards with events in New York City and London. The global press launch of the Standards in New York City occurred in conjunction with WRI’s Corporate Consultative Group (CCG) fall meeting. CCG is a group of 150-200 representatives of large corporations, mainly sustainability managers, who are coming to engage with WRI experts – and with each other – to access environmental intelligence in order to protect and grow shareholder value and steer business to better protect the environment.

O programa GHG Protocol do World Resources Institute – WRI pretende contribuir com o esforço coletivo mundial em busca de uma economia resiliente e do equilíbrio climático do planeta. Para isso, desenvolve ferramentas de apoio à contabilização e reporte de emissões de GEE, como o GHG Protocol para empresas, reconhecido e adotado mundialmente. 

New developments are driving the need for GHG accounting programs around the world to evolve more efficiently, more effectively, and at a greater scale. On the business side, there is a trend toward managing GHG emissions along the value chain. Companies are looking up and down the supply chain and throughout the product life-cycle for GHG management opportunities. As climate policy becomes a reality in industrialized and developing countries around the world, many emerging economies are adopting voluntary national GHG mitigation targets and identifying the policies and measures to best achieve them. These trends point to the need for greatly enhanced GHG accounting capacity and tools at a global scale to ensure that mitigation actions can be measurable, reportable and verifiable. 

A new collaboration launches to develop standards for measuring and managing GHG emissions throughout the product life cycle and across the entire corporate value chain. The group is the GHG Protocol’s Product and Supply Chain Initiative, convened under the GHG Protocol. The project’s Steering Committee and technical working groups launched in September, in a series of meetings in Washington, DC and London, involving over 100 participants.

Following the launch of the Product Life Cycle and Corporate Value Chain Accounting and Reporting Standards in New York City, London, Beijing, and Tokyo, the GHG Protocol will be launching the standards in India on March 15, 2012. The event will be hosted by the World Resources Institute (WRI), World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). The launch event will take place in the morning and be followed by training workshops on the new standards in the afternoon.

Close on the heels of a new GHG program in Brazil, the Indian industry launched a national-level GHG Inventorization Program in Delhi, India, on May 28, 2008. Under the program, corporations will measure and manage their GHG emissions based on internationally recognized standards and monitor their progress towards voluntary reduction goals. The India GHG Inventory Program is a partnership between the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the US EPA, and the World Resources Institute.

The month of October saw the CD-release of the final version of the India program guide by the Indian Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Climate Change, Mr Shyam Saran. In his remarks, Mr Saran emphasized the importance of businesses taking the initiative to deal with climate change and encouraged public-private partnerships. The guide provides guidance and examples to assist companies in accounting for, quantification and tracking of their greenhouse gas emissions using internationally accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Standard.

Agriculture and agriculture-linked land use change contribute almost 80% to Brazil’s national emissions. On September 25 in Sao Paulo, GHG Protocol held an inaugural workshop to engage key stakeholders in developing a set of new tools specific to Brazilian agriculture – a corporate GHG accounting standard and emission factors. The event featured a keynote address by Eduardo Assad, a director at Embrapa and formerly the Brazilian secretary for climate change.

The China Business Council for Sustainable Development, in conjunction with WBCSD and WRI, hosted an informational workshop, “Corporate Energy Conservation and GHG Management,” on June 1 in Beijing at the Kempinski Hotel. Approximately 100 representatives from CBCSD’s member companies, government agencies, and NGOs attended the workshop.

On May 23, in São Paulo, WRI, ICLEI, C40, USP-IEE, and EMBARQ Brazil jointly brought together more than 200 Brazilian city officials and experts to discuss how to use the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GPC) to measure and manage greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cities. 

Accounting for 89 percent of end-use electricity consumption, buildings are the focus of a new ‘Carbon Audit’ campaign aimed to tackle climate change in Hong Kong. On July 24, Hong Kong’s ‘Guidelines to Account for and Report on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals for buildings (Commercial, Residential or Institutional Purpose) in Hong Kong’ based on the WRI-WBCSD GHG Protocol was launched in a ceremony attended by 37 major organizations, including all of Hong Kong’s major property developers, as well as media.

Today the GHG Protocol launches two new global greenhouse gas accounting standards - for corporate value chains (scope 3) and product life cycle emissions. Janet Ranganathan, WRI’s Vice-president for Science & Research, and Pankaj Bhatia, WRI’s Greenhouse Gas Protocol Director since 2004, describe the 12-year program’s critical role in business and government efforts to address climate impacts.

GHG Protocol has published a draft royalty-free Licensing Policy and plans to integrate this agreement into all online calculation tools and standards in the New Year. GHG Protocol website visitors will be asked to sign-in before downloading all online tools and standards and will then be asked to accept or decline the license presented before them. Users will not be asked to accept the license every time they download tools and standards; a one-time review of the license is all that is required.