This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity. **Alexia Kelly** Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Navigating Net Zero, the podcast where we talk about what's working, what's not, and what's next on the road to net zero. I am Alexia Kelly, your host, and I am absolutely delighted to be joined here today by the inaugural CEO of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, Tim Mohin, who I've had the pleasure of getting to know over the last few months. I'm really exceptionally excited to have this conversation with you here today, Tim, and welcome to the pod. **Tim Mohin** Thank you so much, Alexia. I am excited, too. It's been a great pleasure to get to know you over the last few months. You are a deep well of information and relationships that go many years into this field, and so I feel like I could learn as much from you as you could learn from me in this discussion. I'm super excited to jump right in. **Alexia Kelly** Well, very kind of you. Just by quick way of introduction, Tim, as I noted, is the first CEO of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, but he is not new to standardization or standard-setting. Tim brings decades of global leadership combining standard-setting, executive leadership, and environmental expertise across the public and private sectors. He previously served as CEO of the Global Reporting Initiative from 2017 until 2020—and we'll talk a little bit about that today—and has held senior sustainability leadership roles at major technology companies, including Intel, Apple, and AMD. He also served as Executive Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer for ESG software company Persefoni. Earlier in his career, he worked at the US EPA and in the US Senate, developing deep experience in policy regulation and government engagement on environmental and sustainability issues. Immediately prior to joining the GHGP, Tim was a Partner and Director of Climate and Sustainability at Boston Consulting Group, and he got his start working on environmental policy at the EPA and the US Senate. You are also a book author, *Changing Business From the Inside Out*, as well as the author of the newsletter *Sustainability Simplified*. **Tim Mohin** It comes out every Friday on Substack and LinkedIn. **Alexia Kelly** Which I have been a loyal reader of for a very long time. I knew you through that prior to meeting you, and it's just so helpful and such an important contribution to tracking this really interesting, momentous, and a little bit crazy time we find ourselves in in the global standard-setting space. So Tim, tell us a little bit about your history and how you came to join the GHGP as their first CEO. **Tim Mohin** Well, first of all, thank you for that kind introduction. When I think back on it, it's actually four decades and counting of working in one field. I'm one of the weirdos that never changed professions. I certainly changed jobs, but I've never changed professions. And the reason for that is my profession is my passion. It is my cause. When I go to work, it's what I want to do. I want to basically save the environment, work for environmental social justice across the world, and it's something that has always been part of me. So, you know, I'm one of those people that's sort of motivated to do the work that we do. It has manifested in many different ways, as your introduction would have suggested. When I first started—I am an old guy, so it was many, many years ago—we didn't have the word sustainability, right? And so if you wanted to do the things that I just mentioned, really you had two choices: You could be an environmental activist working for an NGO, a pressure group, or you could go work for the government. Companies weren't to be trusted. They were to be regulated. And so I went to work for the government, and I was an air toxics regulator. That led me up to Capitol Hill—clean air, clean water, Superfund, some of the biggest environmental legislative packages of our time. I often say I was like the Forrest Gump of environmental regulation. I just showed up at the right place at the right time and was privileged enough to be part of a lot of those policy developments that are still very much the foundational bedrock with us today. But something changed along the way. We sort of went from command-and-control regulation to voluntary disclosure and voluntary action. This is when the Global Reporting Initiative started to come onto the scene and said, "Look, what are these companies doing? We need to know more." And that began this whole corporate social responsibility movement, and that's when I kind of made the shift as well. I saw government working less efficiently—and I think that has just gotten worse, not better, unfortunately—but companies actually moving faster than regulators in terms of environmental protection. I wanted to be part of that. So that's what led me to twenty-plus years in primarily the tech sector, as you mentioned, and lots of different accomplishments there. I continue to have great relationships across the board. One of the threads that held it all together was this issue of disclosure. When we think about all the things that companies are doing voluntarily, they have to tell that story. And so that's what led me to go run GRI and to get involved with standards. Because standards—and I've said this to you before—it's a social construct. It's what we all choose to do the same way across the world. That's fascinating to me, because as a former regulator, we could only regulate in one jurisdiction, whereas standards are