GHG Reduction Programs & Strategies

 A wide range of strategies are available to help organizations reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Below are a list of resources and guides to help your organization identify and implement GHG reduction opportunities.

On this page

• Energy Efficiency
• Renewable Energy
• Supply Chain
• Waste Reduction and Diversion Strategies
• Reduce Methane Emissions
• Increase Fuel Efficiency in Transportation and Logistics
• Additional Resources

Energy Efficiency

U.S. EPA’s ENERGY STAR Program: Through its partnerships with more than 15,000 private and public sector organizations, ENERGY STAR delivers the technical information and tools that organizations and consumers need to choose energy-efficient solutions and best management practices.

• Buildings & Plants: ENERGY STAR certifies top performing commercial buildings and manufacturing plants and provides an innovative energy performance rating system which businesses have already used for more than 96,000 buildings across the country. ENERGY STAR's Portfolio Manager is an online tool to measure and track energy and water consumption, as well as greenhouse gas emissions. Use it to benchmark the performance of one building or across an organization's entire portfolio of buildings.
• Small Businesses: ENERGY STAR offers tools and resources to help small businesses improve their financial performance by reducing energy waste and energy costs.
• Products: ENERGY STAR certifies products in more than 70 categories that use less energy, save money, and help protect the environment.
• ENERGY STAR tips to save energy at work. 
• U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) provides a variety of programs that identify opportunities for integrating energy-efficiency measures into your facility. 
• Buildings Performance Database (BPD) unlocks the power of building energy performance data. The platform enables users to perform statistical analysis on an anonymous dataset of tens of thousands of commercial and residential buildings from across the country. Users can compare performance trends among similar buildings to identify and prioritize cost-saving energy efficiency improvements and assess the range of likely savings from these improvements.
• Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) platform is a software tool that provides a standardized format for collecting, storing, and analyzing building energy performance information about large portfolios. The platform provides an easy, flexible, and cost effective method to analyze data about large portfolios of buildings and demonstrate the economic and environmental benefits of energy efficiency.

U.S. EPA’s Combined Heat and Power Partnership (CHP) promotes the use of combined heat and power (CHP) to reduce the environmental impacts of power generation, increase your facility's operational efficiency, and decrease energy costs. The Partnership works closely with energy users, the CHP industry, state and local governments, and other clean energy stakeholders to facilitate the development of new projects and to promote their environmental and economic benefits.

• CHP Project Development Handbook provides information, tools, and hints on combined heat and power (CHP) project development, CHP technologies, and the resources of the EPA CHP Partnership.

U.S. EPA’s State and Local Climate and Energy Program helps state, local, and tribal governments develop policies and programs that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lower energy costs, improve air quality and public health, and help achieve economic development goals. EPA provides proven, cost–effective best practices, peer exchange opportunities, and analytical tools.

Renewable Energy

U.S. EPA’s Green Power Partnership (GPP) is a voluntary program that encourages organizations to use green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with conventional electricity use. The Partnership currently has more than 1,300 Partner organizations voluntarily using billions of kilowatt-hours of green power annually. GPP supports the organizational procurement of green power by offering expert advice, technical support, tools, and resources. Green power is electricity produced from a subset of renewable resources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and low-impact hydro. Partnering with EPA can help your organization reduce its carbon footprint and communicate its leadership to key stakeholders.

• Guide to Purchasing Green Power provides current and potential buyers of green power with information about green power purchasing, including different types of green power products, the benefits of green power purchasing, and how to capture the greatest benefit from your purchase. The Guide is the product of a cooperative effort between the EPA, the U.S. Department of Energy, the World Resources Institute, and the Center for Resource Solutions.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Innovations in Voluntary Renewable Energy Procurement: Methods for Expanding Access and Lowering Cost for Communities, Governments, and Businesses (pdf) explores five innovative options for voluntarily procuring renewable energy generation or systems. These methods can be replicated by a variety of stakeholders—including local governments, not-for-profit organizations, businesses, and utilities.

