Carbon Footprint
Does anyone have a ballpark figure for the cost of Carbon Footprinting a college or university campus (any size)?
Karissa, I agree that doing a ghg inventory for a campus can be affordably done by a class or student interns and provide an excellent educational opportunity at the same time.
It sounds like you may be interested in hiring the job out. There can be benefits to using an external consultant in situations where your capacity to do it internally is limited, where their is grant money available or where your Board or leadership wants the inventory verified by people with professional expertise.
There are a number of consultants that provide GHG inventory services. I would highly recommend that you conduct a Request for Proposals before selecting a consultant. Fees and expertise will vary widely. I see that Drexel University found their GHG inventory consultant through a public RFP, so you can probably ask them for a copy of their RFP on which to base yours.
I would also recommend calling other schools that have used consultants to find out about their experience and get referrals for consultants you might want to invite to your RFP. They will probably also be able to help you "ballpark" the cost. You can find a number of schools that used external consultants by looking at the answers schools provided for the question "Who primarily conducted this emissions inventory?" in their GHG inventory report on the ACUPCC reporting website. For example, you can see here that American Public University System used Sightlines to prepare their 2008 inventory: http://acupcc.aashe.org/ghg-report.php?id=717
While I'm on the topic of RFPs (I'm a big fan), I ran across this excellent carbon offset RFP template for any higher ed institution looking to buy carbon offsets. (Courtesy of the Responsible Purchasing Network - another great resource and supporter of these forums.)
Best of luck with your inventory!
-Sam
I've done a few greenhouse gas inventories in the last year (~10). They generally have only cost $1,000-3,000. If you're looking to have your inventory done by an external consultant please consider contacting me - mail@sustainableconsultantsllc.com
If you do decide to do the inventory externally, I agree that RFPs are the way to go. I have heard that some schools have paid upwards of $20,000 for their inventories. If anyone is charging you more than $10,000, no matter how large your school is, you're probably getting taken advantage of.
Hope that helps.
-Chris
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Hi Karissa,
It's really hard to give a meaningful estimate. The cost can range very widely depending on a bunch of different factors including the size and complexity of the institution, the amount and quality of data that the institution is already collecting, who is doing the work, how many years worth of emissions you wish to estimate, and which emissions you wish evaluate. At the low end, if you have a class do the emissions inventory, the only cost will be the cost of the paid staff time spent providing data to the students and otherwise overseeing the project.
Even if you have paid staff do the full inventory, it really shouldn't cost that very much. The most time intensive part of a campus emissions inventory is often data collection but if the school in question has reasonably good numbers on its electricity consumption and onsite fuel consumption that are easily available, you should be able to get the large majority of Scope 1 and 2 emissions calculated within an afternoon using Clean Air-Cool Planet’s "Campus Carbon Calculator" (even allowing for an hour to two to just figure out how the calculator works). Typically, finding good data on Scope 3 emissions sources like commuting, air travel, and supply chain takes quite a bit longer. I generally recommend including these sources so as to get a more complete understanding of the emissions reduction options available to you, but these emissions sources are generally optional under most programs (the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commiment is fairly unique in requiring participant to evaluate commuting and air travel).
I'm sorry I can't give a more specific answer - it's just very hard to generalize. In any case, I hope this is helpful. If you'd like to learn more about campus emissions inventorying, AASHE's Climate Action Planning wiki provides some good background on the issue.
Best of luck,
Julian
Julian Dautremont-Smith
MBA/MS Candidate, Class of 2012
Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise
Stephen M. Ross School of Business | School of Natural Resources & Environment
University of Michigan
http://www.linkedin.com/in/juliands