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Environmental & Risk Management / Green Building

Carbon Footprint: Overview

For organizations that wish to reduce their carbon footprint, the Green Building application provides a web-based, intuitive interface to specify protocols, calculate net greenhouse gas equivalent impact for buildings, and report on carbon footprint change over time for their facility portfolio.

The carbon footprint tasks in ARCHIBUS Green Building follow the framework documented by the World Resources Institute/World Business Council for Sustainable Development's (WRI/WBCSD) GHG Protocol Corporate Standard. The built-in unit conversion process allows users to configure conversion values and enter data in any units desired.

This application can assist offices in making decisions on how to reduce the GHG emissions associated with their practices and can be modified as needed for formal GHG inventory reporting.

The Green Building's Carbon Footprint processes enable you to set up, track, and analyze carbon footprint for your buildings.

You can:

• enter the carbon footprint protocols that the application uses to calculate emissions
• modify the application as needed for formal greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory reporting.
• set up footprint scenarios to store consumption data for different scenarios, or to enter data using different protocols for different reporting requirements
• enter the consumption data required to obtain one or more buildings’ carbon footprint using footprint protocols
• generate reports that help you analyze how to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with building activities

Getting Started

To calculate the carbon footprint for your buildings requires careful planning so that the greenhouse gas inventory you create is accurate and useful. To get started, consider the following:

• What is the time frame and the scope of your greenhouse gas inventory? That is, consider which activities you will include and for what time period. Generally, emissions are tracked by the year, so you would need data for a complete year.
• How will you quantify your fuel consumption activities? For example, for stationary fuel combustion, this can be based on fuel receipts, purchase records, or metering of the amount of fuel entering the combustion device. To calculate mobile emissions, you will need to track the miles traveled by each vehicle type. Review the tabs in the Carbon Footprint - Track / Enter Building Footprint Data task so that you are familiar with the types of consumption data required to calculate different types of emissions.
• Decide which protocols you will use for each type of emission. Protocols are generally organized by sector and emission type (such as direct or indirect) and provide guidance on data collection.

Procedure

1. A business process owner enters basic information about the geographic and building locations.
2. A business process owner enters information for equipment and equipment standards if this information has not been developed using other ARCHIBUS applications.
3. A business process owner, or another user familiar with the carbon footprint protocols, enters the carbon footprint protocols.
4. Define footprint scenarios. You associate a building and calculation year with a footprint scenario. This enables you to develop different scenarios for the same time period that use different protocols or consumption data.
5. Select a building, a calculation year, a scenario, and the protocol versions that you want the application to use to calculate emissions for this building. You make these selections on the Enter Building Footprint Data - Building Details tab. See Entering Building Footprint Details.
6. Enter and save consumption data for the selected building, footprint scenario, and calculation year. See Entering Building Footprint Data: Overview.
7. In compliance with some reporting requirements, you can review the methodology (mathematical formulas) used by the system to calculate total emissions for each category of each scope. See Viewing the Methodology for Emission Calculations.
8. Run the Summarize Emissions action so that the application totals the emissions from all sources for a specific building, footprint, scenario, and calculation year, or for all emissions data in the database.See Summarize Emissions.
9. Analyze Carbon Footprint metrics. Managers can analyze and report on emissions from the building level to the entire enterprise level. The application provides summarized and detailed emissions reports for selected buildings and years. See Analyzing Carbon Footprint: Overview.