Supply Chain

U.S. EPA’s Green Suppliers Network works with large manufacturers to engage their suppliers in low-cost technical reviews to identify strategies for improving process lines, using materials more efficiently, and reducing waste. Working in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) National Institute of Standards and Technology's Manufacturing Extension Partnership (NIST MEP), the Green Suppliers Network helps small and medium-sized manufacturers stay competitive and profitable while reducing their impact on the environment.

Managing Supply Chain Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Lessons Learned for the Road Ahead (pdf) (8.66 MB, December 2010) highlights lessons learned by early movers that engaged their suppliers in GHG management.

Additional resources listed on The Center's Supply Chain webpage.

Waste Reduction and Diversion Strategies

U.S. EPA’s Resources for Waste Reduction and Recycling provides resources related to waste reduction and recycling in the workplace, including guidance on starting or expanding a recycling collection program, initiatives to reduce everyday trash, and frameworks for food recovery programs.

U.S. EPA’s WaterSense program partners with manufacturers, retailers and distributors, and utilities to bring WaterSense labeled products to the marketplace and make it easy to purchase high-performing, water-efficient products. WaterSense also partners with professional certifying organizations to promote water–efficient landscape irrigation practices.

Reduce Methane Emissions

U.S. EPA’s AgSTAR program promotes the use of biogas recovery systems to reduce methane emissions from livestock waste. AgSTAR assists those who enable, purchase, or implement anaerobic digesters by identifying project benefits, risks, options, and opportunities. AgSTAR provides information and participates in events to create a supporting environment for anaerobic digester implementation.

U.S. EPA’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP) promotes the use of landfill gas as a renewable, green energy source. Landfill gas is the natural by-product of the decomposition of solid waste in landfills and is comprised primarily of carbon dioxide and methane. LMOP forms partnerships with communities, landfill owners, utilities, power marketers, states, project developers, tribes, and non-profit organizations to overcome barriers to project development by helping them assess project feasibility, find financing, and market the benefits of project development to the community.

U.S. EPA’s Natural Gas STAR Program provides a framework for companies with U.S. oil and gas operations to implement methane reducing technologies and practices and document their voluntary emission reduction activities.

U.S. EPA’s Natural Gas STAR Methane Challenge Program recognizes oil and natural gas companies that make specific and transparent commitments to reduce methane emissions.

Increase Fuel Efficiency in Transportation and Logistics

U.S. EPA’s SmartWay is a public/private collaboration between EPA and the freight transportation industry that helps freight shippers, carriers, and logistics companies improve fuel-efficiency and save money. Acquiring U.S. EPA Certified SmartWay light-duty vehicles can help improve the overall fuel economy performance of a light-duty fleet.

Additional Resources

Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Councilis a non-profit organization whose mission is to support and recognize leadership procurement.

What are market mechanisms?

 When countries set a limit, or cap, on greenhouse gas emissions, they create something of value: the right to emit. What happens if we apply market principles and rules? The countries or companies that reduce emissions below their cap have something to sell, an unused right to emit, measured in tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Countries and companies that don’t meet their target can buy these one-tonne units to make up the shortfall. This is called emissions trading, or cap and trade. The net affect on the atmosphere is the same, provided measurements are accurate – ie each unit represents a true one-tonne reduction below the cap – and each unit is used only once. This requires clear rules and transparency.

There are a number of benefits to emissions trading. Flexibility is an important one. Companies can better plan their capital investments and climate action in the medium and long term, knowing that in some years they can buy units to help meet their reduction targets. In other years they might have units to sell. This is another benefit of emissions trading – it creates a monetary incentive to reduce emissions.

The Kyoto Protocol created three such “market mechanisms”. The first, emissions trading, as described above, has led to a growing number of emissions markets in countries around the world. Perhaps the best known is the European Union Emissions Trading System (EUETS). The other two market mechanisms are project-based: the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and joint implementation (JI).

