GMA Announces Official Launch of New Chemicals Program

On Tuesday, September 24, the Center for Green Market Activation (GMA) released details related to its work in chemicals, as part of a Climate Week NYC session hosted by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and Boston Consulting Group. In what marked the official GMA Chemicals program launch, Kim Carnahan, GMA CEO, described the chemicals decarbonization challenge and the approach GMA and its stakeholders are taking to address a sector that contributes more than 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Products from the chemicals sector are found throughout our daily lives, and chemicals emissions are a sizable and growing issue. Decarbonization efforts are being impeded, at least in part, by structural barriers that will require coordinated efforts to overcome. GMA believes that chain of custody and demand aggregation approaches have an important role to play in this work and is excited to embark on a program to gather critical insights to inform subsequent phases of this endeavor – with the ultimate goal of accelerating decarbonization of the chemicals sector while supporting efforts to address the global plastics waste crisis.

GMA Chemicals has been designed to deliver a range of benefits to its participants drawing from the model GMA has already applied successfully in other hard to abate sectors like aviation, maritime, and heavy-duty trucking. More specifically, GMA aims to do the following, in sequence:

• First, build a chain of custody system that enables the transfer of attributes from high integrity decarbonized chemicals to customers willing to pay a premium for a decarbonized product
• Second, develop a buyers alliance for such customers, aggregating their demand and managing joint procurement on their behalf

GMA will also provide education to buyers alliance members and the broader chemicals stakeholder community on GHG accounting and sustainability certification.

To kick off the system development process, GMA is convening a working group of stakeholders from across the chemicals sector – from producers to buyers, standard setters and NGOs – to ensure that diverse views input into our chemicals system design. Our approach is inclusive, working with both legacy chemicals producers as well as start-ups focused on game-changing decarbonized chemicals technologies.

Program design will continue through the remainder of 2024 and into the first part of 2025, after which GMA will shift our efforts from program design to activating the market through our buyers alliance.

Companies who are interested in getting involved should contact chemicals@gmacenter.org.