Participants in the motor industry’s complex supply chains, regulators as well as investors seeking to invest sustainably are increasingly interested in considering the carbon footprint of vehicles over their entire lifetime - from material extraction and production to manufacturing, use and disposal.
Lifecycle assessments of products are becoming common practice in a variety of industries, but in the automotive industry, methodologies to determine cradle-to-grave carbon emissions have so far been diverse and thus non-comparable.
This is about to change with the adoption by UNECE’s Working Party on Pollution and Energy of terms of reference for an Informal Working Group on Automotive Life Cycle Assessment.
The objective of the new working group, led by the governments of Japan and the Republic of Korea, is to develop an internationally harmonized procedure to determine the carbon footprint of vehicles, including energy use, no matter which technology (combustion engine, electric, hybrid) they are running on, and to allow comparisons between different models using the same technology.
The target date for the adoption of this procedure is 2025, in the form of a resolution under the framework of the UNECE World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations (WP.29), which will apply to all types of vehicles.
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