Environment Agency plans for emissions reporting

It has signed a contract with IT systems company SFW and climate change solutions provider CDC Climat to deliver a workflow and messaging system for monitoring, permitting, reporting and benchmarking on all industries covered by the EU greenhouse gas Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The move has been made to enable the agency to meet the requirements of the ETS, under which the aviation industry will be subject to a carbon cap and trade system by 2012. The system is scheduled to go live for benchmarking and reporting later this year. Chris Peddie-Birch, the IT project manager for emissions trading at SFW, told GC News that each airline operating in the UK will have to report to the Environment Agency on its fleet and operations to provide an indication of its emissions. The workflow system will make it possible to pass the information between the companies, the agency and auditors, and on to the European Commission. This will provide the basis for managing the ETS. "It's the first end-to-end system for managing the information requirements within emissions trading," Peddie-Birch said. "It will utilise the XETL data schema, which has been developed specifically for emissions trading so that other systems will be interoperable with ours. When the European Commission wants reports it will all be interoperable with their system." He said the system will also be useable for managing information on other industries that will be made subject to the ETS. There are plans for it to be used to cover stationary sources – companies that consume large amounts of energy – from 2011, and for the marine, metals and chemical industries from 2012. The contract with the two companies will last for four years and is valued at £2.2m.