The recent publication of the ISO 14064 standards for greenhouse gas quantification and verification, prompts the question of their business value.
What are some benefits?
From an ISO press release: ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden says:
Claims made about reductions of the greenhouse gas emissions widely held responsible for climate change may have political and financial implications, in addition to environmental and technical ones. Ensuring their credibility is thus vital.
Let’s break it down and consider what may be potential benefits if and when these standards are widely adopted — with particular consideration of the ISO 14064-2:2006 standard for projects .
- The ISO label presents a standard of integrity: integrity that includes technical, environmental and ultimately financial.
- ISO 14064 supports a commonality of terminology, baseline and other procedures, monitoring, reporting and documentation. If the standard is used across different schemes, we should be able to “cut-and-paste” pieces from one project document into another project that is in a different jurisdiction, sector, or region. We believe it would be greatly beneficial to have commonality from CDM to Canada to Europe to Japan and beyond.
- ‘64 should be used to streamline process costs, including document development, validation and verification. Will we soon see DOE’s advocating the use of ISO 14064-2 for CDM projects? The logic and layout is more auditable than a PDD.
- ISO’s efforts support an open market for carbon credits. If they all use the same basis, we would think that fungibility would be significantly promoted.
At what cost?
We see the cost of “doing 64″ to be more than paid back by the benefits outlined above. Only an investment in time will be required to understand the new document, its terms and logic — and of course the price of purchasing the documents.