The Mexico GHG Program officially transitioned from a pilot project to a permanent program on October 2, marking a significant milestone for the program partners and 30 par

Hurricane Sandy was a massive and deadly storm, extending more than 1,000 miles, bringing huge waves and more than 13 feet of water to parts of New York City. In Manhattan, floods swept away cars and overflowed subway stations.

Project developers are concerned that high transaction costs and uncertainty around the acceptance of projects by governing bodies is limiting the number of projects being developed in Africa and around the world.

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.

As corporate leaders track and set more ambitious targets for reducing GHG emissions—and take a broader look at Scope 3 emissions—many are looking for a way to find new opportunities to collaborate (internally and externally). Starting this month, WRI is inviting companies to road test a new collaboration tool developed as part of the Next Practice Collaborative.

The Philippines Greenhouse Gas Accounting and Reporting Program (PhilGARP) was officially launched at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manila on November 30, 2006.

EPA is creating a nationwide database of greenhouse gas emissions, an important first step on the path to reducing U.S. emissions. The plan would require 13,000 facilities to report their emissions. 

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.

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. 

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. 

WRI’s GHG Protocol Team is teaching “the new carbon math” – carbon accounting for GHG measurement and management – by developing e-learning curriculum based on GHG Protocol standards and tools. Under the GHG Management Institute, WRI will develop a series of online courses in partnership with Earth Council Geneva (ECG), the GHG Experts Network (GEN), and ClimateCheck. The institute aims to provide professional training on how to measure and manage GHG emissions. “The Institute’s philosophy is ‘if you cannot accurately measure GHG emissions, you cannot manage them’,” Michael Gillenwater, the Dean of the Institute and the Director of the GHG Experts Network, said in a press release.

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.

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.