How do you explain additionality?

If you have worked in the climate change space for very long, you have likely faced this question in one form or another. Try explaining carbon offsets to your sister-in-law and you have two choices. Either you give her a superficial response in an attempt to change the subject or you dive in and try and explain offsets. If you chose the latter, you will find it near impossible to avoid the concepts of a baseline and additionality.

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Was Durban a success or failure? A holiday edition.

It’s December, a month best characterized in many parts of the world by holiday cheer, winter revelry, and reflection of the year that’s about to draw to a close. But for those following international climate negotiations, the end of the year also marks the season for another brand of reflection: deriving meaning from the annual UNFCCC Conference of the Parties.

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A plain English look at the post-Kyoto carbon market

“Will failure to strike a post-Kyoto deal in Durban kill the carbon market?”

With the latest big annual United Nations climate conference just a month away in Durban, South Africa, this question is seeing attention from the press the world around. The question seems innocuous enough, but as with so much in climate policy —and particularly the UN process— answers come in pieces, with caveats, and almost exclusively in acronym-thick jargon difficult for anyone who doesn’t happen to be a full-time climate policy wonk to penetrate.

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Professional associations invited to take Climate Change leadership

17 November 2011

Vancouver – West Coast Environmental Law, a non-profit environmental law organization, today released a report – Professionals and Climate Change: How professional associations can get serious about global warming. This report is perhaps the first in the world to examine the implications of climate change for professional associations regulating the qualifications and activities of resource and planning professionals, such as engineers, biologists, lawyers, architects and others.

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New initiative launched to meet growing demand from expansion of Chinese carbon market

16 November 2011

Beijing and Washington, DC – The Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation (iCET), a leading think tank on climate change and sustainable development in China, and the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute (GHGMI), an international non-profit organization founded to build professional capacity in measuring, reporting, verifying, and managing GHG emissions, have partnered to bring an international training curriculum on GHG accounting and verification to climate change practitioners throughout China.

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New Course: GHG Accounting for Forest and Other Land Use Projects

The Institute is excited to announce the launch of a new sectoral course: GHG Accounting for Forest and Other Land Use Projects. The new course, the latest addition to the Institute’s online course catalogue, provides in-depth instruction on GHG accounting at the project level for forest and other land use activities. The course is focused on reforestation, forest management, and avoided deforestation projects; and also provides information relevant to revegetation and agricultural soil carbon projects.

This course launch comes on the wave of renewed and invigorated interest in forest carbon accounting. Indeed the course is perhaps the Institute’s most widely anticipated.

Enrollment for the course, instructed by forest carbon expert Penny Baalman, is now open. Sign up information and a more in-depth course description is available on the course page.