Integrated carbon assessment and sustainable development goals frameworks towards green industry

Abstract

Green industry can be defined as an economy striving for sustainable pathway improvement, implementing public policy initiatives and undertaking green public investments that encourage environmentally responsible private investments. Malaysia had passed the bill on the renewable energy act and has also implemented the low carbon city framework as part of the national policy to reduce the carbon emission. Malaysia is committed to contribute to the global climate change mitigation especially in the city level by mobilising a transition to low carbon emissions, setting the standards in formulating research-based programs and effective climate action plans. Based on previous studies, there are no specific tools that can integrate the carbon assessment in the industries because the available tools only show the total greenhouse gas emission within the studied system boundary. The main objective of this study was to establish integrated carbon assessment and mitigation framework (INCAM), to establish sustainable development goals trade-off and co-benefit analysis framework (STOCBA) and to apply INCAM and STOCBA in selected case studies. INCAM can provide two purposes which are to track the carbon emission on-site in specific sub section and identify potential emission reduction strategy in a holistic manner. The study was done at selected oleo-chemical industries in Pasir Gudang, Johor based on the stratified analysis for this research. In this study also, Pugh analysis method was adopted to determine the weightage of the STOCBA. The INCAM found that before the industry applied INCAM, the total monthly tCO2e was 7.80x108 tCO2e and after applying the INCAM, the total monthly tCO2e was 6.28X108 tCO2e. It was found that the industries can reduce 20.3% of their carbon emission electricity consumption by applying the carbon reduction initiatives. The developed framework named STOCBA found that by installing photovoltaic solar panel as the carbon reduction initiatives strategy can give the score of 8 for the sustainable development goals SDG trade-off scoring which is positively significant for the Pugh analysis. This shows that INCAM can be integrated with SDG to define better carbon reduction initiatives. The contribution of the study is that the INCAM can provide relevant information that makes carbon profiling visible to various levels of an organization, enabling the industry to plan, make decisions and take effective actions to reduce carbon emission towards greening the industry. The developed frameworks verified that the industries can reduce their carbon emission by applying the proposed framework. In addition, the INCAM also can be integrated with the SDG using STOCBA framework. The STOCBA will help the industry and also the policy maker such as local authorities to review the best carbon reduction initiatives to reduce the carbon emission. Thus, this study can be promoted as a green initiative for a green industry development in Malaysia and also can help users to evaluate the economic and environmental impacts for reducing the carbon emission.