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1 This article was downloaded by: [ ] On: 20 March 2014, At: 12:55 Publisher: Taylor & Francis Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: Registered office: Mortimer House, Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Greenhouse Gas Measurement and Management Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: Public access to comprehensive greenhouse gas mitigation information: the example of climate-relevant investments Jochen Harnisch a a KFW Development Bank, Palmengartenstrasse 5-7, 60325, Frankfurt, Germany Published online: 06 Jun To cite this article: Jochen Harnisch (2011) Public access to comprehensive greenhouse gas mitigation information: the example of climate-relevant investments, Greenhouse Gas Measurement and Management, 1:1, 7-10 To link to this article: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content ) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

2 Commentary Public access to comprehensive greenhouse gas mitigation information: the example of climate-relevant investments Jochen Harnisch* KFW Development Bank, Palmengartenstrasse 5-7, Frankfurt, Germany This article argues that to address greenhouse gas (GHG) measurement and management and the broader climate challenge, public access to additional types of mitigation-relevant information will be needed to complement the existing quantitative information on GHG emissions from countries, sectors, products and companies. Specifically, information and suitable indicators on investment in climatefriendly and mainstream fossil energy infrastructure will be needed to support decision makers in anticipating and detecting economic and political trends of climate relevance. Keywords: climate change; development assistance; fast-start funding; financial flows; green investment; mitigation; monitoring 1. Introduction To know whether planet Earth today is on a development path to a 2, 3 or 4 C warming world, comprehensive and up-to-date greenhouse gas (GHG) emission information is required. However, this information frequently does not permit managers and policy makers to understand the drivers of emissions and give proper insights into technology trends and options. Access to information beyond emission data, such as data on investment flows and technology market shares, is needed to prepare and make policy decisions. This information provides timely insights into drivers of emission changes many years before emissions or savings occur. The outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2010 has diminished short-term expectations for a comprehensive and ambitious multilateral deal on differentiated quantitative GHG emission reduction objectives for industrialized countries and emerging economies. Instead, its results can be read as a reaffirmation of national sovereignty in addressing climate change and a focus on addressing climate change as part of nationally appropriate policy packages on energy, industry, transport, agriculture, forestry and overall development. This diversion of policy attention from binding national emission caps is likely to have profound implications on the further development of international, national and corporate GHG monitoring and management systems and respective methodologies. Further, these international climate policy developments are likely to strengthen the need for a broader range of publicly available climate information beyond GHG emission data. If compliance is designed around technology or performance standards rather than with aggregated quantitative emission targets, then decision makers would need different types of data and reporting systems. 2. Emission data: what we have There is ample experience with GHG emission measurement and a wealth of data from many countries, sectors, processes and companies. Methodologies such as the GHG Protocol of WBCSD/WRI (GHG Protocol Initiative, 2005), the IPCC Inventory Guidelines (IPCC, 2007) or the EU Monitoring and Reporting Guidelines (EU-MRG, 2007) are heavily used in their respective fields. Initiatives such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) (CDP, 2010) have helped to establish voluntary corporate GHG reporting as a practice expected from publicly listed companies. The Clean Development Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with its set of methodologies and monitoring requirements has contributed tremendously to establish the capacity to plan, implement and assess * jochen.harnisch@kfw.de doi: /ghgmm Earthscan ISSN: (print), (online)

3 8 Harnisch international GHG emission reduction projects. Recently, in addition to previous work under the umbrella of life-cycle analysis (EEA, 1997), a comprehensive range of dedicated activities has been started to estimate the life-cycle carbon footprint of products and services (British Standards Institution, 2008; GHG Protocol Initiative, 2010). These initiatives are supplementary to the international framework on the Right to Now as set out by the Arhus Convention, as well as its Kiev Protocol establishing the Pollution Release and Transfer Register PRTR (UNECE, 2009) that provides international emission data on the facility level. Existing methodologies commonly provide a solid framework for the specific objectives. At the same time, part of the existing GHG information including quantitative GHG sector emission levels exhibits limited utility because of missing supplementary activity data. For example, specific productionrelated emission data for different vehicle manufacturers are hard to interpret because of different levels of outsourcing. Also there seems to be a bias towards the disclosure of decreasing emission time series (e.g. multinationals reporting on the activities in industrialized countries only), leading to an impression of an overall decrease of global sectoral trends. At the same time, many governments and companies complain about the substantial resources needed to collect GHG data for meeting voluntary or mandatory reporting requirements. Reporting on project-based reductions (i.e. offsets) is sometimes questioned in relation to the additionality of these measures or potential leakage effects. These examples suggest that despite the significant resources expended for GHG emission monitoring and disclosure, users frequently do not and cannot obtain the comprehensive picture needed to understand the disclosed emission profiles of companies or products. 