(BLOOMINGTON) – The City of Bloomington will share its 2018 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventory Report in a public presentation on Tuesday, October 15 at 7 p.m. in City Council Chambers (401 North Morton St.).
The City committed to conducting this inventory as part of its Sustainability Action Plan (SAP), passed late last year.
The GHG Inventory quantifies the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the whole community across energy, transportation, water, and waste sectors.
The presentation will update the community on Bloomington’s 2018 contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and the inventory will continue to inform the City’s response to the climate crisis in the coming years.
In following guidelines established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the 2018 GHG Inventory improves upon methodologies and procedures the City has used in the past to estimate locally generated climate-impacting emissions. Previous inventories were completed in 2005 and 2016. The new report compiles data from utility providers, state agencies, and local government; and includes sectors that were not previously measured. As stated in the SAP, Bloomington is working to minimize the generation of GHG emissions from all sources with the goal of reducing community greenhouse gas emissions 11 percent by 2023 relative to the 2016 baseline.
“The new inventory provides an updated and more accurate baseline for the greenhouse gasses produced by our entire community so that we can calculate the effectiveness of strategies to mitigate those emissions,” said Bloomington Mayor John Hamilton. “Together with cities around the nation and the world, we are tackling climate change by being accountable and transparent about our respective contribution to it.”
In addition to measuring local emissions, the report discusses the sources and the activities associated with generating them. The data will inform the City’s GHG reduction targets, guide climate mitigation strategies, allow for public education about how climate change will affect Bloomington, and help identify steps the community can take to reduce the collective emissions and climate impact.
As a member of the Global Covenant of Mayors, Bloomington will complete another GHG inventory by the end of 2021. The establishment of consistent GHG reporting will help the City communicate GHG emissions trends and the impact of ongoing mitigation efforts in a format that is compatible with reports generated in cities around the nation and the world. In 2019, Bloomington was one of fourteen Indiana cities that received training, technology, and technical assistance from Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute (ERI) and ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) to ensure consistent, complete, and comparable greenhouse gas reporting.
The 2018 GHG inventory follows the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventories (GPC). It was conducted by the City’s Economic and Sustainable Development Department, through the Indiana Sustainable Development Program (ISDP) in partnership with ERI and ICLEI, and reporting was externally verified through utilization of the ClearPath GHG inventory software.
The 2018 GHG Inventory, along with responses to frequently asked questions, will be available at the City’s website after the public presentation Tuesday, October 15.