Projects under CDM and JI don’t earn units by reducing emissions below a set cap. They earn units by reducing emissions below “business-as-usual” – the emissions that would occur without the project. Just like emissions trading, for such mechanisms to work a tonne reduction must represent a real tonne. This means that the calculation of the “business-as-usual” emissions must be based on good information, for example of past emissions, and accurate measurement of the emissions once the project is implemented. The project earns the difference between the two – the business-as-usual emissions and the post-project emissions, again, measured in tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

The units have a name. Under the CDM, the units are called certified emission reductions (CERs). Under JI they’re called emission reduction units (ERUs). Companies under the EUETS could use CERs and JI units to cover a part of their obligations. Likewise, countries with an emission reduction obligation under the Kyoto Protocol could use the units to cover a part of that obligation. The incentive thus created led to registration of more than 8000 projects in 111 developing countries eager to earn saleable CERs – spurring everything from wind power projects, to bus rapid transit schemes, to projects that spread the use of more efficient cook stoves. Likewise, JI incentivized projects, not in developing countries but in countries with an emission reduction commitment under the Kyoto Protocol.

Market and non-market based approaches in the Paris Agreement

Parties negotiating the Paris Climate Change Agreement decided they liked the benefits of countries cooperating to reduce emissions, like they can do under a market-based system. Under the Paris Agreement, cooperation should promote greater ambition (in terms of mitigation of emissions and adaptation to the effects of climate change), it should foster sustainable development and it should encourage broad participation in climate action from the private and public sectors. Parties also recognized that there are other ways to cooperate on climate action, and approaches other than market-based approaches.

Parties expressed all of this in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, they recognizedthe possibility of cooperative implementation among Parties and agreed to create a new market mechanism, that should be built drawing on the lessons from what went before, such as the CDM and JI. They also agreed to create a framework for non-market approaches mechanism. Just as the details of the new market mechanism need to be hammered out, Parties need to agree on how their new framework of non-market approaches mechanism will function. Until they decide otherwise, the non-market approaches mechanism can be anything and everything, provided it’s not market- based. It’s a broad basket, but based on what Parties have expressed since Paris, the non-market approaches mechanism will focus on cooperation on climate policy, it could include fiscal measures, such as putting a price on carbon or applying taxes to discourage emissions. 

What Is Platform Engineering?

 Platform engineering is an emerging technology approach that can accelerate the delivery of applications and the pace at which they produce business value.

Platform engineering improves developer experience and productivity by providing self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations. Platform engineering is trending because of its promise to optimize the developer experience and accelerate product teams’ delivery of customer value.

“Platform engineering emerged in response to the increasing complexity of modern software architectures. Today, non-expert end users are often asked to operate an assembly of complicated arcane services,” says Paul Delory, VP Analyst at Gartner. “To help end users, and reduce friction for the valuable work they do, forward-thinking companies have begun to build operating platforms that sit between the end user and the backing services on which they rely.”

Gartner expects that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery. Platform engineering will ultimately solve the central problem of cooperation between software developers and operators.

How platform engineering works?

Platform engineering is an emerging trend intended to modernize enterprise software delivery, particularly for digital transformation. The engineering platform is created and maintained by a dedicated product team, designed to support the needs of software developers and others by providing common, reusable tools and capabilities, and interfacing to complex infrastructure. 

The specific capabilities of an engineering platform depend entirely on the needs of its end users. The platform is a product, built by a dedicated team of experts and offered to customers, who may be developers, data scientists or end users. Platform teams need to understand the needs of their user groups, prioritize the work, and then build a platform that is useful to the target audience.

Initial platform-building efforts often begin with internal developer portals (IDPs), as these are most mature. IDPs provide a curated set of tools, capabilities and processes. They are selected by subject matter experts and packaged for easy consumption by development teams. The platform team, in close consultation with the developers they support, must determine which approach is best for their unique circumstances.

The goal is a frictionless, self-service developer experience that offers the right capabilities to enable developers and others to produce valuable software with as little overhead as possible. The platform should increase developer productivity, along with reducing the cognitive load. The platform should include everything development teams need and present it in whatever manner fits best with the team’s preferred workflow.

The development of a new generation of tools has made platform engineering one of the hottest topics of conversation within the DevOps community. These tools aim to make building and maintaining platforms easier.

