Rio de Janeiro is one of the world’s leading cities injecting sustainability into its planning. In 2011, Mayor Eduardo Paes enacted an ambitious climate change law, setting a goal to avoid 20 percent of its emissions by 2020, based on 2005 levels. There was only one problem: The city wasn’t sure just how much it was emitting, or where its emissions were coming from.
As home to 3.5 billion of the world’s population, cities and urban areas play a crucial role in combating global climate change. And today, many of their leaders are announcing steps to do just that.
The World Resources Institute unveiled the first ever Agricultural Guidance to help companies measure, manage, and report greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture sector, including farming, livestock, and land use change. The agriculture sector is responsible for 17 percent of global GHG emissions, including land use change.
Rio de Janeiro is a leader among the Brazilian cities aggressively promoting low-carbon development. Now Rio is conducting a GHG inventory for 2012, the first target year under its climate change law.
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.
Last week 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.
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.
GHG Protocol has released a second draft of its Agricultural Guidance for open comment. The Agricultural Guidance is an international supplement to the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard that aims to customize the latter to the agricultural sector, while addressing the unique challenges posed by the sector - accounting for reversible carbon stocks in soils and biomass, setting and tracking progress toward reduction targets against a background of highly variable emissions, quantifying emissions, etc.
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.
During the informal sessions of the U.N.’s Rio+20 conference on sustainable development last week, Rio de Janeiro city officials and the World Bank jointly launched a very timely project: the Rio Low-Carbon City Program.