Following the Paris Agreement on climate change, it becomes imperative for countries, and for companies, municipalities, and other organizations to track their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and consequently, GHG accounting and reporting processes help organizations to identify, calculate, and report GHG emissions. They enable accurate, complete, consistent, relevant, and transparent accounting and reporting of GHG emissions by governments and organizations, including information on setting organizational and operational boundaries, tracking emissions over time, and reporting emissions. This month, our cover story highlights that today in the age of increased urbanization, where the world is increasingly discussing the rise of greenhouse gases and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, common citizens must also be able to assess and track CO2 emissions from their own activities, and the activities of people and organizations around them. The efforts undertaken, internationally, nationally, or at state or district levels to document these emissions, need an overarching framework, with a certain degree of standardization. Till then, maintaining the consistency as well as comparability of the data remains uncertain. With cities building up and developing at a rapid pace, there is an urgent need to be watchful of the GHG emissions that these spaces are expected to pump in the atmosphere. In addition to the focus on larger geographical areas (country level), city-level emission checks are the need of the hour. Our cover story discusses how GHG accounting, reporting, and inventorization has changed the way we look at emission documentation today. Though streamlining of these processes is still an evolving practice, it is encouraging that authorities who wish to initiate the documentation and reporting of the emissions, under their own city boundaries, can now do so with these frameworks and continue improving progressively. However, the challenge faced by these methods today is the inability to standardize, which makes these results and datasets ambiguous for policy use. The silver lining, however, is that making the emissions data available along with transparency in the process can be now made possible with several reporting frameworks. The data, which acts as an input to this inventory, can be gathered from a variety of sources, such as government departments and statistics agencies, national GHG inventory reports, etc. What remains as a challenge is to maintain consistency in both acquiring data as well as storing it.

The special report this month highlights hydrocarbon exploration and the high risks associated with it due to pressure irregularities, weather conditions, and a host of other uncertainties. The question is whether an agricultural belt as potent as Neduvasal in Tamil Nadu should give up its land for an economically viable, high-risk hydrocarbon project? The article sheds light on the impressive resistance that has been put up by the villagers and this case represents one of the most important predicaments of our time..

Ajay Mathur, Director-General, TERI