Document Type
Report/Policy Paper
Publication Date
7-2021
Abstract
To further and fully understand how to plan for the decarbonization of mining value chains, we need better data on carbon and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, neither consumers, corporates, or financial institutions know the embodied emissions in the products they produce or sell. While methods like life-cycle analysis and environmental product declarations exist, none use a verifiable, comparable, or widely adopted emissions reporting framework capable of sending supply chain signals.
To truly reform material supply chains, new solutions for markets, capital, and policy are required. COMET (the Coalition on Materials Emissions Transparency) – an alliance launched at Davos in January 2020 by CCSI, RockyMountain Institute, MIT’s Sustainable Supply Chains initiative, and the Colorado School of Mines – is creating a harmonized GHG calculation framework applicable to all mineral and industrial supply chains. To learn more about COMET, read:
- The three two-pagers on how COMET is working with financiers, producers, and buyers to create a harmonized GHG calculation framework.
- The blog How Much CO2 is Embedded in a Product? Toward an Emissions Calculation Framework for the Minerals Industry.
- The two-page policy brief The COMET Framework: Greenhouse Gas Data Transparency to Enable the Success of EU Climate Policy.
- The report, Comparison Between the IPCC Reporting Framework and Country Practice. This study examines national GHG inventories prepared by Australia, China, Germany, Japan, and the United States, and highlights how the inventories of different countries – though following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories – reflect different choices of GHG accounting methodologies and approaches, emission factors, and categories and gases reported. These choices, allowed under the IPCC Guidelines, result in significant differences in reported GHG emissions, reinforcing the case for adopting a harmonized GHG accounting framework.
In June 2021, the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN Climate Change) partnered with COMET to support the development of a harmonized GHG accounting framework.
Disciplines
Environmental Law | Law | Natural Resources Law | Oil, Gas, and Mineral Law | Transnational Law
Recommended Citation
Jiarui Chen & Martin D. Brauch,
Comparison Between the IPCC Reporting Framework and Country Practice,
(2021).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/sustainable_investment_staffpubs/200
Included in
Environmental Law Commons, Natural Resources Law Commons, Oil, Gas, and Mineral Law Commons, Transnational Law Commons