Accelerating decarbonization digitally: Status quo and potentials of greenhouse gas emission tracking and trading

Abstract

To effectively mitigate climate change, policymakers worldwide established various GHG tracking and trading systems. In the light of ambitious climate goals, stricter regulations, and increasing demand for climate action, various groups such as researchers and governmental institutions suggested additional approaches. This paper addresses the complexity that arises from the breadth of suggested approaches and implemented systems for GHG tracking and trading. By doing so, it synthesizes relevant dimensions in a way that is understandable to enterprises and policymakers, enabling them to design meaningful systems incorporating the reduction of GHG emissions and advance cleaner production. Therefore, this paper presents a first-of-its-kind taxonomy of GHG tracking and trading approaches through a systematic literature review. It illustrates ten main design and implementation dimensions with 30 corresponding characteristics. To accelerate decarbonization, this paper sets impulses for future GHG tracking in the electricity sector based on semi-structured expert interviews. Consecutively, it provides policy directions for CO2-adaptive decision-making for enterprises, formulated as a Call for Action with seven prospective questions. These include, for example, questions concerning technical aspects like data management, legal issues like the sufficiency of existing data security and privacy regulations, as well as economic topics like the calculation of an appropriate local and temporal granularity.