GHG measurement and management are vital, but always be looking to advance the end game of mitigating climate change

It has become almost a truism that we tend to not manage what we don’t (or can’t) measure. Measuring GHG emissions is obviously important, and the new Greenhouse Gas Measurement and Management journal can contribute to the development of reliable measurement and verification metrics for GHG emissions and removals. As we pursue that objective, however, we should not make the mistake of assuming that we necessarily ‘manage what we measure’, or that all GHG measurement and management efforts are created equal in the eyes of climate change mitigation. Most of all, we should not make the mistake of assuming that better measurement is an end in and of itself. Confusing means and ends is easy to do when talking about climate change, particularly when we lack key elements of the policy framework needed to address the problem. It is easy to focus inordinately on those variables we feel we do have some control over. But climate change is a complicated and long-term problem, as is climate change mitigation. It is natural to look for proxy success indicators that are simple and measurable, like emissions disclosure efforts, emissions reduction targets, and measurement and verification protocols. Indeed, it’s important to have nearand medium-term success indicators to keep ourselves motivated. The use of proxy success indicators is not without risk. The wrong success indicators, or confusing the ends and means of climate change mitigation, can easily distract us from the long-term ‘end game’. Successful climate change mitigation would almost certainly require a combination of aggressive regulation, a material carbon price and radical technology innovation. That’s the end game. Getting from here to there will be even tougher if we lose sight of the target by focusing on the wrong proxies, or on ‘means’ rather than ‘ends’. Today, many published articles in the climate change field are little more than a presentation of better statistics relating to GHG emissions or removals, whether at the project or systems level. Such articles implicitly assume that improving the measurement of sources and sinks is an end in and of itself. Is that always true? As we launch the Greenhouse Gas Measurement and Management journal, we should recognize that this journal can make a larger contribution to the field if we always keep one eye on ‘the end game’. With that in mind, we should ask authors presenting statistically significant results to explain whether their conclusions are also policy significant, and why. For example, does an article on the improved measurement of standing forest stocks have significant implications for estimates of the country’s GHG inventory, how we think about other countries’ GHG inventories, or how we think about carbon sequestration potentials in the country? When an author estimates the mitigation potential of a particular technology, does the author provide crucial information on the cost-effectiveness of that technology as a mitigation strategy, and how that played into estimating its perceived potential? In other words, do the findings in a given article improve our larger understanding of how to advance the cause of climate change mitigation? Do the results being published have the potential to contribute to better policy decision making in the future? In other words, are the improvements ‘policy significant’, as opposed to just ‘statistically significant’? These questions apply equally importantly to both the GHG measurement and GHG management aspects of the