News
WRI’s GHG Protocol Director, Pankaj Bhatia, delivered a keynote address on the new GHG Protocol Supply Chain Standards at the Life Cycle Management (LCM) Conference 2011. The Life Cycle Management conference series is one of the world’s leading forums for environmental, economic and social sustainability.
The GHG Protocol is often approached by industry organizations and companies asking if we can partner with them to develop new GHG accounting guidance or tools, or whether we can endorse tools they have already developed. GHG Protocol has just released a draft policy for dealing with such requests. It outlines the development and review processes needed before tools can be co-branded with GHG Protocol and/or listed on our website.
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is looking for financial support to develop an online training course for both practitioners and trainers on the Corporate Standard. This will be a part of the Training and Capacity Building Initiative’s global, multi-year effort to scale-up the capacity of companies, governments and other organizations in developing countries to measure and manage greenhouse gas emissions. The Protocol seeks to develop an effective on-line course based on the Corporate Standard training materials that are already available but with additional web-based learning features.
The Greenhouse Gas Management Institute and the Environmental Careers Organization of Canada (ECO Canada) have announced a groundbreaking global personnel certification program for “carbon management” professionals. The Environmental Professional Certification on Greenhouse Gases – EP (GHG) – is the world’s first and only professional greenhouse gas-related certification accredited to ISO 17024.
The Sustainability Consortium members, comprised of leading global retailers, manufacturers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, have voted to adopt the GHG Protocol Product Standard.
On July 8, 2011, through USAID’s Partnership for Climate Action (PCA), GHG Protocol held a training and pilot-testing workshop in the Guangdong Province of China on its new “Energy-GHG Conversion Tool”. Fifteen participants from five companies representing the power, semiconductor, glass manufacturing, paper, and textile industries attended.
For the first time, leaders within the hotel industry are collaborating to reach a consensus on a single methodology for calculating carbon footprints and consistent metrics for communicating emissions.
On May 5, 2011, USAID’s US-China Partnership for Climate Action program partners, the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) and the World Resource Institute (WRI), signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Municipality Government of Xiaolan to launch the Xiaolan Low Carbon Initiative.
WRI is considering developing new guidance to help government agencies, civil society organizations, and others address the question, “What effect are policies expected to have on GHG emissions?”
ICT companies and their customers will soon have common approaches and methodologies to calculate the carbon footprints of ICT products and services thanks to industry guidance due to be published at the end of the year.
The Energy and Resources Institute – Business Council for Sustainable Development (TERI-BCSD), The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), and the World Resources Institute (WRI) organized a stakeholder dialogue on Corporate GHG Accounting in India on February 2nd, 2011. The event was held on the sidelines of the World CEO Forum 2011 and was the first formal consultation of a project between TERI and WRI. The partnership aims to build capacity on corporate GHG accounting and gain an appreciation of the necessary steps required for developing a national GHG program.
To garner feedback on the issues and options related to green power accounting, the GHG Protocol team held discussion-based workshops over the past few months tailored to US and European audiences specifically. The DC workshop on December 13th, 2010 centered around accounting practices relating to renewable energy credits (RECs), best practices for assuring clear emission attribute ownership, and how an emissions cap on the power sector impacts voluntary green power purchases.
Please join us October 25th for the first GHG Protocol Product Program Workshop. The workshop brings together product measurement, reporting, and labeling programs from around the world to: Learn how the GHG Protocol Product Standard can benefit established and developing GHG programs; Discuss ways of promoting consistency and harmonization between programs; Identify areas where the GHG Protocol can provide value and support; and Provide an opportunity for discussion and peer learning on the challenges and opportunities in program development and implementation.
The first drafts of the GHG Protocol Product and Scope 3 Accounting and Reporting Standards were released for stakeholder review on November 11th 2009. The draft standards were developed over a nine month period between January and October 2009 through the work of 7 technical working groups comprised of more than 160 members, with strategic guidance provided by a 25 member steering committee.
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.
A new journal, Greenhouse Gas Measurement & Management, focuses on the infrastructure to support future GHG mitigation policies by providing a scholarly forum for both academic researchers and GHG professionals.
As companies seek ways to reduce the GHG emissions in their corporate inventory, they have increasingly posed questions regarding the use of external instruments such as offsets and green power products. The variety of green power products available internationally reflects a diversity of national/regional electricity policies and voluntary approaches, and some of the common challenges in these topics include
Compliant with the GHG Protocol and built around the first set of third-party-certified open source carbon models, this “science as a service” is provided at no cost to non-profit organizations as
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.