Climate Governance: Implementing public policies to calculate and reduce organisations carbon footprint

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

BACKGROUND

The European Union has a set of objectives and policies to mitigate climate change and to shift towards a resource-efficient, low-carbon and climate-resilient economy. These objectives require the involvement of all European stakeholders with the support of national policymakers. The EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) has led to the development of national policies targeting the most polluting industries by calculating their direct greenhouse-gas emissions. However, no common framework has been proposed for reaching less-polluting organisations. Evaluation of indirect emissions is important as a basis for reducing the global environmental footprints of these organisations. The complexity of assessing indirect emissions has meant that demand from organisations for such schemes has not been matched by their availability: only a few countries have implemented public policies in this area.

OBJECTIVES

Clim'Foot set out to support the implementation of public policies that will give public and private organisations incentives to calculate and reduce their carbon emissions.

This would involve the following steps:

launch of a European network around the concept of the carbon footprint of organisations (CFO) in accordance with EU requirements, in particular the Single Market for Green Products initiative;

development of a capacity-building programme to train national policymakers in the implementation of public policies for both calculating and reducing the carbon footprint of organisations;

demonstration of the value of country-specific material for enhancing the involvement of local organisations in implementing carbon mitigation plans, based on a common EU framework;

bringing together the whole value chain from policymakers to investors at EU level to implement efficient mitigation plans that will both improve their environmental footprint and boost their competitiveness.

RESULTS

The Clim'Foot project developed common training materials and tools, including a database of emission factors. This included 151 factors common to all EU countries, and more than 1 000 national emission factors for the 28 Member States.

It held on-site training sessions on the CFO methodology in Croatia, Greece, Hungary and Italy. More than 300 people from 74 private sector and 35 public sector entities took part in the training.

The project involved77 organisations in CFO programmes (51 private/26 public), enabling 48 of these to calculate their carbon footprint, and the other 29 to assess their maturity level regarding carbon footprint management.

Five participating organisations developed greenhouse gas mitigation plans, while a further 12 expressed an interest in defining a mitigation plan.

More than 30 policymakers from 10 EU countries were trained to use LIFE Clim'Foot's CFO tools.

Further information on the project can be found in the project's layman report and After-LIFE Communication Plan (see "Read more" section).