Theory and Practice of Enterprise Carbon Assets Management for Climate Change

Abstract

Carbon assets are fundamental to the development of carbon emission rights market. However, research into recognizing and managing carbon assets is limited with no clear framework for carbon assets. Carbon assets management is a new and difficult problem in the carbon accounting field, which can affect further development of carbon assets management. It develops a definition for carbon assets using environmental assets and the analysis of carbon resource. That is, carbon assets are various kinds of tangible or intangible carbon resource that are owned or controlled by an enterprise, which are used to generate current and future economic benefits and related to generation of greenhouse gas emissions. Then, it uses this framework to analyze specific cases of international and Chinese carbon assets management to identify problems in effective implementation. Finally, several measures, including establishing institution organization and regulations, constructing budget system, participating carbon trading and consulting toward professional agency according to the characteristics of carbon assets management are proposed. Carbon assets management is a new research field, so many problems, such as the definition of carbon assets, carbon assets management pattern and key influence factors, need further investigation. The results identify the essence and definition of carbon assets, which may strengthen the enterprise’s carbon assets management awareness and also provide helpful directions to improve carbon assets performance.