Complete inventory of climate change pollution to help guide regional climate action

Effort will estimate emissions of all goods and services, help inform future plans

Assessing the sources of global climate pollution – but on a local level – is the goal of a new effort set to begin this summer in King County.

In partnership with the City of Seattle and the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, King County will conduct new research to estimate greenhouse gas emissions not only generated within King County but by the goods and services manufactured and transported from elsewhere that are consumed in the county. The project will begin in June and should be completed within one year.

“While there is growing interest in taking a holistic view of climate change, very few comprehensive greenhouse gas inventories have been completed,” said King County Executive Dow Constantine. “With this regional partnership we hope to fill that gap with the kind of information that can support climate actions by individuals, businesses and governments.”

The Executive said past inventories have generally limited their scope to compiling the greenhouse gases created within a set geographic boundary.

While a typical greenhouse gas inventory study might focus on the emissions from factories and vehicles within the county, researchers in the new study will also quantify the amount of greenhouse gas emissions created globally by products used in King County – even if the emissions don’t occur within its geographic boundary.

For example, in a traditional emissions inventory, an apple consumed in King County is an apple, whether it comes from another country or a local farmer’s market.  This research will provide new tools to factor in emissions associated with growing and transporting that apple.

This research will use widely available economic activity data, combined with life cycle emissions information for different goods and services, to estimate emissions from all products used in King County. This information will help inform decision making by governments, businesses, and individuals working to reduce their environmental impact.

Jill Simmons, Acting Director of Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and the Environment, a primary project partner, said the project will also propose a new framework for helping assess progress and performance in meeting aggressive regional climate pollution reduction goals and policy.

“It is critical for communities such as Seattle to track progress toward meeting their ambitious climate protection goals,” Simmons said. “This project will create a state-of-the-art measurement framework that will gage progress toward community goals and help inform local actions and policies that reduce climate pollution.”

This project is jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the City of Seattle, the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, and King County.

It is one of more than 20 projects that were seeded by a grant of $6,141,000 from the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant. For more information about these related projects, see: http://www.kingcounty.gov/exec/recovery/Projects/Energy.aspx

For more information on King County’s climate response efforts, visit the county’s new Climate Change Web site at www.kingcounty.gov/climate, or contact climatechange@kingcounty.gov.

King County residents can also learn about actions they can take to reduce their carbon footprint this Thursday, April 22, at King County’s Earth Day Expo, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Westlake Plaza, Fourth and Pine in Seattle. For more information, visit the website: http://www.kingcounty.gov/environment/stewardship/being-green.aspx.

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