[Scholar News]Co-authored Paper by Prof. Qi Shaozhou from the School of Economics and Management Published in Nature Climate ChangeCo-authored Paper by Prof. Qi Shaozhou from the School of Economics and Management Published in Nature Climate Change

Recently, “Integrity of firms' emissions reporting in China's early carbon markets”, a paper co-authoredbyQi Shaozhou, Professor of the Department of World Economics of Wuhan University School of Economics and Management, and Director of the Center for Climate Change and Energy Economics of Wuhan University, and the scholars of Tsinghua University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was published inNature Climate Change(January 28, 2019), a subject-specific journal underNature, and the impact factor ofNature Climate Changeis 19.181 (2017-2018),whichranks the top among journals in the field of meteorology & atmosphere and environment.

The paper argues that the integrity of greenhouse gas emissions data is critical to assessing the progress of countries' commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement, especially in developing countries, where the establishment of reliable greenhouse gas emissions measurement, reporting and verification systems is a challenge. To this end, the paperstudiestwo typical carbon emission trading pilots in China, Beijing and Hubei, and concludedthat the gap between the self-reported data and the verifieddata has significantly decreased after several years of implementation of the carbon market policy.

The paper also uses the econometric model to conduct a number of tests to check whether there was any evidence that anyone had deliberately misreported or colluded with the verification agency during the data reporting and verification process. The evidence was not found in the study.Therefore, the study believes that the effective operation of the data reporting and verification mechanism has indeed improved the carbon accounting and reporting capabilities of each unit.

In the end, the study proposes policy recommendations for establishing effective enterprise-level MRV mechanisms in China and other developing countries, emphasizing the importance of preventing conflicts of interest in verification agencies, spot checks on verification agencies, and financial support for verification of historical emissions data.