The World Bank’s Partnership for Market Readiness (PMR) has released Greenhouse Gas Data Management: Building Systems for Corporate/Facility-Level Reporting. Drawing on lessons learned from more than 10 jurisdictions – including Chile, China, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, and the US – the report provides guidance on how to design, develop, and implement data management systems that support industry greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting programs.
GHG data arise from the measure or estimate of the amount of GHG emissions generated by different activities and sources – such as energy generation, industrial processes and product use, agriculture, forestry and other land use, and waste. The role that GHG data play in ensuring transparency and accountability has become even more important as countries work to implement the Paris Agreement and achieve their post-2020 mitigation targets.
This guide advises countries seeking to develop robust and reliable GHG data management infrastructure to underpin GHG reporting programs—an often resource and time-intensive process.
Readers can find information on:
- Ensuring the system is responsive to an evolving regulatory environment, such as additional reporting sectors, changing thresholds, or a transition from voluntary to mandatory reporting.
- Mitigating the costs of acquisition, development and maintenance, which are hugely variable and dependent on the scope of functionality and the development approach (in-house vs. outsourced). A number of funding options were identified by the countries interviewed for this report, including annual appropriations, equity injections, or revenues from carbon pricing policies.
- Assessing data exchange and integration needs to decide if it is desirable to build a GHG data management system that can exchange data with another system, such as a non-GHG pollutant system, or an energy management or fuel tracking system, which may already contain much of the data needed to produce GHG emissions inventories.
Integrating data collection systems can ensure consistency between different reporting obligations, and can often benefit reporters by reducing duplication and the reporting burden. But jurisdictions often encounter challenges related to reconciling differences between the different reporting obligations in terms of scope, time schedule, or units used to report.
*To learn more, register for a webinar on Wednesday, May 4, 2016 11:00 am EST