Step 2: Track Emissions and Benefits
Collect historical data on carbon emission trends and key community co-benefits such as health quality and environmental justice. At CIW, we track 90 co-benefits to ensure your community's comprehensive coverage.
Why Collect Data on Carbon Emissions and Co-Benefits?
This step focuses on gathering data on carbon emissions and other climate impacts. Building on the previous step, it's crucial to collect data on the main climate concerns raised by your community members. This data helps identify the biggest drivers of climate change in your area, allowing for the creation of targeted and effective climate action plans that address the real problems your community is facing.
By understanding the sources and trends of carbon emissions, you can pinpoint which sectors—such as transportation, industry, or residential—contribute most significantly to the community’s carbon footprint. This targeted approach ensures that resources are allocated efficiently to achieve the most substantial emissions reductions. Additionally, understanding co-benefits like health quality and environmental justice helps to create a more holistic climate action plan. These co-benefits ensure that actions taken to reduce emissions also promote public health, equity, and overall community well-being.
Data collection also provides a baseline against which future progress can be measured. Without accurate data, it’s challenging to set realistic goals or track the effectiveness of interventions. Collecting comprehensive data upfront ensures that the climate action plan is based on solid evidence, making it more likely to achieve its objectives and gain community support.
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Prioritizing Data Collection
Community outreach is essential in prioritizing what data to collect. Residents experience the impacts of climate change in various ways across different parts of the city. At CIW, we track 100 different variables to get a comprehensive view, but for most cities, this level of detail may not be feasible initially. Here are key steps to prioritize data collection:
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Carbon Emissions: Start with creating a comprehensive carbon emissions inventory. This provides a baseline understanding of your emissions profile. Begin by identifying major sources of emissions, such as transportation, industrial activities, energy production, and residential heating.
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Community-Specific Impacts: Based on feedback from community engagement, focus on additional climate impacts that are of particular concern. For instance, if residents have raised concerns about increased asthma rates, tracking air quality and its correlation with emission sources can be crucial.
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Leverage Existing Data: Collaborate with other city departments to access existing data, this can provide a broad overview and help identify initial areas of focus. Existing data from public health departments can reveal trends in health conditions exacerbated by climate change, while transportation departments can provide data on vehicle miles traveled and public transit usage.
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Start Small and Scale Up: Begin with collecting data from five key sources and expand over time as capacity and resources allow. Initially focusing on a few critical areas ensures that the data collection process is manageable and allows for the gradual expansion of data sources.
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Community Priorities: Continuously engage with the community to refine data collection priorities. This iterative process ensures that the climate action plan remains responsive to the community's most pressing concerns.
By following these steps, you can ensure that your data collection efforts are both comprehensive and feasible, providing a strong foundation for a data-driven and community-supported climate action plan.
Sources of Data
Finding reliable data is critical for effective climate action planning. Here are some primary sources:
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IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: A comprehensive resource with extensive data and insights on global climate change, including a handbook for effective communication.
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US Census Bureau: Provides detailed demographic data, helping understand the community's composition and vulnerability.
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NOAA: Offers State of the Climate resources and Regional Climate Assessments, which provide valuable national and regional climate data.
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Local Data Sources: Engage with local entities such as the tax assessor's office, utilities, planning and public works departments, and police to gather granular data
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GIS Data: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can provide localized map data on socio-economic characteristics, disaster vulnerability, and tree canopy coverage. This detailed information can guide targeted outreach and interventions.
This tables on the next pages show the 90 standard metrics that we use with clients to inform their climate action plan goals and strategies. The metrics that are the most useful, usually aren’t captured in your typical greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) inventory, so don’t stop there and listen to your community!
In our consulting work with clients, we dive deeper into each metric – how relevant is it in this community, how often is the data updated, etc., but this highlights the WHY and WHERE for some of the best opportunities to drive impactful climate action.
Next Steps
In the download below, you’ll get a head start with data collection. We share the variables that we track at CIW for data analysis. While you may not be able to track as many variables, you’ll get a good idea of what data is best to track for your climate concerns along with some examples of where to download similar data.
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