پروژه موجودی منطقه ای گازهای گلخانه ای (GRIP): طراحی و استفاده از یک ابزار اندازه گیری گازهای گلخانه ای منطقه ای برای استفاده سهامداران

Regional and local policy-making on carbon reduction requires user-friendly greenhouse gas inventory and quantitative scenario tools. We present one such tool – the Greenhouse Gas Regional Inventory Project (GRIP) – and discuss stakeholder reaction to this interactive computer-based approach. We then provide results on a set of 38 stakeholder-led interviews that were undertaken using GRIP to explore prospects for achieving deep cuts (−60%) in CO2 emissions by 2050 in the North West region of England. Seventeen energy stakeholders, despite being engaged in a professional capacity with the climate change and carbon reduction issues, struggled to find ways to reduce emissions by as much as 60% by 2050. This should worry policy makers in central government who consider that local and regional implementation of energy policy will be straightforward. Our findings, we argue, support a greater role for energy policy making at the sub-national regional scale in England.

Local and regional (sub-national) policy makers in many nations are increasingly asking what they can, and should, be doing to respond to the challenge of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction (e.g. Byrne et al., 2007; Rabe, 2007; Walker et al., 2007; Webber and Fleming, 2002). Regional targets for renewable energy are one of the most developed areas of energy policy at the sub-national scale within the UK. Take, for example, the North West Sustainable Energy Strategy published in 2006 by the North West Regional Assembly (for England). Whilst it contains a useful and informative summary of the broad expanse of sustainable energy activities in the region, the only quantified targets are for renewable electricity (10% of final regional electricity demand by 2010, 15% by 2015 and 20% by 2020) ( NWRA, 2006, p. 6). What is more, these targets are only aspirational, not definitive or in any senses binding, continuing the usual pattern of sub-national energy policy making in England. Nevertheless, there appears to be a demand from regional stakeholders for policies which go further in addressing regional greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, there is a need to formally link regional and national energy policy formation; otherwise, it is likely that confusion will reign and the necessary policy drivers and incentives will not be in place. The key questions addressed in this paper are consequently: 1. To what extent do regional stakeholders currently engage in an assessment of the prospects for deep cuts in CO2 emissions in their region? 2. How can we characterise stakeholders’ assessments of the prospects for deep cuts in regional CO2 emissions? In order to address question 1, a regional greenhouse gas simulator, the Greenhouse Gas Regional Inventory Project tool (GRIP), was employed. This tool, described in Section 2, is designed to allow stakeholders to explore regional greenhouse gas emission reductions across the whole energy system. In order to reflect the proposed national policy target in the Climate Change Bill (at the time of the research) of a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 (compared to a 1990 baseline) and of 26–32% reduction by 2020, the participants were asked to explore the prospects for a 60% reduction by 2050, and then asked to ‘back-cast’ from their 2050 reduction to 2020. It became apparent between 2005 and 2008 that a 60% reduction target for the UK and other industrialised countries was insufficient as their contribution towards stabilising atmospheric CO2 concentrations to below dangerous levels (Solomon et al., 2009; Hansen et al., 2008). In November 2008, the Climate Change Act introduced a legally binding target of an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions in the UK by 2050; subsequently the Committee on Climate Change (2008) has proposed carbon budgets for the three time periods up to 2022. Note that stakeholders were not asked to generate a scenario that they would like to see or would in some senses prefer to happen; rather they were asked to provide a scenario that they thought was a realistic appraisal of what would be likely to happen to achieve a 60% reduction in regional CO2 emissions. The results of this exercise will be discussed in Section 3 and analysed further in Section 4. The implications for climate change policy making regionally and nationally will then be explored in Section 5.

A bottom-up, stakeholder-led process of building regional CO2 reduction scenarios has been developed and implemented as a case-study in the North West of England. The GRIP software package proved to be a successful device for eliciting detailed stakeholder data, ideas and opinions. One of the benefits is that it adopts a comprehensive perspective of the whole regional energy system (excluding international aviation and marine). A further benefit is that it quantifies the energy supply and demand factors. It requires users to turn their ideas and suggestions into hard numbers. Whilst this is difficult, most stakeholders appear to have found it a satisfying and stimulating challenge. Since its inception, GRIP has proven to be a popular tool with other stakeholder groups and it is currently being adapted for use in cities and city-regions in the USA and other parts of Europe. For example, GRIP has been used in 2008 and 2009 to produce emission inventories for 18 European city-regions, including Glasgow, Bologna, Stockholm, Athens, Hamburg, Madrid, Stuttgart, Napoli, Oslo and Veneto (METREX; GRIP, 2009). GRIP can be used by local authorities in creating a greenhouse gas emissions baseline and measuring progress toward meeting area-based per capita emission reductions (NI 186). Because the scenarios were actually generated by the stakeholders themselves, the method is a good test of how robust national targets are with respect to their regional transposition. To our surprise, a large percentage of the stakeholders, just under half, found that they could not achieve a 60% CO2 reduction by 2050. If a scenario process imposes an ex ante emissions reduction cap (like most other CO2 reduction analyses in the UK have done) it may underestimate the resistance, inertia, scepticism, sheer difficulty or other problems perceived by regional stakeholders in meeting ambitious CO2 reduction targets. In conclusion, GRIP has provided regional climate change and sustainable energy stakeholders with a device for exploring the challenges of meeting a given CO2 reduction target. It has helped stakeholders assess for themselves just how important different sources of CO2 are and the distribution of emissions from different sectors. No one doubts the importance of setting robust national greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. Only the national government has the prerogative to establish such targets and to agree these through international negotiations, both via the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and within the European Union. Yet the excessive centralisation within the UK has in many policy fields led to unsuccessful and sometimes disastrous implementation. It is our contention that for the same reasons that health, educational, planning and crime prevention policy need to be, at least partly, conceived as well as delivered nearer to the intended beneficiaries or recipients of such policies, the design of climate change and sustainable energy policies also need to be focused much more at the regional scale. One way forward is for some sort of iterative bottom-up, top-down combination. A GRIP-type of process could be undertaken for each constituent country and region of the UK. Then different ways of combining the regional scenarios up to the UK scale could be examined, possibly with the benefit of an independent, but transparent, assessment of opportunities and constraints in each region by a group of national stakeholders. This panel would then pass on suggestions back to the regional stakeholders on how much each region could contribute to the decarbonisation target. An iterative process would, hopefully, result in a consensus on the relative contribution of the regions. Regional Sustainable Energy Agencies would be an important part of the regional target-setting process and would have responsibility for delivering regional targets once they have been agreed. Whilst England seems to be a long way away from such regionalism at the present moment, there is a serious risk that deep cuts in CO2 emissions will not be achieved without this type of change in the system of governance.