Greenhouse Gas Accounting in China: Measuring to Manage

When you talk about actually getting into the weeds about how you manage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nothing is more important or more technical than measuring those emissions. This week our organization, the World Resources Institute (WRI), hosted two stakeholder workshops to discuss new standards that WRI along with the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) have been developing with a global committee. These new accounting standards, part of WRI’s Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative address two critical needs in greenhouse gas management: how to calculate emissions of a company’s entire supply chain and how to measure emissions through a product’s lifecycle, including manufacture and end use.

WRI is hosting five workshops around the world to discuss these issues with critical stakeholders, and two of these workshops were in China – one in Guangzhou, located in the Pearl River Delta, China’s center of export-oriented manufacturing, and one in Beijing. The Guangzhou workshop attracted manufacturers and exporters, while the Beijing workshop’s attendees were mainly involved in policy-setting. Both workshops also attracted attendees from other countries in the Asia-Pacific, including Japan and New Zealand.

Attendees were focused on the nuts and bolts of how these measurements work and how to ensure global comparability. The keen interest in these tools demonstrates that Chinese business is feeling the need to measure and demonstrate improvements in greenhouse gas measurement and that the government is looking for global best practices as it develops greenhouse gas measurement tools for the 12th Five Year Plan.