FGV EAESP

With the objective of offering the Brazilian business sector the opportunity of testing a financial instrument for carbon pricing, the Center for Sustainability Studies of the Business Management School at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (GVces) has, since 2013 and as part of their EPC business initiative (Businesses for Climate Platform), promoted an emissions trading system simulation – the EPC ETS.

2015 will see the second operational cycle of this initiative, of which currently 23 companies from diverse sectors of the Brazilian economy are taking part: forestry, pulp and paper; services; electricity; logistics; manufacturing; construction; extractivism; and water, sewage and waste management. Companies operating in this cycle have the final objective of meeting their emissions for the current year (2015) with bonds traded through the EPC ETS, especially the emission allowance, each of which is equivalent to 1 tonne of CO2 (tCO2e).

The objective of this report is to present the numbers and results for the initial 6 months (March to August) of the EPC ETS 2015 operation, as well as analyse the strategies and performances adopted by the participating companies. There is, additionally, a study about the relative cap. The cap is the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission limit stipulated for the group of companies that make up the scope of the cap and trade type of emission trading system, and which is converted to the volume of bonds released into the market for trading. The cap may be either relative, which establishes carbon intensity at a predetermined rate based on GHG emissions for a given economic unit (such as, for example, GDP or physical production), or absolute, representing the limit of total emissions sought for the totality of sources contemplated by the system.