Foreword

An Overview of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Verification Issues

Foreword Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change

The need for information on how to count, track, and verify greenhouse gas emissions has never been greater. Many of the world’s nations are working toward international, national, and subnational regimes for reducing emissions. These efforts have been accompanied by a growing number of corporate targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the emergence of a greenhouse gas trading market. To ensure that the numbers on which governments determine compliance, and on which companies stake their finances and reputations, are real, greenhouse gas emissions verification is critical.

In this Pew Center report, authors Christopher Loreti, Scot Foster, and Jane Obbagy of Arthur D. Little, Inc. describe the evolving approaches to corporate greenhouse gas emissions verification. They identify factors that drive verification activities and suggest a number of principles that organizations should consider when verifying greenhouse gas emissions, with an eye toward the experiences of the firms, governments, and non-governmental organizations that have been involved in verification activities.

This report builds on An Overview of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory Issues which the Pew Center released last year, and which offered a set of principles for conducting greenhouse gas inventories. Both of these reports are part of the Solutions series, which is aimed at providing individuals and organizations with tools to evaluate and reduce their contributions to climate change.

The authors and the Pew Center would like to thank the companies featured in this report for sharing their experiences and perspectives, and acknowledge the members of the Center’s Business Environmental Leadership Council, as well as Jean-Bernard Carrasco of the Australian Greenhouse Office, Nick Hughes of BP, and Janet Ranganathan of the World Resources Institute for their review and advice on a previous draft of this report.