The purpose of the PCP Protocol is to provide municipalities with a set of clear accounting and reporting guidelines for developing corporate and community-level GHG inventories within the context of the PCP program.
All across the country, municipal governments are taking action to reduce GHG emissions and mitigate
the effects of climate change. The Partners for Climate Protection (PCP) program is a network of these
Canadian municipalities are working together to create tangible changes in their local
communities while together tackling a global concern.
The PCP program is based on the premise that in order to effectively manage GHG emissions, local
governments must first measure and report. Accurate and reliable GHG measurement enables local
governments to identify energy and emissions-intensive activities with their communities and
provides policy and decision-makers with a set of verifiable metrics upon which targeted and
prioritized action can be based.
Community-wide GHG measurement also provides local government and community stakeholders with the necessary baseline information to monitor, evaluate, and compare performance over time. For these reasons, GHG inventorying is often seen as the foundation of a climate change or community energy strategy.
The purpose of the PCP Protocol is to provide municipalities with a set of clear accounting and
reporting guidelines for developing corporate and community-level GHG inventories within the
context of the PCP program. These standards have been developed to meet the following objectives:
- Clarify the corporate and community inventory requirements so that PCP municipalities have a clear sense of which emissions sources must be reported and those that are optional;
- Clarify the relationship between the corporate and community-scale inventories to address overlapping emission sources and activity sectors, such as municipal landfills and publictransit systems;
- Provide detailed accounting and quantification guidelines, including recommended best practices and alternate approaches, for each of the required reporting sectors; and
- Clarify the relationship between PCP and other GHG inventory protocols so that municipalities can plan and coordinate their reporting according to their own needs and priorities.
Understand the Basics
These web-based resources provide local governments with a user-friendly framework to quantify, monitor and manage GHG emissions generated at the local level.
- How to quantify greenhouse gas reductions at the project level
- How to set emissions reduction targets
- How to create a local action plan to manage energy and emissions
- How to detail implementation strategies for local action plans
- How to finance climate action initiatives
- How to track progress on emission reduction goals
Quantify, Measure, and Manage
The PCP Milestone Tool is a resource to support program members in their GHG emissions reduction activities, as a web-based GHG inventory management tool. It provides you with a user-friendly framework to quantify, monitor, and manage GHG emissions. This helps in working through the five milestone framework of the PCP program.
Visit www.pcptool.ca to learn more.