truly global. It is that social construct that spans the entire world and says, "This is how we're going to count greenhouse gas emissions. This is how we're going to report them." And that, to me, was a real unlock in terms of the leverage that brings along with it. That was my interest in standards. That's what led me to go to GRI, and it's led me to my current position at the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. **Alexia Kelly** That's great. Tell us a little bit about your time at GRI—what it did, why it was important at the time, and what you learned about standards development that is globally applicable from that experience. **Tim Mohin** Yeah, great question. When I think about my time at GRI, it was already a somewhat mature organization, but was still growing very quickly. We were like a hundred and ten people working out of Amsterdam. Again, the G stands for global, so it was born in the US, but we wanted it to be based in Europe to kind of make that point. When I think about and reflect upon that experience, what most people don't understand about standards is it's a very wonky, technical process. Without governance within that organization, the standards don't matter. Again, going back to that sort of social construct or social contract, it really demands that you have folks from across the various demographics—sector and region—all coming together with the same expertise to really opine upon what is the right way to measure and what is the right way to report so that we can have comparability. And when we have comparability, then we can make decisions about how to protect the environment. That's how standards are made, and GRI was one of the pioneers in doing this. Over time, they put these governance modules in place, and that's where I came into the organization. By the time I left, we had what was called the "alphabet soup." I think we're very much still in that era. When you have a lot of different standard-setters and a lot of different standards, it's just confusing. Frankly, it works against our very purpose and mission. So my tenure at GRI was to try to harmonize and converge the standards together. I was quite proud of the work we did to actually bring several standard-setters together, and that led to the creation of the International Sustainability Standards Board, or ISSB, five years ago. That was constructed at a meeting in Davos in 2020 that I attended. You know, I've got a selfie from everybody that was there. Still to this day, I think there's a lot more work we could do to bring folks together to get a single, common global measurement system. That's what I hope to accomplish here at GHGP as well. **Alexia Kelly** Yeah, it's a great segue to GHGP. You know, I always chuckle a little bit as somebody who has worked—not as long as you, but a long time—in this space, that the greenhouse gas accounting conversation used to be a few experts in a room at the UN and in a few nonprofits having very intense, passionate, and very academic conversations about how you do this accounting and what the right ways and methods are. It's evolved significantly, which I think is both a sign of our progress, but also a sign that it's time for us to really start thinking about how these rules impact and direct real-world action and financial flows. So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about the role that the Greenhouse Gas Protocol itself plays. What are its core functions? What does it do for us that other standards don't do, and why is it so important? From there, we can dig into some of the wonkier bits that I'm excited to chat with you about as well. **Tim Mohin** I mean, first of all, this is the greatest story never told. These are the unsung heroes of the climate movement. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants that came before me who created the first measurement system for greenhouse gases 25 years ago. That wasn't even a thing before. As I think most of your listeners know, greenhouse gases are rarely measured; they're often estimated. So how do we estimate the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from various corporate activities, various project activities, cities, et cetera? That's what the GHGP, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, took on 25 years ago. They developed a framework as we all know and love: Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3. I don't think we even need to define those for your listeners; they've become the standard building blocks of greenhouse gas accounting. This is the infrastructure. This is what the entire world uses to measure their emissions, and measuring emissions is the first step in reducing those emissions. I can say with firsthand knowledge, the companies I worked for are reducing their emissions. They're doing so voluntarily, and they're using the GHGP to measure where they are today and how they're progressing toward the net-zero goals that they have set for themselves. So it does work. Now, having said all that, there's a massive change in the wind. We know that this movement has largely been voluntary on the part of companies, and now we're seeing a movement toward mandatory disclosure. Why? Because investors care. Investors know that there are significant risks associated with the companies they invest in from climate change. They want to know: What are companies doing about it in terms of reducing their own emissions and preparing for the effects of climate change? So climate risk and climate emissions are now starting to show up in capital market regulations around the