Climate Action
Overview
Greenplanet Energy Analytics (GEA) works on clean energy, energy efficiency and environmental education projects. We believe in the importance of ‘Quantifying Climate Action’ as we tackle the global climate change crisis. It is critical to take individual or collective actions that make a measurable difference to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and that also have an economic benefit.
Background
GEA has developed and maintains a collection of case studies and success stories in a sophisticated database that focus on “climate action”. These are specific measures or initiatives that reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) through:
- Implementing enhanced energy efficiency retrofits,
- Replacing high carbon fossil fuel energy supply with green (renewable, low carbon) energy supply, or
- Other measures such as:
- Solid waste management,
- Methane emissions reduction,
- Increasing natural carbon sequestration in trees or soils, or
- Low carbon consumption
Each record is an actual GEA client project, or a student project, or a third-party (public domain) success story and the key distinction is the effort to reasonably and accurately quantify both the economic costs and benefits, and the climate benefit in terms of the net reductions of GHGs.
These case studies include good illustrative examples collected through GEA’s research and networks, GEA client and project examples, or proposed measures (projects) that GEA is developing, reviewing, and analyzing. It also includes a number of student and youth climate action projects.
The case studies include both proposed measures with estimated economic and GHG reduction benefits, and actual initiated and completed projects that in some cases are accompanied by actual verified and measured cost savings and GHG reduction benefits. Where available and applicable, the economics information includes capital costs, operating costs, and savings and looks at comparing a standard business as usual or the “before” case, with the implemented climate action or “project” case.
The information collected includes:
- Background information on where the project took place,
- Audit details,
- Description (both qualitative and quantitative) of the action(s) taken, and
- Measurable results
Calculator Tools
GEA has developed transparent carbon / GHG reduction calculators that can work in parallel with the database. These tools make the GHG emission factors and other analysis calculations as transparent as possible, and able to be customized or adjusted for local data.
This database and associated calculator tools will also serve as a teaching and learning tool for students and decision-makers in the schools, First Nations communities, municipalities, businesses and non-profit societies.
Businesses and Municipalities
GEA has designed this website to support businesses and municipalities to make effective decisions on projects that will not only reduce costs, but also have a net reduction in GHGs. By querying relatable case studies, you can determine upfront costs, potential annual savings, and possible payback of the project. You can use the calculator tools to test the economic and environmental benefit of your projects before taking them on and then add in either your proposed project with estimated savings or your completed project with actual savings to help benefit others considering similar projects.
Students
GEA has designed this website to support students and youth to measure the impact of their project in terms of a net GHG reduction and an economic benefit. The students will work through the process of thinking through their projects in terms of a lifecycle (extraction, production, transportation, and end of life disposal) impact. Students can work through using the custom analysis tools to measure the environmental and economic impact of their project and track their climate action project in the database. These learnings, whether a project has a significant benefit, limited benefit or no benefit at all, will be captured and shared for others to benefit from. Working together, we can collect, analyze and share that many more student climate action projects as they relate to energy efficiency, renewable energy and other climate action projects.
Teachers will have the ability to:
- Download unique student activities around climate action
- Access key climate action terminology
- Access additional reference resources to guide student learning
Students will have the ability to:
- Extract relatable climate action success stories
- Enter in project information and get a report and some indicators on how to improve the project
