GHG Protocol meaning

In this issue: Air emissions and climate change Energy efficiency and buildings Energy for environmental lawyers Environmental enforcement and prosecutions Environmental information ESG and sustainability Nature, biodiversity and habitat conservation Waste Waste producer responsibility regimes Water, flooding and drainage Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Air emissions and climate change Defra requests CCC to assess climate change adaptation planning assumptions The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has released a letter from the Minister for Water and Flooding, Emma Hardy, to the Climate Change Committee (CCC), seeking an assessment of which climate change assumptions ought to be embedded within government planning for climate adaptation. This request comes after the CCC’s April 2025 progress update on adaptation, which called for clearer objectives and targets. The resulting assessment will guide the government in formulating stronger objectives for managing climate risks. See: LNB News 05/09/2025 30...

Reasons for reporting greenhouse gas emissions Over the past decade, expectations on businesses and public bodies to disclose greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have steadily escalated, creating growing momentum for transparent reporting. Analyses of climate impacts—most notably assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—together with tangible extreme weather events across the real world, have sharpened this pressure by underscoring the urgent need to cut emissions. Global accords, including the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties (COP), further amplify the drive on organisations and authorities to curb GHG releases. For further detail on the Paris Agreement and recent COP gatherings, see Practice Note: The Paris Agreement 2015—snapshot. Within the UK, the Climate Change Act 2008 imposes binding obligations on government to cut national carbon emissions, including a statutory requirement for the UK to reach net zero carbon by 2050...

Basic principles Carbon markets sit within the discipline of economics—the analysis of how limited resources are apportioned among rival uses, as set out by Lionel Robbins (An Essay on the Nature & Significance of Economic Science, 2nd ed., revised and extended, 1949, Ch 1.3). Through this lens, a decent environment counts as a scarce resource. The central proposition is that by conferring property rights over greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—by ‘pricing carbon’—market participants can allocate this resource in a cost‑effective way. Consequently, a stated emissions goal (for instance, cutting emissions by 100% by 2050) can be achieved at the lowest overall cost. Setting a carbon price creates climate‑aligned incentives: it discourages carbon‑intensive behaviour and spurs investment in the low‑carbon economy, so that when actors face the social cost of high‑carbon goods and services, they switch to lower‑carbon alternatives. Emissions trading schemes (ETS) are a particular, and increasingly widespread, form of carbon market. They treat the entitlement to emit as tradable property via transferable discharge permits, with a regulator fixing...

ARCHIVED: This Practice Note has been archived and is not being maintained at present. Under the Kyoto Protocol, the developed economies listed in Annex I to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Annex I Parties) accepted specific targets to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across two separate commitment periods. The initial period covered 2008 to 2012 and obliged Annex I Parties to reduce total GHG emissions by at least 5% below 1990 figures. The subsequent period spanned 2013 to 2020 and called for cuts of at least 18% beneath 1990 levels; however, after 2012 these obligations were not legally binding...