world. **Alexia Kelly** Yeah, and that piece I think is so important because this is maybe one of the most consequential sets of unsung heroes, to your point, who have been doing the hard, intellectual labor of figuring out how this system works where everything is mostly estimated and not directly measured—which I think is such an important point and is often overlooked in these conversations. We really need to think about how you standardize these, and how we build in continuous improvement so that as the science gets better, as our understanding of what's happening gets better, and as our ability to measure and estimate these emissions through new tools, resources, and technologies gets better, we can continuously evolve. But we need to do it in a way that is predictable and manageable so that companies can deploy the capital we need them to be deploying into decarbonization technologies for their supply chains, and into the full suite of additional mitigation actions and outcomes wherever they may be in the world that we know can make a meaningful contribution to addressing the climate crisis. This question of what is the right governance structure for that role, I think, is a really, really important one. I'm curious if you can elaborate a little bit: In your mind, what does a really good, well-functioning global regulator look like? I know you had been advising the GHGP team in your previous role on the new governance structure, so maybe just talk through a little bit of what that looks like now and where you see that going in the future. **Tim Mohin** I think you need to look no further than the group I mentioned before, the ISSB, the International Sustainability Standards Board. In terms of the overall infrastructure, it's a professional, paid staff with paid board members. They have a definitive process for considering inputs, and they go through this process and issue standards that are then adopted by just about every country in the world when it comes to financial standards. Now, the sustainability standards and climate standards they're working on are following that same path, but it's nascent. It's new, and it's something they're still kind of working out. GHGP has a partnership with ISSB, and we are modeling a lot of our new governance processes after the ISSB. So that's kind of the archetype, if you will. Again, adoption speaks louder than words. Standards work when they're adopted globally, and that's certainly what they have over there. **Alexia Kelly** Yeah, that's great. Maybe for folks who are not as familiar with the disclosure and financial accounting landscape, say just two more words about the role that ISSB plays in the ecosystem right now, and how you see that being complementary to or integrated with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol's role. **Tim Mohin** Sure. If you take a giant step back, the ISSB is really new, but IFRS, the International Financial Reporting Standards system, is not. It's been around for a few decades. Why do we have an international financial reporting system? We have it because we have global trade. Globalization is a part of our life, and we couldn't really trade globally if we had different ways of accounting for money, so we had to have an international system. The only real holdout from that is the US, which has its own system called FASB, but it's actually quite close to the international system, so it's doable. Now, the same idea was applied to ESG—environmental, social, and governance—with the advent of the International Sustainability Standards Board, which was added on quite recently. As I said, they've issued two standards. One is on general ESG matters, but the one that is probably more important for your listeners is their second standard, which is on climate disclosure. We formed a partnership because they don't do the accounting side; they do the disclosure side, and GHGP does the accounting side. That's why the partnership exists, and we've been in constant contact since—certainly since I joined. I was on email with them earlier today about how our standards fit together in terms of both the content, the timing, and some of the cross-cutting issues. So that's working. It's working incredibly well. If you follow that evolution that I just laid out, because there is global adoption for the financial standards in IFRS, we're going to see the same global adoption for sustainability standards. They're up to about 40 jurisdictions that have adopted them right now, and we see that only growing over time. **Alexia Kelly** And what did you say—there are 70 jurisdictions that are now pointing specifically to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol in their regulations? **Tim Mohin** Yeah, so you're going to ask me where the other 30 come from. Right now in the sustainability world, there's a bit of a split. You have the International Sustainability Standards Board over here, and then you have the Europeans. The Europeans have done something a bit different. They did have a multi-stakeholder process, and they did include impact in their standard setting, so that's the main difference. But because of that difference, which may be less of a difference than people think, those other 29 jurisdictions are the 29 European nations under the European Union, and they also reference the Greenhouse Gas Protocol as the accounting procedure. The one left over to make it to 70 is the state of California. The state of California specifically lists the Greenhouse Gas Protocol as the required accounting standard for their disclosure laws that went through just a