Parties have agreed to negotiate a new international climate agreement until 2015. This new agreement will diverge from the first international climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, in two very important ways: first it will include commitments for all parties and not only a subgroup of industrialized nations, second it will include a larger diversity of national contributions than just the GHG based targets under the Kyoto protocol. In order for these national contributions to be transparent and comparable new accounting rules will need to be developed.

In this project funded by the German Federal Environmental Agency (UBA) a project consortium consisting of the Öko Insitute, NewClimate Insitute and Ecofys researches potential future accounting rules. This is done on the one hand in a qualitative manner by identifying and evaluating possible future accounting rules and on the other hand in quantitative manner by providing first estimates of the potential GHG impacts of different accounting rules. Ultimately the project aims to provide recommendations on the design of a future transparent, comparable yet implementable accounting framework, taking account of the time needed to agree on appropriate rules.