Copenhagen Day 7
Today was all learning the latest Monitoring, Reporting and Verification, which is commonly referred to as MRV (I know jargon!). Having effective MRV systems in place is crucial for how we track progress on emissions reductions – there needs to be agreed standards and transparency for MRV as this is heart of knowing if mitigations and adaptation have been successful - whether this be at the international, country, sector, activity or corporate level. A crucial motto in the MRV space is that measurement leads to management, which definitely follows the Julie’s Bicycle philosophy of carbon reduction.
One of the panellist, Paul Simpson, from the Carbon Disclosure Project (an initiative to encourage Fortune 500 companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions) reported that 82% of these companies are reporting something about their climate change impact & actions and 68% are reporting their direct operational emissions (scope 1 and 2 of the GHG Protocol). Furthermore, he said half of these companies have set emission reduction targets many times doing so ahead of regulation! The next big area of emissions accounting many of these companies still need to tackle is those tricky supply chain emissions (scope 3), which is something the music industry can relate. MRV systems need to be embedded into business practice as well as integrated with financial reporting.
MRV needs to be integral to any climate deal as there needs to be a harmonised system of data collection and analysis if emission reduction and climate adaption strategies are to be successfully tracked.
In the evening I headed over to a Yale Alumni Reunion where Dr. Pachauri – Chairman of the Intergovernmental on Climate Change and now Director of the Yale Climate & Energy Institute – gave a short keynote before we got the low-down from each other. To me, the most poignant comment made by Pachauri was about the lack of moral leadership by the world’s political leaders to tackle climate change. He said he felt Angela Merkel was the closest to offering this leadership, but she needs to do more to build a coalition of joint leadership because alone her efforts will not yield the global agreement so very much needed.