What platform engineering is used for?

What the ideal development platform is for one company may be useless to another company. Even within the same company, different development teams may have entirely different needs. 

The overarching goal of the engineering platform is enhancing developer productivity. For the organization, such platforms encourage consistency and efficiency. For the developer, they provide a welcome relief from the management of delivery pipelines and low-level infrastructure.

In short:

Platform engineering implements reusable tools and self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations, improving the developer experience and productivity. 

This technology approach utilizes reusable configurable application components and services.

The benefit to users is in standardized tools, components and automated processes.

What Are Industry Cloud Platforms?

 In short:

Industry cloud platforms combine traditional cloud services with tailored, industry-specific functionality to address historically hard-to-tackle vertical challenges. 

Organizations turn to industry cloud platforms to accelerate time to value and benefit from cross-industry innovations.

Industry cloud platforms add value by using innovative supporting technologies and approaches, such as an integrated data fabric, a marketplace with packaged business capabilities and composability tooling, to provide organizations the agility needed to respond to accelerating change.

AI TRiSM

AI trust, risk and security management (AI TRiSM) ensures AI model governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, robustness, efficacy and data protection. This includes solutions and techniques for model interpretability and explainability, AI data protection, model operations and adversarial attack resistance.

Applied observability defined

(a) Observability is the ability to understand what is happening inside a system based on the external data released by that system. Observability requires that actionable data from multiple sources is appropriately connected, optimized and enhanced for context. 

(b) Observable data refers to any variable that can be observed and directly measured. For an enterprise, it often comes from one or more existing IT systems. 

(c) Applied observability is the applied use of observable data in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach across business functions, applications, and infrastructure and operations teams. It enables shortening the time between stakeholder actions and organizational reactions, and so allows proactive planning of business decisions.

Six prerequisites for a strong digital immune system

When building digital immunity, start with a strong vision statement that helps to align the organization and smooth implementation. Then take account of the following six practices and technologies:

(a) Observability enables software and systems to be “seen.” Building observability into applications provides the necessary information to mitigate issues with reliability and resilience and — by observing user behavior — improve UX.

(b) AI-augmented testing enables organizations to make software testing activities increasingly independent from human intervention. It complements and extends conventional test automation and includes fully automated planning, creation, maintenance and analysis of tests. 

(c) Chaos engineering uses experimental testing to uncover vulnerabilities and weaknesses within a complex system. If used in preproduction environments, teams can safely master the practice in a nonintrusive and test-first manner — and then apply the lessons learned to normal operations and production hardening.

(d) Autoremediation focuses on building context-sensitive monitoring capabilities and automated remediation functions directly into an application. It monitors itself and corrects issues automatically when it detects them and returns to a normal working state without requiring the involvement of operations staff. It can also prevent issues by using observability in combination with chaos engineering to remediate a failing UX.

(e) Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a set of engineering principles and practices that focuses on improving CX and retention by leveraging service-level objectives to govern service management. It balances the need for velocity against stability and risk, and reduces the effort of development teams on remediation and tech debt, but allows for more focus on creating a compelling UX.

(f) Software supply chain security addresses the risk of software supply chain attacks. Software bills of materials improve the visibility, transparency, security and integrity of proprietary and open-source code in software supply chains. Strong version-control policies, the use of artifact repositories for trusted content and managing vendor risk throughout the delivery life cycle protect the integrity of internal and external code.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Systems

 

Eligibility of international credits

• 08/11/2013 - Commission Regulation (EU) No 1123/2013 on determining international credit entitlementsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 07/06/2011 - Commission Regulation (EU) No 550/2011 determining certain restrictions applicable to the use of international credits from projects involving industrial gasesSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• Positive and negative credit lists
  • General positive listSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • General negative listSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • Explanatory note on the credit listsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• Harmonised rules regarding large hydroelectric dam projects:
  • 27/10/2004 - Directive 2004/101/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Directive 2003/87/EC in respect of the Kyoto Protocol's project mechanismsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • Guidelines on the application of Article 11(b) 6 of Directive 2004/101/ECSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • Project compliance questionnaireSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••

