Supporting Climate Action and Sustainability

It has been an honour to serve as Guest Editor of this special edition of the OIML Bulletin (2026), focused on how legal metrology supports climate action and sustainability. Too often, legal metrology is overlooked because it is the invisible foundation stone of trust in measurement. Yet this foundation supports society, economies, and fairness. By assuring measurements that are accurate, repeatable, and traceable, we protect consumers, enable fair trade, and support businesses while providing policy makers and decision makers with dependable data to make informed decisions.

For climate policy and sustainability, measurement credibility is essential. Accurate and reliable measurements underpin greenhouse-gas measurement, reporting, and verification, and instill confidence in climate-related measurements. They also enable comparability of data used for national inventories, climate targets, carbon pricing, and climate-related disclosures. The same trusted measurements support sustainability in practice – helping verify performance and claims, improve resource efficiency, and promote transparency in markets and public policy. In turn, this evidence base supports policy makers and key decision makers – from national authorities to world leaders negotiating at COP and the G20 – helping ensure that commitments and claims can be assessed objectively.

This special edition of the Bulletin highlights how legal metrology works alongside other institutions and economies to advance sustainability and the transition to net zero. I would like to thank all the authors who contributed to this edition and helped extend its reach beyond the legal metrology community. We all have a role to play in supporting climate action and sustainability: individually we may be a drop in the ocean, but together we can form an ocean that supports sustainability and climate based on trusted measurement systems that enable accountability with real-world impact.