Welcome to Greenhouse Gas Measurement & Management

I am thrilled to announce the release of the first issue of Greenhouse Gas Measurement & Management (available for free download here) on behalf of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, Earthscan, and the journal’s editorial board. On the occasion of this launch I’d like to highlight an article Tinus Pulles and I wrote introducing the new journal.

Reader,

Welcome to this new journal published in partnership with the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. Greenhouse Gas Measurement & Management (GHGMM) is uniquely focused on the development of the intellectual infrastructure needed for society to move beyond the debate over the design of climate change policy. Its focus is on the serious work of implementation that will increasingly be paramount in the future. Specifically, the focus of this journal is anticipated to be on the management of our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals, with particular attention given to the use of metrics that are the foundation of all rigorous management systems. This journal fills an extended niche that looks beyond the political challenges of the present and instead focuses on the follow-on work required to turn policy agreements, at all levels, into real action. In that sense it is a perfect complement to our stable mate journal at Earthscan, Climate Policy.

There is a diverse and newly emerging collection of professionals, academics and researchers thinking about these issues, but few forums for scholarly inquiry bring the various stakeholders together to share research and ideas. This journal is intended to connect practitioners, researchers and academics at all levels and across fields. It is also the desire of the editors to help to catalyse the creation of new researchers, academics and resources (e.g. textbooks) focused on these issues.

The management of GHG emissions and removals is a very nascent field of inquiry and practice and is inherently interdisciplinary. But, as proof of the pudding is in eating, measuring emissions are fundamental to our ability to manage them as well as being the foundation of compliance with reduction targets. Decisions at all scales, from personal to global, will need to consider the implications of actions on the atmosphere.

We do not pretend to have perfect foresight into how this process of intellectual exploration will progress and how scientific progress will interact with the policy processes accompanying international negotiations and agreements. And so this journal is intended to build a global community of scholars to take part in and to utilize the developments of this exploration. The editorial and commentaries presented in this inaugural issue of GHGMM are meant to initiate a deeper discussion both on what this journal is to be about and the broader question of what is ‘carbon management’. Specifically, the authors highlight a number of research questions that are in need of further exploration. Future issues of this journal will continue this exploration.

The research articles presented in this first issue are illustrative of the range of scales to which GHG measurement and management issues are relevant, ranging from the global to national to city to individual mitigation activity.

We are proud to have brought together an esteemed editorial board to launch GHGMM and have put in place a rigorous double-blind peer review process with excellent support of the staff at Earthscan, who bring their own expertise and passion for scholarly issues related to climate change and sustainability.

GHGMM is being launched with the recognition that we must be cautious and patient as we build the intellectual foundation for a long-term GHG management effort. We recognize that the attention of the academic community to the kind of applied research needed to dynamically manage our intervention with the Earth’s atmosphere will come slowly. But we are committed to catalysing this slow process and look forward to a lively intellectual debate as well as exploration of issues and questions, many of which we have surely not even identified yet.

Sincerely,

Michael Gillenwater and Tinus Pulles

Editors

This is the introductory letter to the first issue of Greenhouse Gas Measurement & Management, a new peer reviewed journal. The first issue is available online free of charge here.