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SEI brief

Creating a practical guide to quantify and reduce air pollution from businesses

SEI, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and IKEA are partners in a project to create a practical guide to help businesses develop their own air pollutant emission inventories. The guide is being devised to set out a process for businesses to track and ultimately reduce these emissions across their value chains. This brief outlines the genesis, concept and aims of the project.

Eleni Michalopoulou, Johan C.I. Kuylenstierna, Chris Malley / Published on 6 September 2021
Download  Read the project brief / PDF / 1 MB
Citation

Michalopoulou. E., Kuylenstierna, J., Malley, C., Borgford-Parnell, N., Galef, A. A. and Holmberg, L., (2021). Creating a practical guide to quantify and reduce air pollution from businesses. SEI brief.

This brief provides details about a project to create a guide to help businesses develop accurate and actionable inventories for their value chains. The planned guide represents the first attempt to adapt, apply and align methods and data used at national and local scales in ways that are tailored to the private sector’s need to undertake mitigation strategies.

The guide seeks to build on existing reporting standards for greenhouse gas emissions, enabling combined reporting, strategy development and mitigation actions to help advance agendas to address both climate change and air pollution.

SEI, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and IKEA are partners in the project. SEI is using its knowledge and experience in quantifying air pollution emissions at national and local scales to develop the guidance. IKEA and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition are providing funding.

The guide is designed to give businesses with both simple and complex global value chains a tool to take actions to help reduce air pollution emissions, which harm human health. The project aims to set out a rigorous approach to quantifying air pollutant emissions so that companies can credibly document and report on their emission reduction efforts to their shareholders and the general public.

The figure shows a generic value chain that illustrates how air pollutants associated with emission sources can be calculated along the chain. Source: SEI.

Project partners intend to make a draft of the guidance available in November 2021 at COP26. IKEA and possibly other businesses then plan to test the guidance, which is expected to be published in its final form in 2022.

Related

Download

Read the project brief / PDF / 1 MB

SEI authors

Eleni Michalopoulou

Research Associate

SEI York

Johan C.I. Kuylenstierna

Reader / Research Leader

SEI York

Chris Malley

Senior Research Fellow

SEI York

Topics and subtopics
Air : Pollution
Related centres
SEI York
Regions
Sweden

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