Some info about determining a community's carbon footprint from Pia Treichel- Unit Manager of
Cities for Climate Protection Australia...
There are councils in some Australian states who have used alternative approaches
to measuring their community emissions, such as the City of Melbourne in
Victoria, and the City of Playford in South Australia.
You can find an explanation of the methodology used by Melbourne in
their Zero Net Emissions by 2020 paper on their website
http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/info.cfm?top=218&pa=1612&pg=1618.
Playford is involved in an Australian Research Council funded project
with RMIT (in which ICLEI is also involved) called Carbon Neutral
Communities: http://www.rmit.edu.au/cnc. This website is particularly
useful, as there are several (academic) papers in the 'research reports'
tab about community emissions and how to effectively establish a
baseline.
It's important to note that both these alternatives to CCP are
considered acceptable by CCP, but that though developed by others, they
essentially use the same premise as the (freely provided) CCP community
default data. (eg from Melbourne's paper: "Due to lack of data at the
local scale, the community inventory generally takes a top-down
approach, firstly determining emissions at a wider geographical scale
(Australia, Victoria, or Melbourne Statistical Division) and then
assigning a percentage to City of Melbourne based on the most
appropriate indicator.")
The Northern Alliance for Greenhouse Action (NAGA: www.naga.org.au) - a
regional grouping of councils in Victoria - have also recently put out a
tender for $100,000 to (amongst other things) establish a baseline for
their community emissions, and would be worth speaking to. I believe
they will be using a similar approach to that taken by the City of
Mebourne.
While CCP's default data is an //estimate// of each council's community
emissions, in the context that we have in Australia, in which there are
currently no national or regional data sets on local energy use (in some
countries such data is compiled by the national government) and in which
this data is often very difficult to source for municipal areas; ICLEI's
Community Energy Use Profiles provide a reasonable approximation of
municipal energy use in the absence of actual data for those councils
who do not have the kind of money necessary to employ consultants to
attempt to source this data or make more specific assumptions for them.
Moreover, while we are happy to discuss accepting alternative approaches
to community data, and there are plenty of consultants doing great work
in the climate change field; we have also seen councils hire consultants
to do greenhouse work for them (eg inventories and greenhouse action
plans) which are not of a standard acceptable to meet the requirements
of CCP.
I'm happy to discuss in more detail - my contact details are below.
Cheers
Pia
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