“TÜV SÜD’s carbon inventory verification service helped the city to develop a fully transparent and robust emissions declaration, giving it complete confidence in the accuracy of its carbon inventory report.”
Mr Felix Göküzüm
Greenhouse Gas Verification Expert
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), cities account for more than 70% of annual global carbon emissions. The decarbonisation of cities is therefore a global priority to help governments around the world achieve decarbonisation goals. However, to create a baseline and make fully informed decisions about new measures to reduce carbon emissions, cities require a precise overview of their greenhouse gas emission (GHG) sources. The verification of a city’s carbon inventory therefore enables them to realise the potential for cutting emissions by identifying and measuring their sources.
A TÜV SÜD project verified the carbon inventory of a city to help it identify which entities contributed to GHG and confirm a development path for planned emissions reduction.
This project was a highly complex task as cities have a very diverse range of emissions sources, including agriculture, transport, industrial processes and energy generation. The carbon inventory also needed to account for indirect emissions created outside of the city boundary. Furthermore, TÜV SÜD faced the challenge of identifying the most appropriate tools to optimise the effectiveness of accessing and evaluating data within a short timeframe.
To meet these challenges, and deliver an accurate and valuable carbon inventory, TÜV SÜD verified the city’s GHG based on international best-practice standards and guidelines, such as ISO 14064 and the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC). ISO 14064 is an international standard for quantifying and reporting GHG, giving guidance on the development of an inventory that can be compared effectively, as well as establishing a process for verifying GHG inventory reports. GPC provides a robust framework for accounting and reporting city-wide greenhouse gas emissions.
During the verification process, TÜV SÜD applied basic principles, such as accuracy consistency and completeness, as well as more case-specific requirements, such as the accounting of relevant industrial facilities. TÜV SÜD’s experts also verified methodologies and performed third-party audits to confirm the accuracy of greenhouse gas declarations of entities within the city boundary.
Standards are dynamically evolving to meet ambitious national and international sustainability goals, businesses often have little understanding and consequently insecurities can be high. TÜV SÜD’s experts therefore faced some resistance from the organisations they needed to work with to get access to the relevant data. However, the TÜV SÜD team worked hard to show they understood organisations’ pain-points by proving that emissions reporting could be significantly improved and how it would benefit the city going forward.
TÜV SÜD’s carbon inventory verification service helped the city to remove deviations in calculation methodologies and inaccuracies within the greenhouse gas report. By helping the client to align its carbon inventory report more accurately against the stipulations of the GPC, they were able to develop a fully transparent and robust emissions declaration.
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