FILE PHOTO: Logos of Exxon Mobil are seen in its booth at Gastech, the world's biggest expo for the gas industry, in Chiba, Japan April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Toru Hanai/File Photo

By Simon Jessop

LONDON (Reuters) -Carbon Measures, a global carbon accounting initiative backed by several big energy and multinational companies, will form an independent panel to help guide its work, its CEO told Reuters.

Founded a week ago by 19 members including ExxonMobil, BASF and Banco Santander, the group aims to create an accounting system to avoid double-counting and to better reward those that become more sustainable, thereby driving faster action.

Other backers include the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Bayer, Linde, EQT and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, although the plan is to broaden Carbon Measures, its CEO Amy Brachio said.

Other carbon accounting guidance exists, such as that provided by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, but comparing across companies can be hard. Carbon Measures aims to create a ledger-based system within the next two years for countries to adopt.

"The organisations that are investing ahead are not necessarily getting rewarded for it," said Brachio, who was previously global vice chair of sustainability at EY.

"So if industries have to move as a whole; if markets have to move as a whole, then there's a level playing field that provides the incentive for investing in innovation," she added.

Carbon Measures, with the help of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), will appoint experts from academia, accounting, industry and civil society to sit on the independent panel and help design the global accounting system.

Its activities will include assessing existing approaches and addressing challenges, and developing product-level and policy implementation roadmaps.

Andrew Wilson, deputy secretary-general of the ICC, said 10 years on from the signing of the Paris Agreement, companies needed a standardised way of accounting to accelerate action and that the initiative had the potential to be "a game changer".

Brachio will co-chair the panel of independent experts with Karthik Ramanna, professor of business and public policy and director of the Transformational Leadership Fellowship at the University of Oxford in England.

Ramanna said the initiative mirrored efforts 90 years ago to set up the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

"If done right, these principles can bring to bear the full power of capitalism to accelerate decarbonisation while driving energy abundance," Ramanna added.

(Reporting by Simon Jessop; Editing by Susan Fenton and Alexander Smith)