October 12th, 2011
Exciting times ahead in Australia for climate change! The carbon tax has finally gone through the Australian lower house. More details to come on its passage through the upper house, but this should be a done deal based on majority support from the Greens. This is a historic moment for Australia as climate change has been the poison chalice of politics since 2007. It has helped lead to the demise of two Prime Minister’s and an opposition leader.
The current opposition leader, Tony Abbot has vowed to get rid of the tax if he comes to power, so its future is not set in stone. But, a lot may happen before Australia’s next election which is set to be held late in 2013 and until then at least the Australian carbon tax is here to stay.
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October 5th, 2011
Yesterday, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol launched two new standards in response to businesses that want to better understand and measure their climate impacts beyond their own operations. The new standards provide companies with a comprehensive way of measuring the emissions produced when making a product and across the value chain.
The Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) and Product Life Cycle Standards were developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) with the aim to enable companies to save money, reduce risks and gain competitive advantage.
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Posted in Emission Factors, Legislation | Please leave a comment »
September 13th, 2011
To date discussions on climate change risk have largely centered on the physical impacts of climate change. Reponses including mitigation and adaptation have focused on risks for water, ecosystems, food, coasts, health and infrastructure.
A groundbreaking report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, ‘Unburnable Carbon – Are the world’s financial markets carrying a carbon bubble?’, demonstrates that our financial markets could also be at risk as a consequence of the need for action on climate change.
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Posted in Carbon Management, Uncategorized | Comments Off
September 12th, 2011
The UK Government Departments for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and Energy & Climate Change (DECC) jointly produce emission conversion factors to aid the calculation of carbon emissions by organisations for UK-based business activities. These conversion factors are optimised to UK circumstances and represent the most accurate means of measuring the carbon emissions associated with UK business activities. The UK is ahead of most countries in the production of specific conversion factors optimised for accuracy of national reporting, and this is good news for organisations wishing to measure and manage the carbon emissions from their UK operations accurately.
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January 12th, 2011
Analysis
The Cancun agreement has been interpreted as a positive outcome for the UNFCC process by re-establishing its credibility as a forum for action on climate change. This outcome is particularly important as following the absence of a legally binding outcome in Copenhagen in 2009, the UNFCC’s role has been called into question. The Copenhagen Accord is a political agreement, which most countries have since joined, but it has no formal standing under the UNFCCC.
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December 16th, 2010
For companies with operations across multiple countries, calculating and managing carbon emissions can be challenging. The environmental manager at the head office must collect various types of consumption data, such as electricity, freight/ business travel and fugitive gases, from hundreds of business units across the globe. All of these business units must use the same assumptions and operational boundaries when gathering the data and the whole process must be auditable, transparent and consistent over time.
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July 21st, 2010
There are increasing drivers on business to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. Regulation and taxation will increasingly apply direct costs on organisations based on their carbon emissions, while customers are increasingly factoring in considerations surrounding sustainability performance and carbon emissions into the supplier selection process. Responsibility in reducing carbon emissions will be shared across any organisation, however information and communications technology is coming under particular scrutiny for its often significant contribution to overall energy consumption. So how can a ‘green’ ICT strategy enable reductions in carbon emissions?
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April 29th, 2010
Abstract
“I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”
Lord Kelvin 1883
The Copenhagen Accord reiterates the international community’s commitment to “hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius”. Similarly, the EU maintains it ‘must ensure global average temperature increases do not exceed 2°C’ and the UK’s 2009 Low Carbon Transition Plan, states that “to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change, average global temperatures must rise no more than 2°C”. Despite such unequivocal statements the accompanying policies or absence of policies demonstrate a pivotal disjuncture between high-level aspirations with regards to 2°C and the policy reality. In part this reflects the continued dominance of ‘end point’ targets rather than scientifically-credible emission budgets and pathways, but even within the UK, where the policy-community and legislation aligns more closely with the science of climate change, the disjuncture nevertheless remains.
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Posted in Climate Change | 109 Comments »
December 15th, 2009
Introduction: what is offsetting?
Offsetting is nothing new – offsetting schemes and providers have been around for more than ten years, and much has been written about them already. Despite renewed focus at the Copenhagen conference (COP15) on the role of carbon credits in climate change mitigation, there remains considerable lack of clarity on what they actually are, how they work, together with their advantages and potential pitfalls.
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October 6th, 2009
Background
After a long period of inaction on climate change, the US is now pushing ahead with a range of regulatory mechanisms aimed at reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, the centrepiece of which is the Climate Change Bill, also known as the Waxman-Markey Bill. While the Bill is not yet guaranteed to become law, there is increasing certainty that US business will face regulation of its carbon emissions in the near future.
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