Good Practice for monitoring plans Viewpoint of a DOE

1. Good Practice for monitoring plans Viewpoint of a DOE Marco van der Linden, SGS Climate Change Programme http://www.sgs.com/climatechange

2. Monitoring and reporting in the CDM • Requirements are not very detailed • No explicit Monitoring and Reporting Principles • KP Art 12 – real, measurable long term; • CDM requires use of an approved monitoring methodology, however most CDM methodologies ignore uncertainty • 53e requires QA/QC procedures – but no guidance • 54b requires monitoring plan to reflect good practice – again, no guidance

3. Monitoring and Reporting Principles • All credible schemes should define a set of principles • In our opinion, they are fundamental to understanding how to go about preparing and implementing a monitoring plan • IPCC GHG Guidelines refer to the terms accurate, complete, consistent, comparable and transparent • Completeness: All sources must be captured; • Consistency: Monitoring plan should enable comparison over time • Transparency: Sources of data and calculations must be transparent such that they can located / recalculated from available data • Accuracy: Free from bias; highest achievable accuracy; all equipment maintained and calibrated to the appropriate level; spreadsheets and other tools free from error or inconsistency • There is a possible conflict between accuracy and conservativeness

4. Examples of good practice • Parameters which have a very strong bearing on the reported results (i.e. those parameters to which the predictive models are highly sensitive) should be collected with the highest accuracy • Most CDM methodologies completely ignore uncertainty, but we expect meters to reflect best practice; (e.g uncertainties on meters stated at the 95% confidence interval) • Project developers to develop procedures for the collection and entry of information into a format that facilitates the calculation of GHG emissions (e.g. database / spreadsheet)

5. Examples of good practice (Cont) • Project developers to audit their own procedures to make sure they are working, train the relevant staff, design QA/QC procedures to minimise the possibility of errors (e.g. electronic download c.f. manual).

6. Quality Assurance and Quality Control • 53e requires QA / QC procedures • This is NOT a requirement for an EMS but delivering the Key Principles will be much easier within a procedurally-driven management system • In an ideal world, QA/QC procedures shall include: • Identification of GHG sources • The sequence and interaction of monitoring and reporting processes • Responsibilities and competence • Methods of calculations or measurements • Measuring equipment • Reporting and records • Internal reviews of reported data and quality system • Corrective and preventive action

7. Remarks for project developers • Validation and Verification Manual http://www.vvmanual.info/ • Verification is a risk-based activity. Facilities that have good monitoring and reporting systems in place, and can demonstrate that these are working well, present less of a risk.

8. Further work to be done • Define monitoring and reporting principles for CDM • Further guidance on 53e • Think about best practice (54b) and how this can be part of the approved methodologies. This could maybe be based on work done by others (for example the EU ETS Monitoring and Reporting guidelines which provide protocols for determining emissions and levels of accuracy required in the form of tiers)