year ago. All told, if you look at California alone, it's the fourth-largest economy in the world. But if you add up all 70, it's pretty clear the majority of global GDP relies upon the Greenhouse Gas Protocol standards. **Alexia Kelly** One commonly overlooked piece of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol suite of standards—because it's not just one standard; you have the Corporate Standard, which enables companies to measure their greenhouse gas footprint and really understand what their emissions impact is across their operations and supply chains. I was at WRI in 2010 during a lot of those early conversations, and the idea really was: How can we cast the widest net of responsibility? There is that adage that you can't manage what you don't measure. We want to measure as much as possible because that visibility enables you to then start thinking about and articulating strategies for how you manage those emissions. That theory of change underpins a lot of that broader brush that we've used to determine responsibility from an emissions footprinting perspective using the current Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Do you think that's still the right approach? As we continue down this path of really trying to mobilize and accelerate companies to take the most ambitious action they can, how do we balance that with some of the folks who are coming in saying, "Oh, we can't do that for all sorts of reasons. Scope 3 is just too hard, it's too diffuse, it's too distinct"? Tell us a little bit about why it's important to have Scope 3 in the mix. **Tim Mohin** The answer to your question is yes, and it is really important to continue with all of the different reporting and reduction efforts that have been built on the GHGP foundation over the years, including the Science Based Targets initiative and you name it. It's all based on the Scope 1, 2, and 3 paradigm that GHGP has espoused for corporates over 25 years. But the "and" part is equally important, because what we're seeing on the landscape is more product carbon footprinting. Why is that important? It's important because not only should we know how much carbon was emitted in the creation of a product that I'm buying so we can buy the right products, but also jurisdictions are starting to tax products based on the carbon intensity it took to make that product. This is where I think we're really going to unlock decarbonization at speed and scale. These are called Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms—my favorite abbreviation or acronym, CBAM. We're seeing these now proliferate across the world. Europe has one, and the UK, Australia, and New Zealand are considering them—many different countries that have an emissions trading system. Imagine you're going through the European Emissions Trading System and you're a compliant company, doing the right things and decarbonizing, and then you get imports of the same product you're making that were made in really high-carbon conditions. You say, "Well, that's not fair. I did my part." So that's why we're seeing these carbon tariffs pop up. This is something the Greenhouse Gas Protocol recognized, and it's the reason that GHGP partnered with the world's largest standard-setter, the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, to develop an international standard for product carbon footprinting. That's underway right now. It's very exciting. We are working with several multinational institutions—UN, WTO, OECD, et cetera—and this is just now starting to take shape. **Alexia Kelly** That's really exciting. I remember as well the UNFCCC mandate coming out of the COP30 presidency to GHGP and ISO to help lead a global harmonization of greenhouse gas accounting through the 2028 Global Stocktake. So presumably, this ISO-GHGP partnership on product-level accounting is a piece of that. Are there other pieces that you are working on to help fulfill and deliver that mandate to the UN? **Tim Mohin** That is the biggest piece, so you're right. It's something that we were discussing actually just today, starting with New York Climate Week, but also going into the COP process right after that. Things never move as fast as I would like them to, so I would have preferred to say, "It's all done," but right now we're still in the process of developing some of those agreements. **Alexia Kelly** หมVery true of both GHGP and ISO, which have fairly large governance structures and complicated stakeholder management systems and processes. So maybe just talk a little bit about what that harmonization and convergence looks like. As the new CEO, what are the things you're doing to really make sure that we have the right mix of voices around the table and that decisions are taken in a really clear and transparent way? **Tim Mohin** Yeah, it's a fantastic question and I should address it directly. I believe that the partnership GHGP forged with ISO—I was at BCG at the time and we were behind the scenes helping out with this—was announced at Climate Week NYC in 2025, so it's still quite new. That's just like, you know, eight months ago or something. I think it's an unlock because, as I mentioned, ISO is the largest standard-setter. People probably know this: It's an association of national standard-setters that all come together to agree, so it really has adoption across the world. One hundred and seventy-seven nations—out of only a hundred and ninety-five—use ISO standards. So that global adoption is a huge unlock. Now, how do we do it? There are three methods. ISO develops a standard, GHGP goes through our process to accept