This year's International Summer Academy of the University of Greifswald, "Energy and the Environment", took place in Irkutsk, Russia, from 21 to 27 August 2005. The focus was "Implementing Kyoto – Opportunities and Challenges for Transition Countries". Christine Lucha and Dr. Camilla Bausch were asked to give a lecture on their experiences in the gathering of CO₂-data needed for the establishment of the German National Allocation Plan (NAP), as part of the implementation of the new European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS).

The Summer Academy is meant to provide a platform for interdisciplinary exchange and discussions of academics, professionals and post-graduates in the field of energy, environment and climate protection. This year's Academy with its participants from Russia, Germany, the U.S., Finland, Belgium and Spain tackled fundamental questions of how the specific provisions of the Kyoto Protocol (KP) could be implemented in order to reach the goals of climate protection in an effective and efficient way. Special attention was paid to the implementation of emissions trading (ET) and joint implementation (JI) in Russia.

The economic, legal and political framework of climate protection and energy politics in Russia were presented, as well as the legal and administrative requirements for and practical experiences with implementing the flexible mechanisms of the KP. On this basis, the chances for an effective implementation of ET and JI, as well as political and economic options for Green Investment Schemes (GIS) were analysed and discussed. Although there is theoretically an especially great potential for JI projects in Russia, there has not yet been major investment in this field. Several reasons for this wait-and-see posture were identified; the most pressing ones being the missing institutional and legal framework for JI projects, as well as a lack of political will to focus on climate change issues and the difficult investment environment in Russia.

One of the complex challenges Russia faces is the set-up of a sufficient emission database. Considering this, Dr. Camilla Bausch and Christine Lucha were asked to make a presentation on the CO₂-data gathering for Germany: When introducing the ET, Germany faced the situation that a comprehensive list of all the installations covered by the EU ETS was lacking, as were installation-specific CO₂-data. This information needed to be collected in cooperation with the 16 "Länder" and the companies running the roughly 2000 installations covered by the EU ETS. A project to accomplish this task was initiated in July 2003. Time was very limited, as the gathering of data had to completed by the end of January 2004 if the results were to be adequately considered when deciding upon CO₂ allocation rules and creating an installations list for the German NAP, as required by European Law. The completed NAP had to be submitted to the European Commission by 31 March 2004.

Ecologic supported the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in this task as project manager. In the project "National Allocation Plan for the European Emissions Trading System", the Ecologic team co-ordinated the different groups developing the necessary software and the data verification and validation procedures. While developing these procedures and software, the allocation rules, which were being concurrently developed in a parallel project, had to be considered. Moreover, Ecologic served as a focal point for the "Länder" and set up a programme to integrate and motivate companies and industry associations to respectively take part in and support the voluntary data gathering. The support of the enterprises was crucial for the success of the data collection, as well as for the establishment of a coherent NAP. Furthermore, they helped to identify the special needs of certain sectors.

Dr. Camilla Bausch and Christine Lucha explained in detail the content and process of this data gathering, from a political as well as a technical angle, and reported on their experiences gained in the process.