Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 2. continued
Name
Participants Launch
Requirements
Quality of
Instructions
Mission
The
Climate
Registry
423
2007
Voluntary commit-
ment to measure, verify
and publicly report
GHG emissions to the
Registry.
Very Detailed A nonprofit collaboration among North American
states, provinces, territories and Native Sovereign
Nations that sets consistent and transparent stan-
dards to calculate, verify and publicly report green-
house gas emissions into a single registry. The
Registry supports both voluntary and mandatory
reporting programs and provides comprehensive,
accurate data to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
American
Carbon
Registry
unclear
1997
Option to report GHG
inventory, publishes stan-
dards, methodologies,
protocols and tools GHG
accounting, based on Inter-
national Standards Orga-
nization (ISO) 14064 and
sound scientific practice. .
Very Detailed A leading voluntary offset program with strong stan-
dards for environmental integrity and over a decade
of operational experience in high quality carbon
offset issuance, serialization and transparent on-line
transaction reporting.
Interna-
tional
Standards
Organiza-
tion (ISO)
14064
unclear
2006
Use the GHG Protocol
Corporate Standard
Most Detailed Specifies principles and requirements at the orga-
nization level for quantification and reporting of
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals.
Includes requirements for the design, development,
management, reporting and verification of an orga-
nization's GHG inventory.
sions and reductions is a risk. With regards to
changing future patterns of energy use, voluntary
programs do not send strong enough price signals
to stimulate demand and production of clean
energy technology (Gardiner & Jacobson, 2002).
In general, programs that have the lowest
incentives have the weakest results. In addition,
programs with stronger incentives such as the UK,
Danish and Japanese programs show the highest
level of emissions reduction. However, the range
of emissions reduction between the weakest and
strongest programs is small. In a 2007 study it
was found that no energy-related programs have
more than 10% impact on emissions and most
have an impact that is closer to 5%. Despite the
generally low impact of voluntary programs, not
surprisingly, both high incentive programs and
low barrier to entry programs are successful in
gaining participants. This increase in participation
may lead to larger overall reductions, even if the
percentage reduction of any given company is
low (Morgenstern and Pizer, 2007).
Upon close investigation of completely vol-
untary programs it is clear that participants have
trouble meeting their targets or do not have the
capacity to properly measure their reductions to
assess whether or not they met their targets. For
example a voluntary program in Finland reported
that it was not able to evaluate results due to in-
sufficient data monitoring (Hansen and Larsen,
1999). In the French Voluntary Agreement on
CO2 Reduction, most improvements were found
to overlap with the industry's business-as-usual
efficiency improvements (Chidiak, 2002). In gen-
eral, programs where companies face the threat
of regulation have higher emissions reduction
outcomes. For example, the Netherlands Long
Term Agreements, which are agreements between
companies and government authorities, and was
implemented as an alternative to regulation, met
and passed their goal of 20% energy efficiency
improvement between 1989-2000 (De Watcher,
2007). The total efficiency improvement was
22.3% (Gerrits and Oudshoff, 2003).