3. Other GHG data To monitor the effectiveness and level of enforcement of climate-relevant policies, civil society and policy makers have a growing need for data on technology mixes, production levels, and activity and technology data for relevant countries and companies. Traditionally, governments and companies have often classified site-specific data on production technology, processes or market shares of certain technologies in new sales as confidential. In practice, this information frequently exists in technology databases of academic institutions, technical consultants, market research companies, watchdog organizations and international agencies. Because of the resulting competitive advantage, data owners typically guard this information and carefully restrict access to a limited (i.e. authorized or paying group of persons). To give decision makers and the informed public a sound base for their decisions, I firmly believe that it is time to make a major advance in increasing the public availability of technology and market data. Because of the clear incentives to limit transparency and restrict the availability of this type of information to small groups, it will be a task for a transnational body or large private foundation to ensure the public availability of this category of information as they are most likely to provide robust long-term funding. Individual companies, industry associations and governments including national statistics offices will be important contributors to such an effort. Key sectoral information should include country-by-country data (e.g. on contracts for new renewable, nuclear and fossil power generation capacity, combined heat and power plants, new refineries and petrochemical plants, coal gasification and liquification plants, steel, cement, fertilizer and aluminium plants, passenger and cargo vehicles, passenger and cargo airplanes, cargo vessels and products containing fluorinated gases). A concerted international effort should identify most urgent data needs to design, monitor and assess policies and understand market trends, identify existing owners of these types of data and estimate the financial resources needed to sustain a publicly available and up-to-date database on these key public datasets. A new common user interface or existing climate and technology platform could be used to make this information available. The next section of this article discusses the current state and development perspectives for the reporting of climate-relevant investment into low-carbon and carbon-intensive technology. 4. Climate investment data Data on investment into the deployment of low-carbon and carbon-intensive technology can provide a test case of public needs for climate-related data. Why does this type of information matter? First and foremost, the data discussed above permit decision makers to anticipate and potentially manage changes of future emissions at a point in time when decisions are made to deploy technologies (i.e. well before emission trends from a sector start to change). In the political context, it is the flow of public financial support by industrialized countries of low-carbon technologies in developing countries that currently receives largest attention. Renewable energy markets currently achieve a reasonable level of transparent and free reporting by commercial or not-for-profit information services like Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF, 2010), in collaboration with UNEP-SEFI (2010) and REN21 (2010). The fossil and nuclear energy markets and other private sector market surveys tend to be less transparent. IEA periodically releases its World Energy Outlook (IEA, 2010) that reports the change of the generation mix in countries. From individual companies like Siemens (2010) aggregated technology and regional market information is made available as part of their investor relation activities. This is less continuous and reliable.

4 Public access to comprehensive GHG mitigation information 9 Table 1 Author s estimate of world markets for key power generation technologies in 2010 Energy source New capacity (GW) Estimated sales Coal billion Gas billion Nuclear 7 15 billion Hydro billion Wind billion Other renewables billion Total billion Table 1 gives an example of the utility of activity data discussed above for new power generation capacity at the global level. While global CO 2 emissions from power production slightly declined from 2008 to 2009, because of the impact of the financial crises, it can be seen from these numbers that the larger part (approx. 130 GW) of new power generation capacity is still based on fossil technology while non-fossil generation capacity accounted for approx. 90 GW in This new generation was added on top of roughly 4,000 GW existing generation capacity with rather limited replacement of outdated generation capacity. The expansion of generation capacity is thus still heavily fossil based despite the impressive expansion of renewable energy markets during the first decade of the 21st century. With growing demand for electricity, non-fossil energy is reducing but still far from reversing the growing trend of emissions from the electricity sector. Another issue particularly relevant under the international climate negotiations is the tracking of concessional (i.e. subsidized loans) loans and grants for low-carbon investment and adaptation in developing countries as provided by development finance institutions who receive their funding mainly from industrialized countries. The database of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD comprises information on development finance flows based on categorizations by donor countries. A recent analysis by the World Bank (2010) tapping different information sources provides a comprehensive overview of current climate financing from different public finance institutions and gives an overview of