New Climate Registry reporting system due in 2010

Hundreds of organisations that report their greenhouse gas emissions to The Climate Registry (TCR) will experience a new and improved online system next year that its makers say will generate more useful emissions reports.

TCR, a government-supported nonprofit that also plays a role in setting standards to calculate and verify emissions, plans to debut the next version of its Climate Registry Information System (CRIS) in early 2010.

The enhancements to CRIS include easier use and navigation, bulk data upload, a more robust verification module, the ability to manage both voluntary and mandatory reporting programs, and will help TCR manage the system more efficiently, according to Jennifer Weiss, TCR's communications director.

The nonprofit recently landed a contract to help the State of Massachusetts develop a new mandatory emissions reporting program, in addition to a data collection application created for the State of Nevada. To help develop the next version of CRIS and the Massachusetts data collection system, TCR chose Misys Open Source Solutions, a division of Misys plc, a UK-based banking and healthcare software firm that has recently made inroads into the burgeoning carbon software market.

The TCR deal is the largest deal Misys has landed in the carbon software space, a feather in the cap of a company that looks forward to its exposure to TCR's 300-plus members, said Rich O'Keefe, the company's vice president of sales and services.

In addition to its work with TCR, Misys' carbon-specific offerings include an environmental trading platform and Open Carbon World, an education and news website that also gives users access to a carbon footprinting tool.

The carbon accounting and management software market has seen an increasing number of players in recent years as a growing number of companies add environmental impacts to their performance metrics for compliance and CSR reasons. A report from Groom Energy Solutions and Greentech Media predicted the market will double annually in the coming years.

"From our perspective, most of those companies not regulated don't have the technology or people in place to measure their carbon footprint," O'Keefe said. "We view this as a fairly wide open market."

This article first appeared on ClimateBiz.com