Businesses vent anger over absence of carbon reporting standards

UK businesses have today expressed frustration at the government's failure to deliver a standard method for reporting greenhouse gas emissions, which has left firms having to navigate a maze of different mandatory carbon reporting requirements

Attendees at a CBI sustainability event this morning warned that the cost of complying with carbon regulations is being driven up by the need to report emissions in different ways for different mandatory schemes.

Experts said that firms were facing both mandatory carbon reporting requirements, such as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), and the UK's Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), as well as numerous voluntary carbon reporting schemes, including the Carbon Trust Standard, the Global Reporting Initiative and the Carbon Disclosure Project, many of which require carbon emissions to be reported in a slightly different way.

The government has long maintained that its two main mandatory emission reporting schemes – the ETS and CRC – are aimed at different types of organisations, with the ETS targeting industrial-scale emitters and the CRC focused on large users of electricity, such as supermarkets, hospitals and hotels.

But Jean Waring-Thomas, energy manager at Boots, said there was some overlap between the two schemes, revealing that the retailer's use of onsite generators meant it will have to report emissions under both schemes from April, and as a result has had to adapt the same data to each schemes' reporting standards.

"We don't want to have to report the same amount of kilowatt hours in four different ways for four different schemes," she said. "We really need to stop that happening – it's extremely time-consuming and expensive."

Waring-Thomas said Boots has already invested heavily in installing energy meters and analysing its smaller sites and supply chain in order to obtain accurate and verifiable energy use data. She added that to then have to adapt this data according to constantly changing guidelines adds to the cost of its emissions management programme.

"The Defra guidelines change every year." she said. "For example, for transport working out what we include and what we don't include is a bit of a nightmare."

One consultant speaking at the event said an NHS organisation had told him they needed to report the same data in five different ways to comply with five sets of guidelines from the Treasury, the NHS, the 10:10 campaign, the CBI and Defra.

Currently, there are more than 30 different methodologies that could potentially be used for measuring emissions, and none has been clearly prioritised over any others by the government.

A new overarching standard could be adopted if the government pursues its plans to introduce mandatory carbon reporting for all businesses by 2012. But business leaders are fearful that unless any new standard is universally adopted by the government it could simply add to the current confusion.

Neil Bentley, director of business environment at the CBI, said that as well as streamlining the way emissions are reported in the ETS, the CRC and any national mandatory reporting scheme, standards also need to be developed at an international level.

"Different reporting obligations in different countries for multinationals is a big danger," he said. "We need a single, standard international method for reporting globally. But these things take a long time to get agreed, so we need to start now."

His comments were echoed by Lindsey Parnell, chief executive of textile firm Interface Flor, who agreed that the emergence of standards is central to the success of many firms' environmental initiatives. "The need for a standard reporting method to reduce overheads [of reporting to different schemes] is crucial, especially at an international level," he said.