Feature
Issue No. 44 - December/January 2008
NGER reporting starts carbon copy
Carbon reporting legislation, which became law on 1 July this year under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007, details the requirements
and associated penalties around business-level carbon reporting.
The legislation starts the data-gathering process that will enable Australia’s emissions trading scheme, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, to begin operating next year.
It is also a hint to Australian businesses to adopt proactive carbon management strategies to meet abatement requirements and find the optimal balance between financial reality and carbon pollution reduction.
Lawmakers hope reducing business carbon footprint will also eliminate unnecessary costs, streamline operations, improve asset utilization and provide marketing collateral benefit to business.
The NGER act aims for a simple carbon reporting scheme to make mandatory compliance easy for businesses above the set threshold.
Key intentions of the NGER Act include:
• Reducing the number of reports to government and eliminating duplication across state and national chemes
• Provide framework data for carbon taxation which ill be introduced in Australian in 2010
• Provide company-level information to the public in greenhouse and energy performance for the first time
• Create a single online entry point for reporting based on the Australian Government’s Online System for Comprehensive Activity Reporting (OSCAR) Businesses which are required to report will measure their emissions using OSCAR which stores all the necessary conversion factors to automatically convert energy and fuel consumption data into greenhouse gas emissions in quantities of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e).
OSCAR can be modified to calculate emissions using emissions factors that are specific to your industry sector.
The act requires controlling corporations – expected to cover around 700 medium and large companies in the first r...
