Summary
Details
- Global
The Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Inventories (GPC) applies to cities, municipalities and other subnational governments seeking a standardized methodology for measuring and reporting community-wide greenhouse gas emissions. The framework can also be used for geographically defined areas such as towns, districts, counties, provinces and states.
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Background
Before the GPC, cities used a range of approaches to prepare greenhouse gas inventories, with differences in the emissions sources included, sector classifications and treatment of emissions occurring outside city boundaries. This made comparisons and aggregation of city-level emissions data difficult. WRI, C40 and ICLEI began developing a common methodology in 2011, tested it with 35 cities, and published the final GPC in 2014.
The GPC was designed specifically for community-wide inventories, rather than the organizational inventories commonly prepared by businesses, as provided by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol). It enables a city to understand emissions generated across activities within its geographical area and certain emissions occurring outside the boundary as a consequence of activities within the city. The resulting inventory can support climate action planning, emissions-reduction targets and monitoring over time.
Although primarily designed for cities, the methodology can also be applied to other geographically defined subnational areas, including towns, districts, counties, prefectures, provinces and states.
Reporting Requirements
The GPC organizes community emissions into major sectors and requires cities to identify emissions according to both their source and where they physically occur. The principal sectors are stationary energy; transportation; waste; industrial processes and product use (IPPU); and agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU).
Emissions are also classified into three scopes:
Scope 1: GHG emissions from sources located within the city boundary.
Scope 2: GHG emissions resulting from grid-supplied energy used within the city.
Scope 3: Other emissions occurring outside the city boundary as a result of activities taking place within it.
The GPC provides detailed methodologies for calculating emissions within each sector, including guidance on activity data, emission factors and data quality. This structure allows cities to report emissions consistently while still using local, national or default data according to availability. It also enables geographically occurring emissions to be aggregated across jurisdictions without double counting.
Current Status
The current standard is GPC 1.1, published in October 2021. It updated the original 2014 standard to reflect the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, clarify methodological ambiguities and provide additional calculation guidance. The framework has also been supplemented in areas requiring more detailed treatment. In 2022, for example, GHG Protocol published Supplemental Guidance for Forests and Trees, expanding the GPC's treatment of emissions and removals associated with forests and trees within community boundaries.
The GPC remains particularly important because it provides the public sector with an internationally consistent counterpart to organizational GHG accounting. Cities can use the resulting inventories not only to understand where their emissions originate, but also to establish base years, prioritize mitigation measures, set reduction targets and compare progress over time.
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