reported data. Initiatives by ODI (2010) and UNFCCC (2007, 2008) have compiled recent information on climate financing commitments. In addition, institutional self-reporting (SEI, 2009) has added transparency to this issue despite the inconsistent definitions and methodologies applied to defined climate financing by different institutions and countries. Nevertheless, it has remained virtually impossible to derive a reasonable understanding of climate financing flows for different technologies and regions, and to conclude whether or not the existing flows are adequate, and allocated and Table 2 Author s estimates of climate financing for renewables, energy efficiency and forest protection in developing countries in 2010 Funding category Developing countries Multilateral development banks Bilateral development banks Other sources of financing (largely domestic) Total Fast-start funding (Copenhagen Accord) Global low-carbon climate financing Global carbon-intensive climate implemented efficiently and effectively and where actions should be prioritized. Potentially, as a direct consequence, there are few politically mature proposals that would give reasonable assurance that they would lead to a 2 C-stabilization world. It can be concluded from the results presented in Table 2 that surveys of climate financing flows should go beyond a monitoring of development finance institutions and should include private sector and domestic developing country investment. They should also compare levels of low-carbon investment to mainstream carbon-intensive investment by the same set of actors. 5. Conclusions New financing committed in billion 12 billion At least 50 billion At least 77 billion 7 billion (contained above) Approx. 200 billion Approx. 400 billion This article argues that the long-term public availability of consistent and up-to-date mitigation-related activity data, like financial flows, will be a necessary prerequisite for the design of sound climate policies. In particular, financial information can provide an early warning indicator of trends in specific sectors. Other relevant mitigation information includes technology mixes and market share information for selected priority technology markets. While the use of fragmented, existing information for this purpose is useful and desirable, appropriate coordination for the global level with respective funding and clear responsibilities is likely to be a critical success factor. There are a number of globally recognized players such as the UNFCCC, IPCC, IEA, OECD, WRI, SEI, ODI or CDP, which could individually or jointly carry out

5 10 Harnisch such a task. A clear commitment for longer-term funding of such a mitigation information centre by a group of countries and/or foundations would be an important prerequisite. This new journal,, could provide an important forum for discussions on these key activity data, their quantification and estimation methods and their common reporting templates. Thus, this journal comes at an important point in time, when GHG measurement and management moves from a phase of rapid and poorly organized growth into a phase of systematic integration of planning, implementation and assessment processes within and between both the public and private sectors. References Bloomberg New Energy Finance, 2010, Information available to download including white papers, presentations, press releases, and podcasts [available at British Standards Institution (BSI), 2008, Guide to PAS 2050: How to Assess the Carbon Footprint of Goods and Services, [available at Utilities/PAS-2050/]. Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), 2010 [available at cdproject.net/en-us/pages/homepage.aspx]. European Environment Agency, 1997, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) A Guide to Approaches, Experiences and Information Sources, Environmental Issues Series, No. 6, [available at eu/publications/gh en-c/issue-report-no-6.pdf]. EU-MRG, 2007, EU Monitoring and Reporting Guidelines; 2007/589/ EC: Commission decision of 18 July 2007 establishing guidelines for the monitoring and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions [available at mrg_en.htm]. GHG Protocol Initiative, 2005,The GHG Protocol for Project Accounting, World Resources Institute (WRI), World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) [available at www. ghgprotocol.org/files/ghg_project_protocol.pdf]. GHG Protocol Initiative, 2010, Draft Supply Chain Standard and GHG Protocol, [available at product-and-supply-chain-standard]. International Energy Agency (IEA), 2010, World Energy Outlook, [available at Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2007, Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, [available at www. ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/]. Overseas Development Institute (ODI), 2010, Climate Funds Update, [available at Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), 2010, Renewables 2010 Global Status Report, [available at full.pdf]. Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), 2009, Bilateral finance institutions and climate change a mapping of climate portfolios, Working paper, [available at org/mediamanager/documents/publications/climatemitigation-adaptation/bilateral-finance-institutions-climatechange.pdf]. Siemens, 2010, Capital Market Days Energy 2010, Siemens Investor Relations [available at presentations_events/speeches_presentations.htm]. UNECE, 2009, Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters and its Kiev Protocol [available at www. unece.org/env/pp/pptr.htm]. UNEP Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative (SEFI), 2010, Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment, [available at unep.org/english/globaltrends2010.html]. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 2007, Investments and Financial Flows to Address Climate Change, [available at support/financial_mechanism/application/pdf/background_ paper.pdf]. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 2008, Investment and Financial Flows to Address Climate Change: An Update [available at tp/07.pdf]. World Bank, 2010, Monitoring Climate Finance and ODA [available at DevCC3_Monitoring.pdf].