W6.1 Emissions monitoring
Determine and implement effective ways to track consumption based emissions.
The inventory protocol for calculating our local emissions was developed by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability (founded in 1990 as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives). Originally, it only covered emissions generated within the County from the built environment, on-road vehicles, waste, and agricultural livestock.
However, their July 2019 Community Protocol now includes methods for estimating consumption based emissions and the emissions associated with materials flows and services. These are all in the package that you get if you download the most recent July 2019 Community Protocol v 1.2 from their website.) They say that they will publish more detailed Guidelines for implementing these by the end of this year.
King County includes a consumption based inventory in its emissions estimates and tracking of reductions. They developed this for their 2008 climate action planning and updated it in 2015. (They initially hired the Stockholm Environmental Institute and Cascadia Consulting for this process and there are papers from SEI about it here and here.)
The Cool Climate Network, based in the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at U.C. Berkeley, has developed consumption based emissions inventories for US areas by zip code.