From GHG inventories to climate management: Aligning IPCC guidelines, SECAP cycles and GPC scopes for sub-national governance

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🔬研究者:Provides a systematic framework integrating three major GHG accounting methodologies for sub-national governance, useful for scholars working on climate disclosure and policy cycles.

🏢実務担当者:Municipal sustainability officers can adopt the four-step approach to structure baseline inventories, classify emissions, and track mitigation progress toward targets.

🏛政策担当者:Regulators of sub-national climate reporting can consider the integrated model to improve consistency between local plans and national/international reporting systems.

Cities and regions increasingly rely on greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories to design, implement, and monitor climate action, yet existing frameworks differ in scope, structure, and usability for local decision-making. Although previous studies have compared municipality and sub-national GHG accounting methods, no study has systematically explored how the IPCC Guidelines, the Covenant of Mayors’ Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP) methodology, and the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GPC) can be integrated into a single operational approach for sub-national climate governance. Results show that the frameworks contribute complementary governance functions. The IPCC Guidelines provide a comprehensive sectoral architecture and consistency with higher-level reporting systems, supporting completeness and methodological robustness. SECAP embeds inventories into a municipal planning and monitoring process, improving usability for target-setting, action choices, and progress tracking. GPC adds a scope-based structure and verification-oriented pathways, enhancing transparency, comparability, and accountability. Addressing this gap, we propose a novel Decision-Oriented Approach structured into four steps that integrates IPCC sectoral accounting, SECAP’s policy cycle, and GPC’s scope logic into a unified operational model. This approach is applied to the Municipality of Grosseto (Italy), where it is used to structure the baseline emission inventory, classify direct and indirect emissions, monitor trends, and assess mitigation actions toward the 2030 target. The resulting Decision-Oriented Approach strengthens the operational link between GHG reporting and sub-national climate governance, supporting inventories that are methodologically robust, decision-relevant, and suitable for tracking implementation over time.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enex.2026.100023first seen 2026-07-19 04:44:12