it, and it's co-branded. The opposite is true: GHGP develops a standard, ISO goes through their process to accept it, and it's co-branded. Or we work together—as we are in the product carbon footprint example I gave earlier—to develop a standard together which is co-branded. Going forward, all of our standards are co-branded. That's an exciting time for us because, again, we get that global adoption that I think the market and the world is really crying out for. **Alexia Kelly** Yeah, I completely agree. The fact that ISO and GHGP have had similar, largely overlapping, but slightly distinct sets of guidance on a lot of the core foundational elements—what I consider the backbone of the greenhouse gas accounting, management, and measurement systems we have globally—has been a challenge. Anywhere we can help facilitate alignment around what "right" looks like based on the best available science and information we have at the time is super valuable. ISO's not the fastest-moving process, and neither is GHGP. What are the things you're doing to help accelerate and move expeditiously toward resolution of what has become a standards situation that's really impeding private capital flow and decarbonization mobilization? **Tim Mohin** We need to move faster. I mean, we're living in 2026 right now. We're living in the world of AI; things need to move faster. As I have only been in this post less than two months, the first thing I'm doing is trying to raise money for the organization. We are doing six—count them, six—different standard revisions right now with a staff of 35 people. Obviously, not all 35 are involved with standards, so that's just not appropriate. We're way overstretched in terms of all of the obligations that this organization has taken on. I'm working very hard to move quickly and, in the interim, give a little bit more certainty to the market and to our clients that are using these standards about which direction we're going, because they often don't have time to wait. The last thing I'll say—and I think this is actually one of the most important things I'll say—early in my tenure as CEO of this organization, I've reached out to the other standard-setters. Not just ISO, but EFRAG with the Europeans, ISSB with the international standards, and SBTi, the Science Based Targets initiative. How do we work better together? How do we work so that when GHGP develops a standard, it's immediately approved and taken up by the others? That conversation was like bringing a glass of water to a thirsty man in the desert. They were like, "Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!" So it's been pushing on an open door. However, I think it's easier said than done. We're in the conversations right now, and I'm really hopeful that this will be more than a talking shop—that it will result in a coherent measurement and disclosure system for the world. I'm really proud of that early effort. I'm going to maybe decrease expectations a little bit, but I'm super proud of where we're going. **Alexia Kelly** That's great, and that alignment, convergence, and harmonization is so fundamentally important so that we can build what ultimately needs to be a globally interoperable set of greenhouse gas accounting systems that can talk to each other and function effectively and efficiently. I do want to come back to this question of who's at the table in the decision-making process, and how we balance that to really make sure we are getting that mix of strong environmental integrity—focusing on making sure these systems deliver the environmental outcomes we need them to for the climate—while making sure that they work in the real world. That's the intersection of a lot of our work, and I know that's been the intersection of your work over the course of your career. It is a balancing act always. Talk a little bit about that balancing act and how you see that evolving and playing out moving forward for GHGP, and also based on your experience historically. **Tim Mohin** Yeah, I love that question. The role of a standard-setter is like the role of a referee, or a marriage counselor, or somebody who's trying to bring people together, right? It can be hard. I walked into a situation recently in this new role at GHGP where many of our standards revisions are polarized to the extent where it's almost irrecoverable. I don't know how it got that way, but I will just say at London Climate Week that just passed—we saw each other there—I rarely get spontaneous applause when I talk to folks, but in this case I said, "Look, we have to stop shooting at each other. We have enough people from outside the environmental movement trying to take us down. We need to come together." People went, "Yeah, yeah, yeah!" And then they went back to doing what they were doing anyway. So I think it's super important that we really look at that and say, "Okay, we may not have the perfect science, but finding that pragmatism is what standard-setters do." I'm actually quite eager and thrilled to take on this role. It sounds weird because you're walking into a fur fight, but going all the way back to the introduction, this is exactly what I did on Capitol Hill. **Alexia Kelly** Yeah, that's excellent. I keep coming back to governance because, as a standard-setter and as an international regulator, that really is the framework within which you have these conversations and negotiate compromises. Helping people understand the governance changes that have been made at the Greenhouse Gas Protocol is so important. As you know, my background is in emissions trading and carbon pricing. There