Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Inventories

Definition

The Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Inventories (GPC) is a GHG Accounting and Reporting Standard for Cities. . The GPC can be used by anyone assessing the GHG emissions of a geographically defined, subnational area.

Structure

The GPC is divided into three main parts:

• Part I introduces the GPC reporting and accounting principles, sets out how to define the inventory boundary, specifies reporting requirements and offers a sample reporting template
• Part II provides overarching and sector-specific accounting and reporting guidance for sourcing data and calculating emissions, including calculation methods and equations
• Part III shows how inventories can be used to set mitigation goals and track performance over time, and shows how cities can manage inventory quality

Objectives

The GPC seeks to:

• Help cities develop a comprehensive and robust GHG Inventory in order to support climate action planning.
• Help cities establish a base year inventory (Base Year GHG Emissions), set reduction targets (GHG Emissions Target), and track their performance.
• Ensure consistent and transparent measurement and reporting of GHG emissions between cities, benchmarking performance, following internationally recognized GHG accounting and reporting principles.
• Enable city inventories to be aggregated at subnational and national levels.
• Demonstrate the important role that cities play in tackling climate change, and facilitate insight through benchmarking - and aggregation - of comparable data.