Carbon Management

Making SDGs work for Carbon Management: Measurement, Accounting, and Implementation

This Article Collection examines the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as a tool for carbon management. First, the SDGs can serve as a framework of performance, offering a shared yardstick against which corporate and public climate action can be evaluated. Second, the SDGs can function as a vehicle for coalition building, aligning actors who might otherwise pursue climate, development, and environmental objectives in isolation. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the SDGs draw attention to the connections between planetary and local management. While greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation is typically framed as a global problem, its consequences are felt based on local contexts. For example, in the global north, it is largely framed as a problem of mitigation, energy transition, and financial risk, whereas in the global south, it is more often experienced as a problem of adaptation, loss and damage, and the right to development. Sectors may experience the SDG differently. For example, resource-driven economies (ex. coal, critical mineral mining) may have to share undue burden of national mitigation policies, posing a challenge to sustainable development and just transitions.

These questions matter because carbon management sits at the intersection of fields that rarely share a common vocabulary, data structure, scale or time horizon. Climate, business, and nature management each rest on different assumptions about what is being managed and why. Climate policies depend on a chain that runs from the micro foundations of measurement to the macro direction of policy: numbers that are not right at the granular level cannot reliably tell policymakers whether the policy sphere is aimed in the right direction. Managerial and governmental cycles are typically measured in quarters and years while carbon cycles unfold over decades and centuries, creating a structural mismatch between the timescales on which decisions are made and when their consequences are felt. Global, national and subnational management might have divergent goals, such as a national government expanding fossil fuel production for energy security while its cities and states commit to net-zero targets. The SDGs have offered one attempt to bridge these tensions, yet it remains unclear whether they have produced new management techniques or frameworks that have demonstrably worked. Thus, this Collection examines where the SDGs have succeeded as a bridge and where gaps remain, accelerating progress towards designing the next generation of carbon management tools.

The Article Collection invites contributions across two broad subject areas. The first concerns metrology, measurement, and accounting at the level of national, subnational and business organizations, and the normative structures that underpin them. Carbon accounting involves both the social work of classifying activities, entities, and emissions into categories and the technical work of quantifying physical effects. We invite papers that examine either dimension or the interplay between the two.

The second concerns management outcomes that arise from the implementation of carbon instruments. We seek descriptive and policy analysis of formal accounting, including the methodological issues that arise from reporting standards and new regulations. How are carbon instruments implemented and reported against in practice, what happens when standards meet organizational reality, and what are decision case studies were carbon management frameworks played a critical role. Contributions may also examine the micro-foundations of national and international GHG accounting, assess how current regulations and laws are functioning, and propose how these systems could be improved. For instance, these may be explored at the interface of soil carbon dynamics, ecosystem carbon sequestration, land based GHG accounting, and carbon markets, evaluating the effectiveness of accounting practices, policy instruments and the attainment of relevant SDGs.

In short, the Collection welcomes papers that move between the conceptual and the empirical, linking how emissions are counted to how climate governance performs.  Carbon Management accepts the following types of article: Original Research Paper, Short Communication, Case Studies, Review Articles, Policy Briefs/Opinion Pieces/Commentaries, Book Reviews, Conference Reports, Letter to the Editor, Data Notes, Method.

Keywords:

1. Carbon management
2. Sustainable Development Goals
3. Non-financial accounting
4. Climate Policy
5. Decision Science

This Article Collection is part of Taylor & Francis's SDG Article Collection Series. This series is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking research that addresses global sustainability challenges while accelerating progress toward achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Articles published within this Collection will benefit from enhanced promotional activities across Taylor & Francis platforms, ensuring increased visibility and discoverability for your research.

This Collection supports the following SDG:

SDG 13 Climate Action (Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts)

­­All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo a full peer-review; the Guest Advisor for this Collection will not be handling the manuscripts (unless they are an Editorial Board member).

Please review the journal scope and author submission instructions prior to submitting a manuscript.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is 20 August 2027.

Please contact Kara Roberts at Kara.Roberts@taylorandfrancis.com with any queries on discount codes regarding this Article Collection.

Please be sure to select the appropriate Article Collection from the drop-down menu in the submission system.

Guest Advisors declare no potential conflicts of interests in line with our Editorial Policies.

Dr. Jimmy Jia is the Lead, Saïd Business School–Smith School, Initiatives where he is engaged with creating new programmes. His research is on the data structures of climate and financial accounting, in order to reconcile them for the improvement of capital deployment into climate-resilient infrastructure. His interest is in tracking the flow of energy and carbon through financial transactions and seeing how they accumulate into assets and liabilities on the balance sheet. He is focused on capital intensive sectors, such as water and power, to help understand the value of assets towards achieving climate goals.

Dr. Omkar Patange is a faculty member in the Ecosystem and Environment Management area at the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM) Bhopal, India, and a guest research scholar with the Economic Frontiers Group at IIASA, Austria. He works on energy and climate policy, particularly just transitions for regional economies, mitigation strategies, and their local environmental and social implications. He is principal investigator of JUSTCOAL, a Lower Austria-funded project modelling regional welfare impacts of coal transitions under net-zero goals. He also contributes to IIASA’s JustTrans4ALL initiative, analyzing decent living and wellbeing indicators using subnational demographic and health survey data.

Dr. Nirmali Gogoi is a Professor of Environmental Science at Tezpur University, India, specializing in soil carbon sequestration, greenhouse-gas mitigation, biochar, and climate-resilient agro-ecosystems. A recipient of the Raman Fellowship at Oklahoma State University, USA, and the IGSTC WISER Award (2025), she has published over 85 research articles and supervised 10 PhD scholars. Her research advances innovative, science-based solutions for climate change mitigation and environmental sustainability.