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 Greenhouse Gas 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.

Compliance

The GPC uses precise language to indicate which provisions of the standard are requirements, which are recommendations, and which are permissible or allowable options that cities may choose to follow.