CitiesGoGreen -September 2008 - (Page 29) CAPPA Makes Climate Protection Planning Easier ICLEI’s Climate and Air Pollution Planning Assistant (CAPPA), free to local governments, brings the accumulated experience of the ICLEI local government network to you, dramatically speeding up the work of creating a draft climate protection plan. Editor’s note: I saw CAPPA demonstrated at ICLEI’s Local Action Summit in Albuquerque in May, 2008, and it’s outstanding. It takes the tedium and much of the time out of identifying, exploring and comparing action plan options and outcomes. By the time you read this CAPPA ought to be available online. The Climate and Air Pollution Planning Assistant (CAPPA) was created to help local governments develop plans to reduce local air pollution and climate-changing emissions more easily. Rather than each locale identifying possible strategies and estimating their results, CAPPA combines the collective experience of its members and their results from using each strategy. The result is faster development and adoption of climate action plans, with prioritized implementation. After baseline assessment, CAPPA becomes the starting point for climate action planning. CAPPA is designed to assist with the identification and analysis of near and medium term emissions reduction strategies to include in a government operations or community-scale reduction plan. As experience continues to collect and is incorporated into the tool, its baseline assumptions will become more accurate and refined, making it increasingly useful. CAPPA comes with a comprehensive, customizable, and expandable library of emissions reduction strategies relevant to local governments. Its decision support capability (basically a simple scenario builder) helps identify the most effective strategies from the included library. Based on real-world experience from can be optimized around any of six pollutants: greenhouse gases, NOx, SOx, CO, VOCs, and PM10 (particulates). Users can enter emissions inventory and target data to customize the built-in assumptions about degree of implementation and expected performance of each strategy. Users can also express the de- Special Report “ members and expert input, assumptions about average degree of implementation and the performance to be expected are built in. These can be changed at will. CAPPA is an incredibly useful tool with which to begin CAPPA is available to local governments the climate change action planning process. both online and as a downloadable Excel™ spreadsheet, and gree to which several decision criteria are valued. From these inputs, the program to non-members as well as members. will generate a list of potential emissions reduction strategies. A library CAPPA is an incredibly useful tool with Users may browse and explore the more which to begin the climate change acthan 100 specific reduction strategies. Each is featured on its own unique page tion planning process. It is not, however, intended to replace a thorough analysis and contains: with more detailed emissions source data • A description and advanced models. These types of • Links to resources • Examples of how it has been imple- models are still needed to estimate costs and benefits associated with complex mented by other communities • Calculators to analyze emissions re- strategies, such as whole-building energy retrofits and land use/transit planning deduction potential cisions. • Costs and benefits A final caveat: because the data in • Information on how the strategy CAPPA is based on information from a tends to perform from the perspecwide range of sources it will not exactly fit tive of several key decision criteria any specific user’s profile. Keeping this in mind, all default assumptions contained A planning tool in this tool regarding the degree of impleCAPPA can also be used to develop a mentation, costs and resource impacts, customized emissions reduction plan fo- and performance factors for each stratcused on either government operations egy should be customized to the user’s or the community as a whole. This plan local circumstances. Our mayor was one of the signatories to the climate agreement back in the summer of 2006. In early 2007 we proposed that joining ICLEI would be an effective way to get some support and assistance in the tasks that were essentially outlined in that agreement. We were very attracted to using a methodology being used by a lot of other localities that was scientifically defensible and looked like it had a good support system, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and coming up with stuff that was difficult to compare to other folks’ efforts. The fact that they could make software available and staff available to help hold our hand during the initial phases of getting legs under our climate protection program was very appealing. [ICLEI staff] have been very responsive. They have given very good technical review comments on material we’ve sent them. They help with troubleshooting and with understanding some of the components of the software and the emissions baseline work. And the interactions I’ve had in meeting with them during the conference in New Mexico were great. They have a lot of folks on their staff who are serious believers in this whole effort and that comes through in how they work with us. — Kristel Riddervold, Environmental Administrator City of Charlottesville, Virginia September 2008 ” .com 29 http://www.icleiusa.org/action-center/tools/decision-support-tool http://www.icleiusa.org/action-center/tools/decision-support-tool http://CitiesGoGreen.com
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