We are excited to announce that the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN Climate Change) has partnered with the Coalition on Materials Emissions Transparency (COMET) to support the development of a harmonized carbon accounting framework.
UN Climate Change, the custodian of the Paris Agreement, is now joining forces with COMET, an initiative between the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines, and RMI. COMET was launched in early 2020 to create a harmonized greenhouse gas (GHG) calculation framework applicable to all mineral and industrial value chains.
To plan for the decarbonization of mineral and industrial value chains, we need good data. However, a multitude of methods exist for accounting GHG emissions, meaning that companies and investors use individual and fragmented accounting standards. In the absence of a verifiable, comparable, and widely adopted emissions accounting framework, companies, investors, consumers, and governments cannot track embodied emissions of materials and products throughout their value chains, making it difficult to plan to reduce emissions.
The COMET Framework will bring together the main GHG emissions standards and protocols, both generic and sector specific, into an integrated set of guidance documents, built on the principles of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. The framework will work across all materials and include sector-specific guidance. It will cover direct and indirect emissions (scopes 1, 2, and 3), considering the full life cycle of a material no matter where it was produced. UN Climate Change has partnered with COMET to support this effort.
UN Climate Change and the COMET partners share the understanding that a common carbon accounting framework is essential to give companies, investors, consumers, and governments a verifiable way to make better choices to reduce emissions throughout supply chains, measure climate risk, and make informed buying decisions on climate-friendly materials and products.
Learn more about the UN Climate Change–COMET partnership by visiting CCSI’s project page on COMET, the UN Climate Change website, or the newly launched COMET website.
Visit CCSI’s pages on Climate Change and the Energy Transition to learn more about our other projects in these areas of focus.