was an evolution where NGOs stepped into the breach where governments were not willing or able politically to step in and regulate. Those NGOs stepped up and said, "Okay, somebody needs to write down the rules for how this is all going to work, and we're going to do that." That was very much the birth of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol coming out of WRI and WBCSD 25 years ago. Similarly, in the carbon markets, last I heard, I count 50 different standards bodies active in the carbon markets. The ICVCM, the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets, has been an example of how we've moved past this highly fractured, balkanized landscape where everybody's doing it their own way and describing it slightly differently, to a much more coherent, organized, global threshold benchmark for what it means to be a high-integrity carbon credit. That experience and exercise is where GHGP really needs to be moved to: How do you create that credible, well-governed, highly transparent global regulator that is acting as a regulator does, and not as an activist NGO or somebody who has an axe to grind? So maybe talk through the governance structure that you guys have put in place, because I don't know that everybody is familiar with it, and share how you see that evolving over the next little bit. **Tim Mohin** First of all, your thesis is 100% right. It's spot on. One of the reasons I took this job is that it's a little more mature than people understand. Even with the cohesive model that you mentioned, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol enjoys a 97% adoption rate across the S&P 500. We already talked about the adoption rate in different jurisdictions. It is the foundation, so we already have that. Now it's a matter of putting in those systems, processes, and governance that give us those levers of legitimacy for this new regulatory world that we're stepping into. We've already started that process. This started before I joined, so I can't take credit for everything, but this was a process started about two and a half years ago where we have a Steering Committee and Technical Working Groups. The base of the pyramid is the Technical Working Groups. These are the folks from all demographics who come together with expertise in a particular issue—be it forest carbon accounting, electricity, or whatever the issue is—to develop the actual standard. That standard then goes to an Independent Standards Board which we have set up, and then those standards are ratified by a Steering Committee. Those bodies are in place and functioning quite well within the GHGP today. Again, it's been based on those benchmarks of other international standard-setters that have jurisdictional reliance, so we're thinking this will work quite well. **Alexia Kelly** That's great news, and I agree. The more structured governance is a big improvement on what it was before. Having that clear line of sight to who's making which decision when, and who has ultimate purview, is incredibly important. I want to come back to the alignment with the financial markets, because that's something you touched on earlier. How do we make sure that these standards really are fit for purpose? I want to underscore the point you made earlier: The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is one of the great environmental success stories of our movement. Truly. When we were first starting, it was controversial that companies were going to report emissions. To your point, we didn't even really have language for it. Getting people to sit down and say, "Okay, this is how we're going to do this really hard, complicated thing that we're still not really good at—we don't have very good data, we don't know where to get the data, and we're not even sure what data we need to be looking for"—that process has come a long way in the last two decades. We've built a system that everybody uses now, which is amazing to have that comparability. There's a lot of noise right now saying, "Oh, well, maybe the GHGP isn't fit for purpose," or "We don't need the scopes," or "They're too complicated; we can't make them work." That feels to me personally like a huge mistake—this sense that because we didn't get it exactly right the first time, we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and start all over again. You probably know who I'm talking about when I say that! That, I think, is really dangerous. So talk a little bit about your perspective on that evolution. How do we make sure that we learn from and build on the lessons of the past while recognizing that we really have made a lot of progress? **Tim Mohin** We've made a ton of progress. I want to go back to a point you made earlier, which was that the environmental movement deserves all the credit for a lot of this progress. The same thing goes for GRI, the Global Reporting Initiative, which we mentioned before. That was a product of Ceres, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies based out of Boston, Massachusetts. Many of your listeners probably know them. Back in the late '80s during the Exxon Valdez oil spill, they said, "Oh, we've got to figure out what companies are doing." That has now become a global standard. The same goes for GHGP. It really started from this notion that we need a way to measure greenhouse gas emissions. Now, fast-forwarding on that maturity curve to the base of your question about not being fit for purpose for the future: This was fit for purpose in a voluntary disclosure paradigm. In the future, as we go into the mandatory disclosure paradigm, there's a