Kick the Habit: A UN Guide to Climate Neutrality

Count and analyse

What gets measured, gets managed

Counting and analyzing the emissions that you need to eliminate, and the options you have for doing so, is the most crucial step in the cycle, because without this knowledge you will be working in the dark. It enables you to de- cide the priorities for action – from the food you eat and the products you buy to energy use and transport – and to start monitoring your progress. Anyone starting on a diet will be sure to step on the scales the first day, partly to know the extent of the problem and also to have a baseline for recording their (pre- sumed) progress towards their target weight. So you need an inventory.

The inventory aims at answering questions such as: Which operations, activities, units should be included? Which sources should be included? Who is responsible for which emissions? Which gases should be included?

Step one: Set up your inventory Step two: Count your emissions

When making an inventory of GHG emissions, we are immediately confront- ed with the question of where to start, and where to end. We will probably not want to stick at accounting for our CO 2 emissions alone, but include all GHGs. There are several problems here. Carbon dioxide is the most abundant of them, but several of the others, although much rarer, are far more destruc- tive, molecule for molecule. So we will need to be familiar with the idea of CO 2 equivalence – the impact a GHG has on the atmosphere expressed in the equivalent amount of CO 2 . The US Environmental Protection Agency provides a helpful Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Converter to translate GHGs at www. epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/calculator.html . Depending onwhat we want our inventory for, it will need to provide different levels of transparency and possibilities for verification. In particular if your goal is trading emissions, a standardized approach is the only way to ensure that actual emissions in one organization correspond to those in another and are offset in equal amounts.

KICK THE HABIT THE CYCLE – COUNT AND ANALYSE 58