Lack of harmonisation of greenhouse gases reporting standards and the methane emissions gap.

ABSTRACT: Monitoring companies' contributions to climate dynamics and their exposure to transition risks requires accurate measurements of their non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions (non-CO₂ GHG). However, carbon accounting standards are not harmonised and allow for some discretion when converting emissions of different GHGs into CO₂ equivalent units, the currency in which carbon footprints are expressed. Focusing on methane, we build counterfactual harmonised standards using the latest IPCC Global Warming Potential (GWP) values over 100 years and estimate a cumulative gap in reported methane emissions of 170MtCO₂e ( ~6Tg) over a sample of 2864 companies. Changing the counterfactual from GWP₁₀₀to GWP₂₀, as recently codified in certain jur

SUBMITTER: Cenci S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11814072 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature