About

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) is is the leading community of around 230 global businesses making sustainability performance a key driver for competitiveness. Established in 1995, WBCSD is a non-profit member-led organization that connects business leaders through all sectors and major economies, and creates the tools and frameworks to scale collective impact, drive cross-sector innovation, and shape an ambitious, enabling policy agenda. WBCSD operates from seven offices worldwide — in Geneva, New York, Chicago, Amsterdam, London, Singapore and Wuhan — enabling collaboration across value chains and geographies. Together with its members, WBCSD is rewiring economic and financial systems to support the transition to a net-zero, nature-positive, and inclusive future that creates business value.

Challenge

The WBCSD worked with PRé to update its Guidance on Avoided Emissions, which provides a robust methodology for assessing and disclosing the climate impact of their solutions. Avoided emissions (AE) are the positive impact created when comparing the GHG impact of a low-carbon solution to an alternative scenario without that solution in place. The update of the Guidance was informed by a structured testing of the first version of the Guidance by WBCSD members, independent review by experts from science, standard setters, policy, finance, and NGOS, and from recent developments in the fast-moving but rather nascent space of intervention accounting and disclosure standards.

The overall goal was to develop a state-of-the-art, robust, and conservative methodology to calculating and disclosing avoided emissions. This should serve as base for further standardization on this key topic. To achieve that, the objectives were to:

1. Respond to recent developments by aligning with other frameworks and standards such as from GHG Protocol, IPCC, ISO, IEC, and PCAF
2. Update the methodology to make the processes of eligibility assessment, AE calculation, and reporting clear and easy to follow
3. Expand the Guidance to address allocation, data and traceability, reporting, and verification

Solution

Led by the WBCSD climate team and in collaboration with WBCSD member companies and external experts, PRé coordinated the update of the methodological guidance in four steps:

1. We evaluated all feedback from WBCSD members on the first version of the Guidance to increase practicability of the updated Guidance. In parallel, we reviewed prioritized relevant standards (e.g. Greenhouse Gas Protocol and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards) and recent developments in the field of intervention-based accounting in other fields such as finance. This helped to identify the key updates to be made to the Guidance.
2. We led the development of new methodological content through further literature review and a series of workshops on key themes, both within the project team and with WBCSD members.
3. We further informed and validated the Guidance update through a 60-day open consultation, which was launched during COP29 in Baku. Based on the feedback from more than 80 respondents of various backgrounds, we consolidated broadly accepted views on the proposed changes into the Guidance version 2.0.
4. Throughout the update period, we convened, organized, and collected feedback on the proposed methodological changes and Guidance draft from an Independent advisory group of experts on avoided emissions and standards from the likes of GHG Protocol, ISO, and GFANZ.

Overall, updating concepts and adding new ones was an iterative and engaging process that required various types of expertise and skills. Through our strong co-creative partnership with the client, we were able to create a high-quality update of the Guidance, in line with varying stakeholder views. The Guidance was accessed and downloaded more than 3,000 times within the first few months after release and is increasingly being adopted among corporate and finance practitioners.

Benefits

With our expertise in methodological development, life cycle assessments and life cycle thinking, carbon accounting and standards, we were able to provide critical and robust proposals and high-quality technical authoring to enhance the Guidance document. The total project of delivering Guidance v2.0 in time was smooth, collaborative, and iterative, thanks to our experience in multi-stakeholder engagement and consultation, consensus-building, workshop design and project management.

In this way, PRé supported WBCSD in reaching its objective of a robust, science-aligned methodology to quantify and disclose avoided emissions. Ultimately, this work supports companies, investors and policymakers in scaling climate solutions with integrity and transparency.

Thank you very much to the entire PRè team that supported this project. It was a pleasure working with you, the level of expertise, professionalism and dedication were consistently high, and we would be happy to work with you again!

Marvin Henry, Director Climate Action at WBCSD