The Climate Change Group plays a central role in supporting and developing other parts of the business. Our team is led by Gareth Phillips, SCC's Chief Climate Change Officer.

The Climate Change Group is involved in:

• Baseline studies, environmental audits and emission abatement studies
• Developing project design documentation for UN approval
• Preparing new and revising existing approved methodologies and protocols for the quantification of emission reductions
• Managing the UN approval process under either CDM or JI
• Satisfying the certification and verification criteria required by the UN
• Developing monitoring plans for projects once commissioned

In addition, the Climate Change Group is responsible for projects that do not involve a direct, hands-on project development role by SCC, nor necessarily a commitment to finance the GHG abatement projects (though finance may be offered). In this segment, SCC draws on the experience of its Climate Change Group to either (a) write and submit for approval Project Design Documents and where appropriate to develop new CDM methodologies as part of the overall project, typically in return for a fee payable in the form of CERs, or (b) enter into Emission Reduction Purchase Agreements to purchase CERs from a project. This activity is more aligned with the service provided by other CDM project developers however SCC's approach differs in four principal ways:

• by screening the projects at an early stage, SCC accepts all of the development risk associated with the preparation of the PDD and its registration;
• SCC adds value by committing to provide long term monitoring and reporting support to the project host;
• SCC offers its project partners access to its broking and trading network through which they could achieve much better returns compared to a conventional ERPA deal; and
• SCC only takes its returns in CERs, thereby aligning its interests with those of the project owner.