Newest Planning Tool Makes It Easier to Map Carbon Projects

by Jennifer Andrews, Campus Program Manager, Clean Air-Cool Planet

Campus administrators, staff or students weighing which energy and carbon reduction projects will be most valuable now have a new, free tool to help them decide. Clean Air-Cool Planet’s updated Campus Carbon CalculatorTM helps to measure campus emissions and determine viable long-term strategies to reduce universities’ carbon footprints. Currently in use at more than a third of campuses across the U.S. and Canada, the recently-released version 6 of the Calculator includes new Projection and Solutions modules that will make it easier for administrators to plan for money-saving efficiencies on their campuses, make action plans easier to comprehend for trustees, and provide a powerful new educational tool for instructors and students.

While the new modules are designed to help users who are beginning to put together climate action plans, other revisions to version six have clear benefits for those who are still working on their greenhouse gas inventories. Updated emissions factors for electricity and other fuels, the inclusion of separate “line items” for directly-financed outsourced travel, and more robust guidance documents are among the updates that will serve to make the greenhouse gas inventory more accurate, and the process of completing it more productive, for Calculator users.

The methodology for estimating emissions from student, staff and faculty commuting has also been more streamlined in the newer version of the Calculator. Since commuting emissions are some of the hardest to estimate accurately, even something as simple as tracking “trips per week” rather than “trips per day”—whether using surveys, or estimates based on course scheduling conventions and the academic calendar—can lead to more accessible and intelligible input data. The new version of the Campus Carbon Calculator™ also allows interested users to track emissions related to the processing of wastewater, or the presence of recycled content in their purchased paper, if they so desire.

With the release of the new Calculator, CA-CP is launching an ongoing series of webinars and Q-and-A sessions for users, as well as an expanded resource section within their online Campus Climate Action Toolkit. Frequently Asked Questions, model surveys, and other resources are posted at www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/toolkit. The idea is to empower students, faculty and staff to undertake research and analysis that can contribute to campus climate neutrality efforts, in order to reduce the need to “outsource” while encouraging experiential education and multi-stakeholder dialogue.

Version 6 of the Campus Carbon Calculator, with the new Projection and Solutions Modules, was inspired by student-initiated multi-stakeholder efforts at Middlebury College, the University of California – Santa Barbara, University of California- Berkeley, and Duke University—just to name a few. The Excel file and accompanying Users Guide can be downloaded free of charge at www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/toolkit.