Avoided emissions are emission savings that occur outside of a product's life cycle or value chain. Photo Credit: Adobe Stock/Nuthawut
Avoided emissions, those emissions savings that occur outside a
company's value chain, could offer another route towards
decarbonisation.
This thinking was set out at a G7 Ministers' Meeting on Climate,
Energy and Environment, hosted in Japan earlier this month, where
attending ministers acknowledged that the concept of avoided emissions
was one worth looking at.
As detailed in a report in Nikkei Asia, the agreement between
ministers came a day after the Japanese government invited Dominic
Waughray of Switzerland-based World Business Council for Sustainable
Development (WBCSD), a grouping of CEOs of over 200 global companies, to
brief G7 representatives about avoided emissions.
WBCSD recently published guidance on avoided emissions, to support
companies with a credible way to assess the decarbonising impact of
their solutions. The guidance points out that while governments and
regulators have recently emphasised accountability and the need for
companies to set net zero targets for the entirety of their value chain
emissions, suppose companies are only encouraged to reduce inventory
emissions, instead of also transforming them into low- and
zero-emissions solution providers.
In that case, WBCSD says, the shared goal of achieving a global Net
Zero by 2050 will fall out of reach. It is calling for the incorporation
of avoided emissions into globally recognised carbon accounting
standards.
Speaking in NIkkei Asia, Waughray said that quantifying avoided
emissions will ‘show who's moving fastest, quickest or being most
successful’ in offering more low-carbon products and give investors ‘a
good signal’ of the companies' efforts not only in reducing emissions
but also in adapting and evolving to a more sustainable business model.