whole lot of other expertise that has to be brought in. I'll use an example of the Big Four accountancy firms. What these folks do is go through each disclosure in fine detail to understand the provenance of each piece of information in that disclosure and check if it checks out. That's the assurance process, and therefore they can write an assurance letter saying, "We put our name on this as being true." Our standards need to go through such a rigorous process to be assurable. That's one example of where we need to professionalize. Another is the work I talked about before regarding harmonization with jurisdictional standard-setters across the world. Those kinds of efforts are ones that I am going to bring with me, because I really feel like this is our future going forward. It will change the nature of this, but I don't want to lose the massive credit that goes to the roots of the GHGP simply because it has now been successful and is moving into this new regulatory world. I think if you talk to folks like Janet Ranganathan and others who gave birth to this thing 25 years ago, they would have dreamed of this world and said, "Yes, this is what we want." Well, now it's happening, and it doesn't take a thing away. In fact, it only underscores the incredible work that was done to create these standards. **Alexia Kelly** Yeah, and especially for our listeners who are not as deep in the weeds on assurance and financial market alignment, the point you just made about third-party assurance and auditability is fundamentally important. I didn't even fully appreciate it until I was inside of a company working with our CFO and our CEO, trying to figure out what we are willing to sign on the dotted line and put in public documentation that we are responsible for. How do we think about our regulators—the SEC and others—and the information that we're disclosing publicly, making sure that it's credible? This issue of assurance became really, really important. It means that you need to be able to get recognized third-party assurance bodies, as you noted, to come in, use our standards, and go through their formal processes that they are mandated by their accreditation bodies to follow, and say, "Yep, this all lines up. This data is correct, and it conforms with our data requirements, transparency, and disclosure requirements." All of those pieces need to be there. We don't have that in a lot of the standards that have been developed to date across the greenhouse gas accounting field. Personally, I think a lot of the work that needs to happen in the next two to five years is that very deep alignment and evaluation of what it's going to take. In many instances, it's actually not huge, right? It's like: You're missing a disclosure requirement here, you need a specific provision to address fraud there, or you need to require more data in this element of your standard. It's tweaks; it's not surgery. Those tweaks move us from being a voluntary NGO ESG report that nobody really pays attention to at the corporate level, to things that can start to be integrated into mainstream disclosure statements and filings. We're in the middle of that transition right now, but that transition is fundamentally important to making sure environmental action, markets, and information are not just a siloed sideshow that a bunch of hippies are doing because they think it's important. It is information that is fully integrated into the mainstream economy and into the way in which businesses think about their operations. We still have a long way to go there, but I'm so glad that you're focused on that evolution. I just want to underscore how important I think it is based on my experience working inside one of these companies, because we are not going to get where we need to go if we aren't able to integrate into large-scale private capital markets. **Tim Mohin** You said it perfectly. Just to underscore one of your points: This is not about more administrivia. This is not about more paperwork. The ultimate goal here is to incorporate climate into our financial system so that we can flow capital to sustainable business practices. That's what investors want. That's what all the capital markets want, because guess what? Climate change is real, it's here, and we have to do something about it and prepare for it. We felt it when we were together in London when it was 100 degrees in every single meeting room and we had an event on extreme heat canceled because of extreme heat. These are not jokes; these are happening now, and it's something the world is waking up to. So the financial system, which basically runs the world, is saying, "Oh, wow, what are we doing? How do we measure? How do we get this stuff involved in our investment decisions, all the way from development banks to individual investors?" That's the goal: so that it's not an afterthought, as you said. It's not a weird hippie thing. It's not a voluntary do-gooder thing anymore. This is mainstream global commerce. **Alexia Kelly** Yeah, exactly. I also want to touch on something that people don't talk about enough, but is also very important and something that the Greenhouse Gas Protocol has led in for a long time: project-level accounting and intervention accounting. One of the standards that the GHGP has is the GHGP Project Protocol. I was actually talking to a former colleague at WRI a couple of months ago, and they said, "Man, you know, I was talking to another colleague the other day, and we were really bummed because we wrote that Project Protocol and we feel like nobody's really using it." I looked at him and said, "This