Linking with other greenhouse gas emissions trading systems

• 05/11/2020 - Decision No 1/2020 of the Joint Committee established by the Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the linking of their greenhouse gas emission trading systems of 5 November 2020 on the adoption of Common Operational Procedures (COP)Search for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 05/11/2020 - Decision No 2/2020 of the Joint Committee established by the Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the linking of their greenhouse gas emission trading systems of 5 November 2020 on on amending Annexes I and II to the Agreementand the adoption of Linking Technical Standards (LTS)Search for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 12/10/2020 - Council Decision (EU) 2020/1492 of 12 October 2020 on the position to be taken on behalf of the European Union within the Joint Committee established by the Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the linking of their greenhouse gas emissions trading systems as regards the adoption of Common Operational ProceduresSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 12/10/2020 - Council Decision (EU) 2020/1493 of 12 October 2020 on the position to be taken on behalf of the European Union within the Joint Committee, established by the Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the linking of their greenhouse gas emissions trading systems, as regards amending Annexes I and II to the Agreement and the adoption of Linking Technical StandardsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 01/01/2020 - Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the linking of their greenhouse gas emissions trading systems (consolidated version on 1 January 2020)Search for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 01/01/2020 - Notice concerning the entry into force of the Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the linking of their greenhouse gas emissions trading systemsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 10/12/2019 - Council Decision (EU) 2019/2106 - on the position to be taken, on behalf of the European Union, within the Joint Committee established by the Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the linking of their greenhouse gas emissions trading systems, as regards the amendment of Annexes I and II to the AgreementSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 05/12/2019 - Decision No 2/2019 of the Joint Committee established by the Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the linking of their greenhouse gas emission trading systemsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 25/01/2019 - Decision No 1/2019 of the Joint Committee established by the Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the linking of their greenhouse gas emissions trading systemsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 07/12/2017 - Agreement between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the linking of their greenhouse gas emissions trading systemsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 16/08/2017 - Proposal for a Council Decision on the conclusion, on behalf of the European Union, of an Agreement, between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the Linking of their Greenhouse gas Emissions Trading SystemsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • AnnexSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 16/08/2017 - Proposal for a Council Decision on the signing, on behalf of the European Union, of an Agreement, between the European Union and the Swiss Confederation on the Linking of their Greenhouse gas Emissions Trading SystemsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • AnnexSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 27/08/2012 - Letter - Minister Combet to Commissioner Hedegaard
• 27/08/2012 - Reply - Commissioner Hedegaard to Minister Combet
• 23/04/2009 - Directive 2009/29/EC (including Article 25) of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Directive 2003/87/EC so as to improve and extend the greenhouse gas emission allowance trading scheme of the CommunitySearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 28/01/2009 - COM(2009) 39 - Commission Communication of 28 January 2009, Towards a comprehensive climate change agreement in CopenhagenSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• International Carbon Action Partnership

Encouraging new market mechanisms

• 31/08/2012 - Study: Design options for sectoral carbon market mechanismsSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• EU submissions on the new market mechanism
  • 11/04/2012 - Views on the new market based mechanism
  • 13/08/2012 - Addendum
• 26/05/2010 - COM(2010) 265 - Communication: Analysis of options to move beyond 20% greenhouse gas emission reductions and assessing the risk of carbon leakageSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
• 09/03/2010 - COM(2010) 86 - Communication: International climate policy post-CopenhagenSearch for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••

Studies

• Study on the Integrity of the Clean Development Mechanism (December 2011)Search for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • Briefing paper "Sustainable Development and Social Equity"Search for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • Briefing paper "Technology Transfer through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)"Search for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • Briefing paper "Political Lock-in in the context of the CDM"Search for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • Briefing paper "Governance of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)"Search for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • Briefing paper "Baseline Setting and Additionality Testing within the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)"Search for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • Briefing paper "JI Track 1 preliminary assessment"Search for available translations of the preceding linkEN•••
  • Scoping paper "The potential for CDM induced leakage in energy intensive sectors"