As the focus on carbon emissions rises, there figures to be new battles looming on carbon accounting, according to the Bloomberg Green Insight newsletter.
The start examining the issue by looking at the claim Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison made in April that the country had cut its emissions by 19% in 2019 compared with 2005 levels. He made the announcement during the climate summit organized by President Joe Biden.
Bloomberg labeled his claim on emissions reductions as "an attempt to burnish his country's coal-stained image."
But digging deeper, the Green Insight author Ashkat Rathi said that the figures touted by Morrison was merely an accounting trick. Turns out, it was a neat accounting trick. "Australia has made minimal progress towards net zero and its emissions trends are among the worst in the developed world," a new study from the Australia Institute concluded.
The study said that the reduction claims made by Morrison was only possible to get to if the land-use sector is included -- forests, agriculture and other related emissions. Taking those items out of the mix, the study said, Australia's emissions from fossil-fuel use and industry increased by 6% in 2018, relative to 2005.
The big focus is on fossil fuels as their contribution of emissions, something which Bloomberg said is something that only can happen over the course of decades, according to Pep Canadell, chief research scientist at CSIRO's climate science center.
But those emissions from land-use areas are certainly important. The Global Carbon Project said that the land-use sector added some 6.5 billion tons of emissions in 2019. To put that in perspective, that is about 20% of the emissions from fossil fuels for 2019.
But therein lies another key issue. Experts agree that measuring emissions from land use are not easy and the measurements used on emissions reductions are largely based on avoiding a hypothetical polluting activity.
Those emissions are going to be key in the climate change debate. Those also figure high on the list of things that will be focused on at the COP26 in Glasgow in November, Bloomberg said.
That COP26 confab will see countries seek to come up with ways to agree on rules for the Paris Agreement to create a new carbon market to help the public and private sectors trade those offsets. Presumably, that would also provide the basis for pricing those credits, another key factor in the process.
"The goal of the market is to reduce emissions, but without clear accounting and strict regulations there's a big risk of greenwashing," Bloomberg said.
One of the terms that figures in the mix is "avoided deforestation," that is based on the concept that the world will have to avoid cutting down forests in order to meet climate goals.
So to measure avoided deforestation, there will have to be a baseline of deforestation established. If, for example, that would be set at 1%, then if the rate of deforestation falls by 0.5% then those developing the projection can create offsets based on the 0.5% of emissions avoided because some trees weren't cut down. Those offsets could then be purchased by those who need such credits to "reduce" their carbon emissions.
But that also leaves the situation rife for the potential for "greenwashing" of figures and manipulating baselines by sellers to create a big batch of credits. That sets up a situation where those that need to buy the credits could obtain them at a cheaper price.
Then there is the potential for double counting. Bloomberg said that could arise as a company could delete emissions from their own accounts and a country could conceivably also cancel those same credits for that country.
And Bloomberg said that is a real situation. "One of the reasons Article 6 negotiations have failed at previous COP meetings is reportedly because Brazil objected to the phrase 'double counting' appearing in the rulebook governing the new carbon market," Bloomberg said.
So we will see. This situation could become a major issue ahead, particularly the matter of double counting and greenwashing and more. And agriculture figures prominently in the mix, particularly on land-use emissions. This creates a series of discussions and debates that agriculture will need to follow closely, Washington Insider believes.