Emissions inventories are the first essential step to undertake in climate action planning. They push cities into introspection and provide a picture of where they stand and which emissions they are responsible for. They are a crucial exercise to complete to know where to act and what sectors and specific sub sectors to prioritize to make a real dent in emissions. That said, emissions inventories are also notoriously time consuming and complex.
The ClimateOS platform simplifies this crucial step. Not only does the emissions inventory feature operationalize the data for optimal planning, but it also now makes reporting easier through a new ‘compile and export’ function.
Primarily necessary for planning a climate action plan, emissions inventories also form the basis of reporting, compliance and disclosure mechanisms.
Depending on the purpose of the inventory – reporting or planning – the data can take varying degrees of granularity. Creating a thorough and credible plan entails searching for precision, through bottom-up and activity-based data, which can often feel like a never ending process for climate strategists trying to ‘get the data right’ or to simply find the data before moving on to the next step.
While reporting corresponds to a largely voluntary collection and assembly of greenhouse gas emission data which can be drawn up from national and top down data alone, other information regarding actions and progress is often required by the reporting framework, in which case more granular data is also useful. As such, the level of granularity for reporting is not as necessary as for planning. However, reporting comes with a certain set of requirements and rigor in the way the data needs to be presented and compiled.
The ClimateOS city inventory
The ClimateOS platform provides a city inventory feature and enables a city to account exactly for the activities happening in a city and to calculate their associated Carbon Causal Chains (CCCs), resulting in a truly bottom-up city inventory that provides a baseline picture of what a city’s main carbon emitting activities are, and why.
To make sure that these activities really do reflect what happens in a city, the data comprises more than 250 parameters, logically laid out according to our calculation model, which can be closely edited to reflect the nature of operations, cohorts, energy intensity and subsequent emission factors.
All parameters come from scientific reports, national or other official statistics and also include our assumptions and data proxies for the data that, despite all our research, could not be found or verified. These powerful proxies are based on the normalized value and average parameters for a city’s size and population, population growth rate and average living area per capita, and solve the major hurdle of data scarcity which usually prevents cities from elaborating precise and actionable, bottom-up emissions inventories.
Reporting made easy
We are excited to announce the launch of our newest functionality: the reporting extension feature to the city inventory.
While the ClimateOS methodology encourages cities to account for emissions as broadly as possible, it is less tied to reporting scopes and geographical boundaries than other methodologies through its Transition Target method. The ClimateOS inventory was designed to enable flexible planning.
However, the newly added reporting feature enables cities to build a report back up to be in line with reporting scopes.
Cities can now not only create flexible and granular inventories seamlessly, but they can also in one click, build a report consistent with the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC)*, a renowned and accepted framework for city-wide greenhouse gas emissions accounting and reporting.
The report supports the GPC BASIC level, covering scope 1 and scope 2 emissions from stationary energy and transportation, as well as scope 1 and scope 3 emissions from waste. In time, the report will also support GPC Basic+” and “Basic+S3” and will cover a greater number of protocols to accommodate all reporting requirements.
Towards an ever more integrated experience
The ClimateOS platform is moving towards an ever more integrated experience.
With this new reporting feature, the ClimateOS platform simultaneously enables planning and reporting. It prevents having to embark on two separate endeavors and helps build a concise, organized and compliant report from numerous data points.
This makes it easier to move from the inventory to reporting and from reporting to planning and implementation. The data is not only interoperable with the rest of the platform to plan a thorough climate plan, but can also be exported seamlessly. It removes manual steps and provides a report aligned with the GPC, in excel format, compatible with CDP’s machine readable system that can be directly uploaded to the CDP platform to accompany your disclosure questionnaire.
What used to be multiple one dimensional tools lacking interoperability come together in one integrated platform.
* Currently under accreditation process with the World Resource Institute (WRI).
