Carbon Expo June 3 2011, Barcelona
3rd June 2011
A busy morning for LRQA at Carbon Expo with a keynote presentation from Madlen King, Global Head of Climate Change and Sustainability at LRQA who spoke to a packed auditorium on Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) alongside senior climate change professionals including representation from The Japan Bank for International Cooperation as well as Clifford Chance.
MRV is essential to convince stakeholders that low-carbon intentions are delivered. The international systems based around inventory and reporting at national level and the Kyoto Protocol machinery at project level are less dominant than they used to be. Trading schemes have MRV rules, but the key is being able to demonstrate how green investments outside of those and outside of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) are delivering.
Investors these days want green outcomes as well as conventional returns. As Madlen King stated during her presentation, the shape of international climate change policy post 2012 is being deliberated and debated in depth. After the climate-change talks at COP16 in Cancun and the more recent UN Climate Change Conference in Bangkok this year, levels of optimism are declining for an internationally agreed solution at COP17 in Durban.
As a result we are all seeing climate policy diversifying into a multi-track framework, with nations and regions developing their own internal or bi-lateral approaches, in a wide variety of guises, and the increasing development of voluntary schemes.
So how do such investments under these mechanisms show that they are delivering and how can investors be convinced? Well the answer is MRV. For a transcript of Madlen’s speech, please visit the LRQA website.