is the basis of the entire global carbon market!" All of our methodologies—all the things that we do to assess how well the actions we're taking to mitigate emissions, reduce emissions, and remove emissions are working—are based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Project Protocol. ISO also has a project protocol, the 14064-2 standard, that helps lay out some of those core principles. Now with the ICVCM Core Carbon Principles label as well, I feel like we have a much more solid foundation for how you do that basic intervention accounting broadly. I know a lot of this is being talked about in the Actions and Market Instruments Technical Working Group right now in the context of the GHGP update. We spend a lot of time rightly focused on how we are measuring and reporting emissions, which is obviously the first step. The second step is really digging in and saying: "Okay, what do we do about them? How do we measure and assess the impact of the things that we're doing about them?" Those two core functions are the basis for all of our climate regulation. Those are the two things that we need to really be able to do well. Carbon markets went first, and they have not been without their controversy over the years. I'm curious: In the update process, as we're moving through this next phase of work, is the GHGP's role in helping set some of those foundational standards part of the conversation? How are you thinking about that, and how do we really help accelerate and tap into the power of markets to massively accelerate decarbonization action? **Tim Mohin** You accurately pointed out that we have all the building blocks. In our previous discussion, we were talking about the importance of getting this right and getting it embedded into the global financial system. I think one of our biggest problems in getting there is how complicated this subject is. Even in this discussion, I think we're trying our best to spell out abbreviations and acronyms and failing! When you're talking to somebody who asks, "What is this?", this is why my newsletter is called *Sustainability Simplified*. We need the decoder ring. We need to be able to use examples that people can relate to, and then they'll understand the importance of what it is we're actually doing. We can take some of these incredible intellectual property works that have been created over the years and adopted so widely, and then use those building blocks to create the system. It's going to take a lot of understanding and a lot of work to get that kind of funding and consolidation together. One thing I will say, having been around a zillion years, is that there's no pride of authorship. It's about getting it right. I'll use the example of SASB, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. It was around for quite a while, and then they saw their future in the International Sustainability Standards Board, and they just merged into it. Same thing here: If we see that system developing—the one that we've just been discussing—we'll just merge into it, because what we need is a global system that works for global commerce. All the building blocks are there; the complication can be sorted. The money needs to be coming in because, frankly, we're our own worst enemy in fracturing the market with all kinds of different stories. But there needs to be this central story: What is the infrastructure? How do we get climate embedded into global commerce? That's the story that we need to tell. **Alexia Kelly** Yeah, absolutely agree. So let's fast-forward five years from now. If you could look back and say, "Here's what I got done," where do you think we would be as a field, and what would make you feel like you had just been wildly successful in this role? **Tim Mohin** First of all, I think having a single global carbon accounting system that is recognized across the world and used for that financial system we discussed earlier. Secondly, and I think maybe more poignantly—going all the way back to the introduction for me—it's about decarbonization. If at the end of the day I made measurement more precise or more accurate, I won't be happy with this job. The point of the standards, and the reason that there is such polarity and so many people are interested and having discussions and conflicts over the standards, is that they matter. They matter because they lead to decarbonization. There are policy decisions embedded in measurement standards that can lead to decarbonization at speed and scale. We used the product carbon footprint example earlier; it's just one example. It's probably the highest-leverage example, but it's one example. Five years from now, I'm going to be way older than I am now! I'll definitely be looking back, and I'll be saying, "You know, if we unlock decarbonization with the work that we do in standard-setting, then I'll be satisfied with this role." **Alexia Kelly** Yeah. Excellent. I love it. Well, Tim, thank you so much for joining me today, sharing your insights, and taking on this enormous but incredibly important challenge. I know there are many other places you could be choosing to spend your time, so I think we are deeply grateful to those of you who are really willing to dig in and do the hard work to move this space forward. I'm looking forward to continued collaboration. **Tim Mohin** Thank you, Alexia. It's been a wonderful conversation. I've learned a lot. It's always a pleasure to speak to you, and I hope that your listeners also got something out of this. I hope we can do it again. **Alexia Kelly** Absolutely. Thanks so much. **Tim Mohin** Thank you.