Creating profiles of major global GHG data sources

The World Resources Institute (WRI) is a global think tank that works with governments, companies, and civil society to build solutions to urgent environmental challenges including climate change.  The WBCSD is a CEO-led, global coalition of some 200 companies advocating for progress on sustainable development.

WRI and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) have led a 12 year multi-stakeholder collaboration, the GHG Protocol, which provides businesses and governments with globally accepted standards for measuring and reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The GHG Protocol includes the long-established and widely used Corporate Standard to help organizations track and report emissions associated with their own operations. Over the past three years GHG Protocol has facilitated the creation of new standards which give businesses the ability to measure emissions across the lifecycle of a product and a corporate value chain.

While these new standards provide a much-needed accounting framework to ensure emissions are measured and reported consistently, many businesses struggle to find appropriate GHG conversion factors to undertake the required calculations.

GHG Protocol was concerned that GHG inventories are often held back by perceived lack of this data, or a lack of knowledge about how to find the best data. This could be a major barrier to action.

GHG Protocol asked Anthesis to create a resource to help businesses understand what data sources exist, and which will be most useful to them. To achieve this Anthesis created a set of profiles of major global GHG data sources. Each data source is described in a consistent format, and has links to relevant websites and documentation.

This resource has been made publicly available alongside the new GHG accounting standards.