By Simon Jessop
LONDON (Reuters) -Carbon Measures, a new carbon accounting initiative backed by a number of big energy and multinational companies, will create an independent panel to help guide its work, its chief executive told Reuters.
The global group – launched a week ago by 19 founder members including ExxonMobil, BASF and Banco Santander – aims to create a carbon emissions accounting system for companies to avoid double-counting of emissions and to better reward companies for becoming more sustainable, thereby driving faster action.
Other carbon accounting guidance exists, such as that provided by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, but comparing across companies can be hard. Carbon Measures aims to create a ledger-based system, such as is used in financial accounting, within the next two years for countries to adopt.
“The organisations that are investing ahead are not necessarily getting rewarded for it,” Carbon Measures’ CEO Amy Brachio said. “So if industries have to move as a whole; if markets have to move as a whole, then there’s a level playing field that provides the incentive for investing in innovation,” she added.
Before taking on the CEO role, Brachio was global vice chair of sustainability at consultants EY.
Carbon Measures, with the help of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), will appoint experts from academia, accounting, industry and civil society to sit on an independent panel and help design the global accounting system.
Andrew Wilson, deputy secretary-general of the ICC, said 10 years on from the signing of the Paris Agreement, companies needed a standardised way of accounting to accelerate action and that the initiative had the potential to be “a game changer”, but it “can’t just be a talking shop, it has to deliver”.
Brachio will co-chair the panel of independent experts along with Karthik Ramanna, professor of Business and Public Policy and director of the Transformational Leadership Fellowship at the University of Oxford in England.
Ramanna said the initiative mirrored efforts 90 years ago to set up the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
“If done right, these principles can bring to bear the full power of capitalism to accelerate decarbonisation while driving energy abundance.”
(Reporting by Simon Jessop; Editing by Susan Fenton)
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