Development of a framework for greenhouse gas emissions accounting for industry reporting

Abstract

Advancement in technology has helped to increase the quality of human lives in many aspects such as transportation, manufacturing, and communication. At the same time, they also contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) to the atmosphere be it the production phase, distribution phase, end-user phase, or the waste management phase. It has been found that these GHG emissions is the dominant cause of climate change. This makes it important for organisations from all industries to record their GHG emissions to be able to monitor their GHG emissions and plan mitigation actions. There is presently a lack of comprehensive framework for organisations to use as guidance in their GHG accounting and reporting. This paper incorporates an integrated carbon accounting and mitigation (INCAM) with GHG Protocol standards and MYCarbon (National Corporate GHG Reporting Programme for Malaysia) GHG Reporting Guidelines. This method breaks down a process into several subdivisions as is done in INCAM and then the sources of emissions are divided into scopes according to the GHG Protocol. This method guides industries on the steps of carrying out a GHG emissions inventory and enables them to use their activity data to produce the organisation's total emissions. The total emissions will be broken down based on indicator, source, and scope. This would enable the industries to identify the highest contributor of emissions either by indicator or source, and to identify which scope their emissions fall under. The carbon emissions profile and carbon emissions index can be used to identify and analyse the organisation's emissions performance.