After a successful nine-month pilot test from May 2013 to January 2014, the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC) has been revised and is now available for public comment until August 18th. The authors particularly welcome review by city officials, practitioners, and technical experts in the fields of energy, transportation, waste management, agriculture and forestry.

The GPC represents a joint effort between World Resources Institute (WRI), C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), and ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) with additional collaboration by the World Bank, UNEP, and UN-HABITAT. As a global reporting standard, the GPC enables cities and communities to consistently measure and report GHG emissions and develop climate action plans and low-emission urban development strategies.

Throughout the piloting process, cities provided valuable input and contributed to making the GPC more user-friendly and technically robust. The following are some new contents in the new draft:

• Boundary setting and reporting levels: The GHG Protocol ‘scopes’ framework has been adapted to suit the needs of a city-level inventory and help clarify boundaries for emission sources and reporting. Multiple reporting levels (BASIC and BASIC+) accommodate city differences in technical capacity and data availability.
• Elaboration of calculation methods and procedures by sector: This includes new guidance on data collection and GHG emissions calculation.
• Comparison with IPCC national inventory practices and other city guidance documents: For cities that have followed other inventory approaches in the past, including adapting national inventory practices to a city, the GPC draft 2.0 shows how these different frameworks align with the GPC and to translate these into a GPC-compliant report.
• Clarification on inventory aggregation: Increasingly, city GHG data is shared with national governments and informs national initiatives. The GPC draft identifies how multiple cities’ inventory data can be rolled up or aggregated at the national level while avoiding double counting.
• Guidance on setting goals and tracking emissions over time: The GPC draft 2.0 follows international best practices, including those in the emerging GHG Protocol Mitigation Goals Standard, in elaborating how cities can set different types of GHG reduction goals and measure progress consistently as cities change in administrative boundaries or adopt better data and methodologies.

The GPC pilot version 1.0 was released in May 2012 and was pilot tested with 35 cities worldwide. Besides the pilot test, the authors convened three meetings to seek comments and inputs of the GPC advisory committee, a group consisting of experts from 29 organizations around the world. As part of the inclusive stakeholder process, the authors also convened a broader group of city representatives, technical experts, and other stakeholders from different parts of the world in Beijing, Sao Paulo, London, Dar es Salaam, New Delhi, and Jakarta to seek their inputs and share good practices.

The authors would like to thank all the pilot city representatives, the GPC advisory committee members and stakeholders for their valuable contributions to this project.

To comment on the new GPC draft 2.0, please use the GPC Review Template and/or provide track-changes in the Word version of the GPC 2.0 draft for public comment. Please submit comments by email to gpc@wri.org by August 18th. For more information, see visit our website.

See also: ICLEI News Release